A rough year for journalists in 2025, with a little hope for things to turn around

NEW YORK — By nearly any measure, 2025 has been a rough year for anyone concerned about freedom of the press.

It's likely to be the deadliest year on record for journalists and media workers. The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman ''piggy.'' And the ranks of those doing the job continues to thin.

It's hard to think of a darker time for journalists. So say many, including Tim Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter and now program director for journalism and disinformation at PEN America. ''It's safe to say this assault on the press over the past year has probably been the most aggressive that we've seen in modern times.''

Tracking killings and assaults against journalists

Worldwide, the 126 media industry people killed in 2025 by early December matched the number of deaths in all of 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and last year was a record-setter. Israel's bombing of Gaza accounted for 85 of those deaths, 82 of them Palestinians.

''It's extremely concerning,'' said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "Unfortunately, it's not just, of course, about the sheer numbers of journalists and media workers killed, it's also about the failure to obtain justice or get accountability for those killings.

''What we know from decades of doing this work is that impunity breeds impunity,'' she said. ''So a failure to tackle journalists' killings creates an environment where those killings continue.''

None of those killed this year were from the United States. But the work on American soil has still been dangerous. There have been 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of those reports came from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.

It's impossible to look past the influence of President Donald Trump, who frequently seethes with anger at the press while simultaneously interacting with journalists more than any president in memory — frequently answering their cell phone calls.

''Trump has always attacked the press," Richardson said. ''But during the second term, he's turned that into government action to restrict and punish and intimidate journalists.''

Journalists learn quickly they have a fight on their hands

The Associated Press learned that quickly, when Trump limited the outlet's access to cover him after it refused to follow his lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico. It launched a court fight that has remained unresolved. Trump has also extracted settlements from ABC and CBS News in lawsuits over stories that displeased him, and is suing The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

''The U.S. is a major investor in media development, in independent media outlets in countries that have little or no independent media, or as a source of information for people in countries where there is no free media,'' Ginsberg said. ''The evisceration of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America is another blow to press freedom globally.''

Others in his administration take Trump's lead, like when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a web portal to complain about outlets or journalists being unfair.

''It's part of this overall strategy that we're seeing from certain governments, notably the United States, to paint all journalists who don't simply (repeat) the narrative put out by the government as fake news, as dubious, as dodgy, as criminal,'' Ginsberg said.

Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has portrayed journalists as dark figures skulking around Pentagon halls to uncover classified secrets as his rationale for putting in restrictive rules for coverage.

That's led to the most notable example of journalists fighting back: most mainstream news outlets gave up their credentials to work in the Pentagon rather than agree to these rules, and are still breaking stories while working off site. The New York Times has sued to overturn the rules. The newspaper also publicly defends itself when attacked by the president, such as when he complained about its coverage of his health.

Polls consistently show that journalists have never been popular, and are likely to elicit little sympathy when their work becomes harder.

"Really the harm falls on the public with so much of this because the public depends on this independent reporting to understand and scrutinize the decisions that are being made by the most powerful office in the world,'' Richardson said.

Some reasons for optimism

The news industry as a whole is more than two decades in to a retrenchment caused largely by a collapse in the advertising market, and every year brings more reports of journalists laid off as a result. One of the year's most sobering statistics came in a report by the organizations Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News: in 2002, there were 40 journalists for every 100,000 people in the United States and by this year, it was down to just over eight.

Asked if they could find reasons for optimism, both Ginsberg and Richardson pointed to the rise of some independent local news organizations, shoots of growth of growth in a barren landscape, places like the Baltimore Banner, Charlottesville Tomorrow in Virginia and Outlier Media in Michigan.

As he told the AP: ''Over time, people will hopefully come to their senses and say, 'Hey, the media like anything else is imperfect but, man, it's a nice thing to have a free press.'"

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