Rash: Election stakes high for journalists and press freedom

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The free press that’s the cornerstone of democracy is imperiled. In part because journalists themselves are.

That’s among the conclusions in a new Committee to Protect Journalists report titled “On Edge: What the U.S. election could mean for journalists and global press freedom.”

CPJ research ahead of the election, the analysis starkly states, “finds that the hostile media climate fostered during Donald Trump’s presidency has continued to fester, with members of the press confronting challenges — including violence, lawsuits, online harassment, and police attacks — that could shape the global media environment for decades.”

The report is replete with bleak statistics, like 18 assaults on journalists during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol; one-third of journalists reporting being harassed on social media in the previous 12 months (particularly pernicious for women, journalists of color, LGBTQ+ reporters and other religious or ethnic minority media members), and a 50% jump in journalist assaults this year compared with 2023.

There are also first-person testimonials from journalists, attorneys and press-freedom advocates, including correspondents who covered the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and reported that supporters surrounding them yelled “Fake news! This is all your fault,” as well as ”You’re next! Your time is coming.”

Others spoke about Jan. 6, including Associated Press photographer John Minchillo, who was assaulted by the MAGA mob that attacked the Capitol and told CPJ it wasn’t just the incident but the lack of reckoning that resonates. The event, he said, “stands as a monument to the times that we are in, not because of the violence, but because of the unwillingness of individuals far and wide to see with their own eyes and know what it is without asking someone else to define it for them.”

Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S., Canada and Caribbean program coordinator who wrote the report, said in an interview that ”what’s at stake for America is a shared understanding of what journalists are doing and the truth they are reporting.“ Jan. 6, she said, has “two different narratives of what happened that day: one which journalists have documented, and another set of ’alternative facts’ that very much portray the events of that day in a different light. I think that’s a perfect example of what is at stake — two different realities of American history and with that what reporting means, and how the institution of journalism works.”

And consequently and consequentially how the country itself works. Or how it doesn’t, in instances when disinformation endangers. In Springfield, Ohio, for instance, where lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets made it into a presidential debate. Or in southeastern states first battered by hurricanes and then by lies about the government’s response.

”If there’s distrust, rumors, all sorts of lies being spread, in particular by the former President Trump, it makes the work of government more difficult,“ Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told “PBS NewsHour” on Monday. “If there’s a lot of noise in the system, not just of [misinformation] — someone gets something wrong — but actual [disinformation], it actually impedes the ability to move resources.”

Which is why journalists jumped to refute the mistruths. So did several Republican representatives, senators and governors who intervened with information essential to their constituents that contradicted Trump and allies like Elon Musk, whose social-media platform X amplified the lies.

The CPJ report reflects the impact the former president has had on perceptions of the press. ”With Trump’s ascent on the national stage,“ it states, ”politicians around the country have grown more outwardly hostile toward the media, employing anti-journalistic rhetoric, limiting access to government proceedings, and — when those tactics don’t stop criticism — using the courts as a means of retaliation in the face of unfavorable coverage.”

And what happens in America may not stop at the water’s edge. November’s election ”has been framed as an existential choice that will chart America’s future democratic course,” the report said, adding: ”The results will also have long-lasting global implications, including for freedom of the press and journalist safety abroad.”

If an American president, Jacobsen said, “creates a permission structure for poor treatment of reporters, that [could] very much serve as a model for a green light in some ways for other leaders around the world who might want to treat their press poorly, deny access, or use legal orders to go after the media.”

In its report CPJ doesn’t just describe the dire dynamics facing journalists but calls for action from the presidential candidates by asking them in a letter to ”affirm their support for fostering an environment in which media freedom is protected in the U.S. and overseas.“ The letter’s set of principles are reasonable. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris should sign it.

And as Election Day draws near, voters should keenly consider the report’s conclusion, which states, ”Politicizing and denigrating journalists, rather than respecting their watchdog role as the Fourth Estate, has a profound impact on democratic institutions and curtails the public’s ability to stay informed through trusted sources. The outcome of this November’s election will, in no small measure, determine the health of the media environment globally for decades to come.”