Hostility towards the media is spreading from dictatorships to democracies, encouraged by U.S. President Donald Trump’s and other leaders’ attacks on ‘fake news,’ according to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index. The annual yardstick produced by the advocacy group Reporters without Borders, which measures media freedom in 180 countries, found assaults on the press – ranging from taunts to murder – were becoming graver. The worst decline in freedom was in Europe, though the region is still the world’s safest for journalists, according to the index. Two murders helped drive the decline. In October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a prominent Maltese journalist who probed corruption by the country’s elites, was assassinated in a car bomb. In Slovakia, 27-year old investigative reporter Jan Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kusnirova were shot to death during Kuciak’s investigation of ties between Slovakian officials and Italian Mafia figures.
Both murders were galvanizing. Kuciak’s led to massive popular protests that ended up toppling the regime of Prime Minister Robert Fico. When anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bombing in Malta last year, the investigations she was working on came to a sudden halt. Until now.
Following Kuciak’s death, longtime ICIJ media partners at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Czech Center for Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI) published Kuciak’s final stories.
Another troubling trend noted in the World Press Freedom Index is increasing efforts to delegitimize and intimidate the press in countries with traditions of democracy. U.S. President Donald Trump has branded the media an “enemy of the American people,” and his attacks on “fake news” to denounce unfavorable coverage have been adopted by authoritarian leaders in nations such as Turkey and Cambodia. Trump’s attacks on the media have led the U.S. to fall two places to 45th in the world in press freedom.
Other leaders of democratic countries who have adopted or encouraged violent rhetoric against the media include Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Narendra Modi of India and Milos Zeman of the Czech Republic. The report noted that “Duterte not only constantly insults reporters but has also warned them that they ‘are not exempted from assassination.’”
