The Press at 64: America's Historic Fall on the World Press Freedom Index

The United States is now ranked 64th in the world for press freedom. Not 64th in GDP. Not 64th in military spending. 64th in its ability to protect the people whose job is to tell the truth about power.

Reporters Without Borders released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index last month, and the findings are damning. For a country that has long held up its First Amendment as the gold standard of democratic values, slipping to 64th out of 180 nations should be a national crisis. Instead, it barely made a ripple in the news cycle.

The report names six factors driving the decline: media ownership consolidation, the Trump administration's ongoing litigation campaign against news organizations, a weakening legal framework for journalists, economic pressures on newsrooms, declining public trust, and the physical safety risks now facing reporters in the field. These are not abstract forces. They are concrete, documented, and accelerating.

Since returning to office, President Trump has barred the Associated Press from White House events, restructured Pentagon press access to favor conservative outlets, sued the BBC for ten billion dollars, and pursued what press freedom advocates describe as politically motivated investigations against disfavored journalists. NPR and PBS have lost over a billion dollars in federal funding. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia have all faced cuts. These are not isolated grievances. They are a pattern.

Clayton Weimers, RSF's North America Director, put it plainly: Trump is pouring gasoline on a fire that was already burning. The decline in U.S. press freedom predates this administration by a decade. Media consolidation, the collapse of local newsrooms, the rise of algorithm-driven outrage as a business model. Trump did not create these conditions. But his administration has accelerated them in ways that will outlast his time in office.

The Varieties of Democracy Institute's 2026 Democracy Report found that U.S. freedom of expression has fallen to World War II-era levels. That sentence should stop you cold. The United States, in 2026, has the same expressive freedom as it did during a period defined by wartime censorship, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the suppression of dissent.

There is a tendency to treat press freedom as a media industry problem, a concern for journalists and their editors rather than for ordinary citizens. That framing is wrong, and it is dangerous.

When reporters cannot access officials without signing documents that restrict what they can publish, when public broadcasters lose their funding, when a sitting president files ten-billion-dollar lawsuits against foreign outlets, the damage is not only to journalism. It is to every person who depends on journalism to understand what is being done in their name.

64th. The number is not just a ranking. It is a measure of distance between the country that America claims to be and the country that it is becoming. The gap is widening. And the people best positioned to document that widening are the ones being systematically silenced.