LANSING — There is no doubt that a free and independent press is under brutal assault in the United States.

There are threats and online stalking of reporters, banning The Associated Press from official White House events and news conferences because the news agency still calls the Gulf of Mexico by the name “Gulf of Mexico” and the wholesale canceling of most federal government subscriptions to newspapers and other news services.

The vice president, unhappy about coverage of the administration, has called out disfavored Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporters by name. 

The government has scrubbed agency websites, hiding vital data and other information from the press and public about public health, the environment, energy, the economy, schools and other essential topics. 

What have been labeled as “ideologically-friendly content creators” have displaced facilities for NBC News, the New York Times, National Public Radio and Politico at the Pentagon and White House, says Reporters without Borders, an international press freedom advocacy organization.

The group decried what it calls the administration’s “war on the press,” saying the ultimate victims of that war are the American people who are “robbed of access to reliable information about their government.” 

On the international front, the administration has decimated long-established and well-respected U.S. government news services like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Televisión Martí that provide influential coverage of U.S. culture and events for audiences around the world, especially those living in authoritarian countries.

On a local level, governments have cut off advertising revenue that is essential for community news media to survive. These governments are retaliating for news reports that angered and embarrassed incompetent or dishonest officials or exposed waste and fraud.

And a Mississippi judge on Feb. 18 ordered a local newspaper to remove an editorial critical of the city council from its website – a blatant and unconstitutional act of censorship.

Also deeply troubling are defensive moves toward self-censorship – the effort by journalists to protect themselves and their press organizations by taming or watering down their reporting and by ignoring contentious issues to avoid retribution by government officials and powerful interests.

Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive officer of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the widespread perception in America had been that “threats to press freedom happen somewhere else.” 

However, the United States is no longer immune from such threats, Ginsberg told an audience at the recent Knight Media Forum sponsored annually by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Journalists around the world are at high risk of physical assaults, arrest, groundless libel suits, harassment, closure of their news outlets, abductions, threats, regulatory retaliation — and murder — for doing their jobs. 

Last year, 124 journalists and media workers were killed, That was more than in any other year since the Committee to Protect Journalists started collecting data in 1992.

There also were 320 journalists behind bars as of Dec. 1, 2023, the second-highest number ever recorded.

Attacks on journalists have happened from time to time in U.S. history, with reporters jailed, assaulted or assassinated. Frivolous libel and invasion of privacy lawsuits are not rare.

This anti-media campaign is damaging the U.S. image abroad as well. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which funds humanitarian programs, is dramatically undermining the survivability of some independent news outlets, especially those serving audiences in authoritarian countries. 

As a journalism educator and trainer, I’ve been in many non-democratic countries as a speaker, instructor, workshop leader and researcher, including some of the most authoritarian such as Russia and Uzbekistan.

I’ve interviewed more than 100 professional journalists and press rights defenders about their experiences and heard firsthand about undergoing censorship, police interrogations, ruinous defamation suits and more. 

Two of the most egregious violators of press rights are the autocratic dictators of Nicaragua and Venezuela, according to veteran journalist Carlos Eduardo Huertas of Colombia.

Speaking on the Knight Media Forum panel, “New Frontlines: Safeguarding Journalism, Locally and Globally,” Huertas described a chilling phone conversation he was having with a fellow Latin American journalist when “I heard a gunshot and the call ended.”

Elsewhere in the world, we see former democracies — or at least quasi-democracies — trampling on independent journalism when autocrats take power, as we’re observing in Hungary, Poland and India. 

Here in the U.S., news organizations should prepare to defend themselves, says Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the City University of New York.

But what looms ahead could be much more far-reaching and ruthless, he and other free press experts say.

The power dynamics between journalists and power-holders has “shifted dramatically,” Simon said at the same panel.

Ginsberg also warned of the need for American journalists to stand in solidarity together in defense of the First Amendment’s freedom of expression.

That means an end to the traditional thinking that “if you just stay silent, they won’t come to us.”

That’s not true, Ginsberg said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Eric Freedman is the director of Capital News Service at the Michigan State University School of Journalism.