Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy

Executive summary

The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been marked by a flurry of executive actions that have created a chilling effect and have the potential to curtail media freedoms. These measures threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swaths of America’s population.

CPJ has noted a significant increase in the number of newsrooms seeking safety advice, concerned that the changing national political environment could threaten their ability to report without fear of retribution from authorities.

This report provides a snapshot of the Trump administration’s policies that directly affect press freedom. The fate of American democracy and journalists’ ability to work without fear are intertwined. The blitz of policy changes from the White House and its appointees set a concerning tone for local governments domestically, and authoritarian-minded rulers globally, and has deepend a climate of hostility toward journalists.     

CPJ is calling on the public, the media, civil society, and all branches, levels, and institutions of government – from municipalities to the U.S. Supreme Court – to safeguard press freedom to help secure the future of American democracy. (Read the full list of CPJ’s recommendations here).

In this report, CPJ made the following findings:

• Changes in the procedures that govern White House access and the makeup of the press pool, the group of journalists with regular access to the president in small, closed events, have the potential to set a precedent by which presidents pick and choose the media that cover them most closely. In the case of The Associated Press, its exclusion from many pool events deprives its thousands of news outlet subscribers which rely primarily on AP for their Washington coverage, access to fact-based, nonpartisan, and real-time news from the White House.
• Major news outlets are unsure how to react to increased pressure from the White House, and owners and journalists alike are facing the choice of whether to placate the president or risk losing access.
• Critics believe that the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory agencies have become increasingly politicized in their work. While it is common for a president to appoint agency heads that are sympathetic to their views, some of the current administration’s appointments have raised concerns that this administration has taken this to a new level in what one expert told CPJ was “Nixon on steroids.” This sense of uncertainty coupled with Trump’s own harsh rhetoric and behavior has set newsrooms on edge.
• The White House’s call to deprive public broadcasters NPR and PBS of government funding has opened the possibility that millions of Americans who rely on these stations and their affiliates, especially in the nation’s growing “news deserts,” might lose access to their valuable news and information programming.
• Reopening FCC investigations into CBS, ABC, and NBC has created a heightened sense of concern among newsrooms. Journalists covering issues viewed as important by the Trump administration, such as immigration, have expressed concern about increased scrutiny and the possibility of retribution for their reporting.

Introduction

These are not normal times for American press freedoms. In the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, there have been a startling number of actions that, taken together, threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swaths of America’s population.

From denying access to upending respect for the independence of a free press to vilifying news organizations to threatening reprisals, this administration has begun to exert its power to punish or reward based on coverage. Whether in the states or on the streets, this behavior is setting a new standard for how the public can treat journalists. The uncertainty and fear resulting from these actions have caused requests for safety advice to increase as journalists and newsrooms aim to prepare for what might be next.

The Associated Press, which estimates that four billion people globally see its news everyday with its journalism appearing in thousands of news outlets, sued the White House chief of staff, her communications deputy, and the press secretary, after the AP was excluded from presidential media events because it did not update the AP Stylebook in the way the White House wanted after President Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Despite the court’s finding that, under the First Amendment, the government cannot open its doors to some journalists while excluding others because of their viewpoints, AP journalists are still having difficulty accessing most pool events to which they previously would have had access.

The Federal Communications Commission is mounting assorted investigations against CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, and PBS, leading free speech groups to characterize some of the investigations as politically motivated. Federal funding for public broadcasters NPR and PBS is under threat following a Congressional hearing during which Marjorie Taylor Greene characterized the organizations, which provide public service journalism in news deserts and beyond, as having “increasingly become radical, left-wing echo chambers.”

On the state level, some officials from both parties have taken to barring journalists from legislatures and other formerly open statehouse proceedings amid nearly a decade of derogatory rhetoric towards journalists. Public records requests, already notoriously backlogged, are taking even longer to be processed at both the local and federal levels.

Abroad, the Trump administration has undercut the ability of thousands of independent news outlets to stay afloat: Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development is imperiling fragile newsrooms in challenging settings around the world that relied significantly on U.S. funding to do their work. Meanwhile, the administration has tied the hands of the U.S. Agency for Global Media effectively silencing five vital U.S. government-funded broadcasters, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that for decades provided another perspective to millions living in authoritarian countries around the world. The actions have led to the suspension or elimination of thousands of journalist positions in the United States and abroad, and they have been cheered by the undemocratic governments of China, Russia, Cuba and elsewhere.

These moves represent a notable escalation from the first Trump administration, which also pursued banning and deriding elements of the press. After nearly a decade of repeating insults and falsehoods, and filing lawsuits, Trump has normalized disdain for media to an alarming degree.

While, according to a recent Pew Research poll, more Americans are paying attention to the news about the Trump administration than did during the early days of the Biden administration, the traditional journalist’s job of getting the story out has grown increasingly difficult.

Some media business owners, like The Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos and the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong, have realigned their publications’ opinion pages in reaction to changing political tides, triggering resignations among their staffs. (Both men have said the decisions were motivated by a desire to protect their respective newspapers’ credibility.)

Bezos, whose cloud computing and rocket companies boast billions in government contracts, was among the tech sector guests, including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, given prominent seating at Trump’s inauguration after donating a million dollars to the inaugural fund. In fall 2024, the Post also made the decision that the paper should forgo a presidential endorsement for the first time in decades.

Ruth Marcus, who had been at the Post for more than four decades, resigned as the deputy editorial page editor after CEO and Publisher Will Lewis declined to publish one of her columns that pushed back against the changes in the opinion page. Marcus wrote in The New Yorker that this decision “underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded.”

Univision, which merged with the Mexican company Televisa in 2022, has also been careful not to draw the administration’s ire, according to sources who work in Spanish-language media who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to discuss editorial policies. While news programming has remained largely untouched, a pre-recorded special that was due to broadcast shortly before Trump’s inauguration in January was canceled by executives in what the sources who spoke with CPJ considered censorship.

The one-hour-long special examining the likely impact of Trump’s proposed immigration policies was cancelled after it was deemed to be speculative, a Univision spokesperson told CPJ.

“The piece was based on assumptions and early drafts rather than concrete facts or enacted policies,” the spokesperson said in an email. “To claim that the network censors criticism of the Trump administration is categorically false,” they added, noting that the network had aired dozens of news reports on the administration’s immigration policies and its consequences.

On the legal front, Trump has been quick to sue perceived critics or outlets that publish stories with which he disagrees. Rather than facing a protracted legal fight, ABC settled with Trump after it was sued for defamation in its coverage of his sexual abuse case. Trump also has active lawsuits against the Des Moines Register, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and CBS, all filed before he was sworn in to his second term. While it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for a sitting U.S. president to pursue legal action against media organizations for unfavorable coverage, Trump has shown no indication that he’ll drop these suits during his presidency.

Fewer Americans appear to be aware of the tensions between this administration and news media compared to during Trump’s first term. In 2017, Pew found that 94% of Americans knew about the state of the relationship between Trump and the press and nearly three quarters (73%) felt that the situation was impeding their access to news. Today, that relationship is arguably worse, but about one in five Americans (19%) say they’ve actually heard nothing at all about the relationship, according to Pew. The attack on press freedom is happening rapidly, and, apparently, many Americans don’t know, haven’t heard, or are choosing to look away at a time when trust of the press is at a record low and the president’s acolytes are “flooding the zone” with actions and information that can distract from the core of what is happening in the country.

The threat to freedom of the press is occurring in a larger context in which First Amendment rights, more broadly, are being eroded. The administration’s sweeping moves to arrest and attempt to expel at least one green card holder and at least one foreign national on a student visa who both advocated for Palestinian rights have put the right to dissent at stake. The gutting of information from myriad federal websites has risked the public’s ability to access pluralistic historical narratives. On the legal front, a constitutional crisis looms as the administration appears reluctant to adhere to certain court orders countering its acts.

A robust and independent press can cover these issues and hold the powerful to account. A weakened press will struggle to tell the story of America to its people.

Since 2013, CPJ has published reports that critically assess Democratic and Republican administrations’ relationships with the media. While CPJ typically waits a year or longer to evaluate the impact of an administration on press freedom, the organization is publishing this special report as a sign of alarm about the myriad actions and statements in a very short time that have been detrimental to the media environment.       

This special report identifies three ways in which the Trump administration is chipping away at U.S. press freedom: by limiting access to information, instituting new regulations, and targeting journalists and newsrooms with lawsuits and investigations. It then spells out the impacts – current and potential – of these trends for the national, state, and local press. This report also explains how newsrooms are responding, and what CPJ and other press freedom groups are doing to uphold journalist rights in a precarious environment. Finally, it contains recommendations to the Trump administration, to Congress, and to newsrooms on ways to improve press freedom.

CPJ reached out to the White House with detailed requests for comment, and did not receive a response.

Access issues

Diverse media coverage of the U.S. presidency and government has been a long standing fixture of American democracy. Allowing a plurality of media outlets access helps to ensure that citizens can make choices based on accurate, factual information and that the government is held to account. Press freedom, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, is one of the rights that distinguishes the United States from many other countries. But press freedom implies that journalists have reasonable access and are able to bear witness to the workings of government without fear of retribution. So far, the second Trump administration has taken multiple steps that curtail the media’s ability to fulfill this role.

Less than a month into Trump’s second term, The Associated Press – one of the world’s most influential news wire agencies serving thousands of newsrooms in the U.S. and abroad and known for setting editorial standards across the industry – had been barred from most White House pool events in retaliation for its refusal to fully embrace the president’s executive order renaming the international body of water the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. (The AP said in its stylebook that it would continue to use the Gulf of Mexico, while noting that the U.S. government now calls it the Gulf of America.)

Most news outlets, including local newspapers, broadcast stations and websites, cannot afford their own national and international correspondents and so subscribe to agencies like the AP. As CPJ and partner organizations noted, removing the AP’s access effectively cuts off its subscribers’ access as well. 

While a federal judge ruled in favor of the AP, stating that the White House should restore access to the news agency on First Amendment grounds, the Trump administration appealed the case and turned away the agency’s reporters from an Oval Office press conference in the week after the judge’s order was announced.

In mid-April, the White House eliminated a permanent spot for wire services at all pool events. This decision will have the effect of restricting coverage of these events, as information gathered by these outlets is widely circulated by others. Wire agency reporters will now be in rotation with more than 30 outlets for two seats reserved for print or wire journalists.

These were the first in a series of actions, including the White House taking control of the briefing room seating chart, that indicate a disregard for long-established norms regulating press access to the administration.

Historically, the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent group of reporters covering the administration, has managed the briefing room seating chart as well as the rotation of outlets that participated in pool events, which have limited space. Assigning these tasks to the WHCA, rather than the White House, has ensured that the administration does not handpick a receptive audience, and that a wide variety of media, and their audiences, are represented.

These actions appear to CPJ to be part of a campaign to influence who is allowed to cover the administration and thus shape public information. Preventing a plurality of media – especially the country’s leading news agency – from having direct access to these events impedes the democratic process.

“My job is to be the eyes of the American people and people around the world,” said Evan Vucci, the AP’s chief photographer in Washington, D.C., who has not been able to access the majority of events at the White House since early February when the White House began restricting AP access. “I want the American public to understand that I am – that we are – truly working on their behalf,” he told CPJ in an interview.

Vucci captured the iconic image of then-candidate Trump after he was shot in July 2024 at a campaign rally, a photo that was used by outlets globally, repurposed by Trump supporters, and is now hanging in the White House. Vucci explained that by limiting the number of photographers with direct access, there are literally fewer perspectives of an event, and ultimately, “the historic record is going to be a little thinner.”

In addition to limiting the perspectives, curtailing access to an administration based on an editorial decision was also the subject of First Amendment challenges in The Associated Press’ lawsuit against the White House press secretary, the president’s chief of staff, and the deputy chief of staff. The district judge ruled that the curtailment in the wire agency’s access violated the First Amendment rights of the AP.

The administration has appealed the court’s decision. 

In the meantime, to avoid the same fate as the AP, many news outlets are trying to toe the line without using the new terminology. The administration’s targeting of the AP sends a message to other news organizations that they, too, could be excluded – and possibly face a costly and drawn out legal battle – if they fail to comply with the White House line.

At the same time, the White House has allowed access to bloggers, influencers and those from outlets that are more likely to promote the president’s vision and do not all adhere to traditional journalistic standards, offering some of them spots in the White House briefing room that have historically been reserved for fact-based media outlets. The Pentagon has also reshuffled its media access, removing The New York Times, NBC News, NPR, and POLITICO from their office spaces inside the building and offering the spaces to Breitbart News Network, HuffPost, the New York Post, and One America News Network. (The administration publicly defended its actions as a way of widening access to newer news outlets, not restricting access.)

“What’s happening on the national level is creating a permission structure for [this treatment of journalists] to filter down to the local level.”

–Bryan Schott, a veteran Salt Lake City-based journalist

In addition, Spanish-language journalists have expressed to CPJ their concern about the disappearance of the White House’s Spanish-language website and social media accounts. While the White House maintained dedicated Spanish-speaking staff under the first Trump administration, they no longer have employees who work primarily with Hispanic outlets, a change that has resulted in the perceived lack of access to senior Trump administration officials.

“Before they considered us a necessary evil, now we are an unnecessary evil,” said a Spanish-language media executive who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity because they were concerned about further impediments to access.  

The White House did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment on this topic.

Media coverage was central to Trump’s emergence as a political figure; in his 2009 book “The Art of the Deal” he said that “bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.” He sought coverage, controversial or otherwise, and at the same time attacked journalists and framed them as irrelevant. Once in office, in 2017, his administration began retaliating against journalists and outlets which challenged his narrative.

As CPJ has previously noted, state and local officials across the United States began to mimic Trump’s treatment of the press, and this aggressiveness toward journalists did not dissipate once Trump was out of office.

“What’s happening on the national level is creating a permission structure for [this treatment of journalists] to filter down to the local level,” explained Bryan Schott, a veteran Salt Lake City-based journalist who has covered Utah politics for more than 25 years and now runs his own political news site, Utah Political Watch.

In 2022, Utah’s Senate joined Iowa and Kansas to become the third state legislature that year to restrict all reporters’ access to the floor, making it more challenging to nab off-the-cuff interviews with lawmakers or catch nuances in discussions around pieces of legislation.

Then, in late 2024, Schott was informed that he had been denied 2025 press credentials to cover the Utah legislature due to last-minute changes in credentialing procedures that excluded independent reporters, though Schott said that he was in effect the only reporter denied credentials.

The journalist, who is known for his unflinching investigations and scoops, said that the decision to deny him access was a reaction to an article he published about the Utah Senate President Stuart Adams’ alleged violation of campaign finance laws. Schott filed a lawsuit against the Utah Legislature for violating his First Amendment rights. The Utah legislative session, which is 45 days, ended on March 7. Schott’s suit is still in litigation.     

Utah Senate Chief of Staff Mark Thomas told CPJ via email that the Senate does not comment on ongoing litigation.

Schott predicts that this kind of behavior will only worsen, especially in states where a super majority controls the government and there is less leverage for pushback. “There’s a lot of people who don’t really pay attention… [who think] this is just minutia,” the journalist explained, but this is all “really frightening.”

Journalists have also expressed to CPJ growing concern about it becoming even more difficult to access public records through freedom of information requests both at the state and federal levels, a fear that has been compounded by the removal of public information and data from government websites, and the instability of federal departments, including the communications departments, at agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health.

Kansas Reflector editor-in-chief Sherman Smith told CPJ he is worried about what Kansas’ recently minted Senate Committee on Government Efficiency, an initiative similar to Musk’s DOGE, means for his reporting. 

“I am particularly concerned about access to records under the Kansas Open Records Act,” Smith said. “Not having the resources to fight for these in court has always been a concern, but the concern is growing now that state-level officials are emboldened by the Trump administration.”     

In an emailed comment to CPJ, Kansas Senate government efficiency chair Renee Erickson said that it is “patently false” that the committee has not provided journalists adequate and timely responses to their requests for comment about the committee’s work.

The Trump campaign’s focus on immigration, and the president’s determination to deliver on campaign promises to deport immigrants awaiting asylum proceedings or lacking documentation, have also created difficulties for journalists covering these policies’ impacts on their communities.

In echoes of the harassment that the diaspora publication The Haitian Times faced last year when it began debunking the unfounded accusations against Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, and the impact the false information was having on the community, journalists in Aurora, Colorado, found themselves the subjects of ire at a national level. 

Commenters on the Sentinel Colorado’s website accused the newspaper of being complicit with lawbreakers and actively working against the Trump administration, said editor Dave Perry who has worked at the paper for more than 20 years. While there hasn’t necessarily been a higher volume of feedback, “the tone of these things has changed,” Perry explained. “We’re nervous about this and we’re watching it really, really closely.”

The president’s border czar, Tom Homan, who launched “Operation Aurora,” blamed alleged leaks to the media for putting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at risk while they were carrying out the raids. The blame came as ICE officials fell under increasing pressure from the Trump administration for not rounding up enough people.

Along the southern border, at least one editor told CPJ that he has observed a shift in the willingness of local Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers to interact with certain categories of media since Trump’s return to office. Robert Moore, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit news website El Paso Matters, attributes this change to a combination of uncertainty about what DHS headquarters might, or might not, want them to say, and the administration’s perspective that traditional media outlets are irrelevant. On the other hand, Moore told CPJ, various agencies have been very willing to provide images of arrests along with press releases.

“I told my reporters…we’re not going to become a PR arm of the government,” said Moore, who has covered the border for nearly 40 years. “We want to inform the community when real stuff is going on, but we also want to be careful not to needlessly alarm the community.” 

(DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told CPJ in an emailed statement that DHS is always willing to coordinate with journalist inquiries.)

These new challenges for local newsrooms are occurring in a vulnerable news ecosystem. El Paso Matters was founded in an effort to fill a hole left when traditional newspapers in the area shut down. Similar websites are trying to stave off the expanding news deserts but it is an uphill battle in under-resourced news markets. The absence of newsrooms, and the scarcity of reporters in those remaining, make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for watchdog journalism to hold power to account and for tax dollars to be spent responsibly.

Legal and regulatory actions

Although the First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech or of the press,” the second Trump administration, with its majorities in both chambers, shows signs of wanting to bring the tremendous legal and regulatory apparatus of the government to bear against news organizations, citing often false or exaggerated claims about their coverage.

Alarmingly, Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 25 rescinded her predecessor’s policies that protected journalists against subpoenas from the Justice Department, except in cases of national security, with the stated goal of punishing government employees who leak to media. While the action appears directed mostly at the leakers, Bondi’s decision would make it possible for reporters who receive information to be subpoenaed, brought before a judge, and forced to disclose sources, with chilling effects on reporting on the government’s activities and ultimately the public’s right to know.

With his return to the White House, Trump has appointed some individuals to cabinet positions, federal regulatory agencies, and federal law enforcement posts who seem generally unafraid to take norm-bending actions that could interfere with the editorial independence of major news outlets. While it is typical for presidents to appoint individuals that are sympathetic to their views, some of Trump’s choices for cabinet and agency heads stand out for their fealty to him and his goals, rather than the traditions of the institutions they serve.

The administration and its allies are framing these actions as a means to redress a media ecosystem that they have characterized as having a radical left bias. However, these efforts, combined with direct verbal attacks on the media and a disregard for facts and fact-checking, are instead establishing harmful frameworks for launching partisan attacks against outlets which might express narratives that counter the administration.

At least three major broadcasters – NBC, ABC, and CBS – as well as the United States’ two public broadcasters – NPR and PBS – were placed under various forms of investigations by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairperson, Brendan Carr, within the first month of Trump’s second term. The speed and specifics of these investigations has caused concern about political interference at a regulatory agency that rarely generates headlines.

“You might think of it as Nixon on steroids,” said Robert Corn-Revere, former chief counsel at the FCC, referring to President Richard Nixon cutting funding for PBS and entertaining the idea of using the FCC to punish television stations for perceived negative coverage.

Carr has defended the fairness of his agency investigations, asserting in a text message to journalist Oliver Darcy that, contrary to his predecessors, he would “ensure that everyone gets a fair shake from this FCC.” (Carr did not reply to a request from CPJ seeking comment about the investigations and the accusations from critics that the FCC is becoming politicized.)

 ”It’s not unusual for FCC commissioners or chairman to engage in jawboning,” said Robert Corn-Revere, a former chief counsel to the FCC chairman, referring to rhetorical pressure. What is unusual, he explained, is to undertake so many actions simultaneously, including “in ways that extend beyond the FCC’s legitimate jurisdiction.”

“You might think of it as Nixon on steroids,” he said, referring to President Richard Nixon cutting funding for PBS and entertaining the idea of using the FCC to punish television stations for perceived negative coverage.

In mid-April, Carr suggested that Comcast, whose properties include NBC and MSNBC, might be in violation of its broadcasting license in response to MSNBC’s coverage of the Trump administration’s unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.

The FCC chairman wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Comcast outlets did not acknowledge that Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally and was a member of the El Salvador gang MS-13, a claim that has not been adjudicated. His post came the day after the White House held a press conference – which MSNBC and other outlets did not air – defending its actions of deporting Abrego Garcia.

In yet another unusual move, Carr, who was recently spotted wearing a gold lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s profile, reopened investigations into NBC, ABC, and CBS in response to complaints from the Center for American Rights, a conservative public interest firm. The complaints, which were dismissed by his predecessor, relate to alleged preferential treatment of then-Vice President Kamala Harris by NBC and ABC, while accusing CBS of news distortion.

The political messaging in these cases is overt, Corn-Revere said. “I’ve never seen a complaint proceeding that was dismissed be reinstated by a chairman. That’s a first for me,” said the lawyer, who now works as chief counsel at the FIRE, a First Amendment advocacy group. A petition to suspend the license of a Fox News affiliate that was also dismissed by Carr’s predecessor around the same time was not reinstated.

A FCC investigation into CBS centers on the editing of the network’s “60 Minutes” interview of then-presidential candidate and Vice President Harris, which is also the subject of a $20 billion consumer fraud and unfair competition lawsuit filed in a Texas court by Trump. In the Texas suit, one of Trump’s claims is that “60 Minutes” violated the state’s consumer fraud statute in the editing of Harris’ answer about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s willingness to engage with the Biden-Harris administration on the topic of the war in Gaza.

“If you were to recognize that theory of the case as stating a violation of the Texas Consumer Protection Law, then any candidate who is running against another candidate could sue a news organization for covering the other candidate,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit legal support organization focused on defending the First Amendment rights of journalists.

“It’s a particular flavor of SLAPP suit,” said Rottman, referencing Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, which plaintiffs bring in an effort to drain resources of the defendants and have the effect of chilling speech. In fact, consumer protection lawsuits have been used before against media organizations in Texas, by the state Attorney General Ken Paxton. It is not unusual for federal and state governments to play copycat, Rottman said.

While concern around SLAPP suits has been growing, nonprofit groups like the Uniform Law Commission have been working to expand anti-SLAPP protections at the state level.

The nonprofit organization was instrumental in pushing forward legislation in states including Iowa, Ohio, and Idaho that makes it more difficult to prosecute individuals and groups, including journalists and media organizations.

“We all enjoy those rights to speak out, to address issues of public concern, to engage in public discourse,” said Kaitlin Wolff, the legislative program director at the Uniform Law Commission. “I think people are starting to understand that it is important that we don’t weaponize the court system … and that we safeguard those First Amendment rights, so people can adequately share what’s on their minds about what’s going on in their communities.”

“Whether you agree with somebody’s speech or not, it is inherent that we have these [rights].”

Trump’s decisions to file the “60 Minutes” consumer fraud lawsuit in Texas and the Pulitzer Prize Board lawsuit in Florida have also raised concerns about shopping for sympathetic jurisdictions.

Trump has kept up the pressure against CBS by writing in a Truth Social post on April 13 that the network should lose its license over recent “60 Minutes” segments on Ukraine and Greenland.

Longtime “60 Minutes” producer Bill Owens resigned in late April, citing perceived infringement on his editorial independence. In a rare on-air criticism of CBS’s parent company, “60 Minutes” journalist Scott Pelley said that “Paramount began to supervise [the show’s] content in new ways.”

“None of our stories has been blocked but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires,” Pelley said. 

The Texas lawsuit and FCC investigation also come amid ongoing proceedings at the FCC in relation to a proposed merger between Skydance Media and Paramount Global, which owns the CBS Network.

“What’s certain is that each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend. They create precedents — not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless — that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits.”

–Jameel Jaffer, Knight First Amendment Institute executive director, in a New York Times op-ed

CBS has also faced public outcry and internal pressure from staff in response to news that it might settle the lawsuit relating to the Harris “60 Minutes” interview, following ABC’s settlement of a Trump defamation lawsuit in December last year.

“What’s certain is that each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend,” wrote Knight First Amendment Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer in an op-ed for The New York Times. “They create precedents — not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless — that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits.”

A mediator is now involved in the lawsuit; it remains unclear whether CBS will settle.

While conceding a case may be more expedient and preserve access, it erodes both the public’s trust in the media institution and the faith that its own journalists might have had in the news organization’s dedication to journalistic practice and standards.

The FCC investigation and merger proceedings are being used as “bargaining chips,” to exert pressure against CBS in a highly unusual way, said Corn-Revere. 

This pressure from the regulator on news outlets seems intended to send a strong, and concerning, message to newsrooms: Fall in line or face the possibility of myriad legal and regulatory challenges.

Recognizing the harmful precedent that an adverse ruling against CBS for the “60 Minutes” interview would create for media across the political spectrum, some conservative groups have voiced their support for the network.

The impact is not just being felt at the national level. At least one local radio station, KCBS, based in San Jose, California, has already come under FCC investigation after it broadcast information about an ICE raid that was happening in the area.

“This is quite novel. The current FCC’s investigation of KCBS goes way beyond anything conducted by previous administrations,” Corn-Revere told CPJ.

The investigation, which followed right-wing social media discussion of the KCBS broadcast, was opened under the regulatory agency’s public interest standard, which is subject to interpretation by the commissioner. News organizations have a right to record and observe law enforcement activity conducted in public.

“It’s all intended to spark fear in people who may not have any pending regulatory business,” and worry about how getting caught up in an investigation might impact future requests such as the Paramount-Skydance merger, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute.

Carr did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment on the merger.

The FCC investigations against NPR and PBS continue this trend of bucking usual procedures. Carr has based the regulator’s case around alleged violation of the networks’ underwriting standards, which were previously negotiated with the FCC, accusing the networks of airing commercial advertisements in violation of their charters. In his letter notifying NPR and PBS CEOs of the investigation, Carr also expressed his doubts that Congress should continue to fund the networks. 

In tandem with Carr’s investigation, a House Oversight subcommittee, Delivering on Government Efficiency, headed by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene held a hearing entitled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” during which the CEOs of NPR and PBS were questioned about alleged liberal bias at their organizations.

Greene and other Republicans framed their defunding efforts as an attempt to halt government spending on “liberal propaganda” that perpetuates a “communist agenda,” and fails to report accurately on stories of public import.

During the hearing, which CPJ staff attended, Taylor Greene also accused the CEOs of allowing programming to air that promoted the “grooming and sexualizing” of children, featuring a photo of a drag queen behind her as she spoke.

While questioning PBS CEO Paula Kerger, Rep. William Timmons, a South Carolina Republican, incorrectly stated that a drag queen had appeared on a PBS children’s program. In response, Kerger pointed out that the drag queen’s image never appeared in any PBS children’s programming, rather it was mistakenly put on the network’s website by the New York City affiliate before being removed.                   

NPR CEO Katherine Maher was asked about NPR coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the theory that the COVID-19 virus originated from a Chinese laboratory. Maher said that she wished NPR had taken more seriously the laptop story, and noted that the outlet has now covered the COVID-19 lab theory, clarifying that both stories emerged before her time leading the news organization.

The CEOs both rejected the accusation that their outlets put out “liberal propaganda” as claimed during the hearing.

In addition to the pressure on NPR and PBS, the Trump White House has written a memo to ask Congress to cut more than $1 billion in funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). While CPB funds some national NPR and PBS programming, the vast majority of the $500 million in federal funds it receives each year is allocated to local public television and radio stations.

The CPB has also filed suit against Trump after he asserted that he was removing three of the corporation’s five board members, which the CPB contends exceeds the president’s authority over an independent private corporation.

A curtailment of federal money would put these small stations at enormous financial risk.

In Indiana, lawmakers have already cut state funding for local public broadcasters. The move will have an outsized impact on rural stations that are slated to lose 30% to 40% of their annual budgets.     

As CPJ and other partner organizations have stated, public broadcasters are an essential public service for many Americans, especially in places that lack other news outlets. According to a 2022 report from the Alliance of Rural Public Media, approximately 20% of rural radio stations serve communities with only one or two other daily news sources.

For smaller organizations, with limited financial resources, the federal and state actions against local public news outlets could be an existential threat.    

Smaller, nonprofit newsroom leaders have also expressed concern that usually neutral federal agencies could be weaponized against them in retaliation for critical coverage of local or federal government.

“I’m really worried about the changes they’re making at the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] in order to make it more political,” said Moore from El Paso Matters. “In the same way they’re already using the FCC to go after public radio and public television, they could use the IRS to go after nonprofit digital organizations like ours because they don’t like our reporting,” said Moore, referencing the FCC’s investigations.

Targeted attacks against journalists and news organizations

A high level of threats and intimidation of journalists has not been characteristic of American      democracy, and historically they have occurred during periods of national tensions, such as during the runup to the Civil War, with the emergence of anti-press laws during World War I and in such epochs as the fight for civil rights or the McCarthy era. In the second Trump administration, an atmosphere of hostility is back.

Throughout his time on the political stage, Trump has made no secret of his disdain for journalists and outlets that do not offer glowing coverage, frequently referring to journalists as “enemies of the people,” and even threatening a photojournalist with prison for taking photographs of a document during an Oval Office interview. At rallies in 2022 for Republican congressional candidates in Texas and Ohio, then-candidate Trump joked that the threat of prison rape would compel journalists to reveal their sources.

“And to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that.”

–President Donald Trump

Trump maintained this theme during his 2024 presidential campaign, as CPJ noted in its pre-election report, saying in the weeks after he was shot during a campaign rally that he wouldn’t mind if a would-be assassin shot through the media section.

“And to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that,” Trump said.

In a speech to the Justice Department on March 14, Trump referred to MSNBC and CNN as “illegal” and “corrupt,” setting a concerning tone for the future use of the federal prosecutor’s office. 

Despite this heightened rhetoric, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan organization which CPJ co-founded that tabulates violations on media freedom, recorded at least 19 press freedom violations in Trump’s first 100 days, down from 42 during the first 100 days of his first term.

The difference, said the Tracker’s Managing Editor Kirstin McCudden, is that there simply have not been the same scale of street demonstrations, which usually come with safety implications for journalists, that there were during Trump’s first term. Additionally, the Trump administration’s chilling statements or actions are no longer vague statements, like calling “fake news” the “enemy of the people.” Nor are they directed at individual journalists. Instead they are being directed against specific media outlets in their entirety, including the AP, NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, and ABC. 

“The knock-on effects of these types of actions are almost immeasurable and long lasting,” McCudden told CPJ. “I really think we’re just beginning to understand the impact of, for example, removing the AP’s access, and what that will do to local news organizations.”

In the weeks following Trump’s 2024 election victory and again after his inauguration, CPJ has provided an increased number of safety consultations to newsrooms and journalists to meet the new realities. From November 8, 2024 to March 7, 2025, CPJ provided safety training to more than 530 journalists in the U.S. to meet the rise in demand for safety information. In contrast, CPJ trained 20 reporters throughout 2022 in the country.

“The knock-on effects of these types of actions are almost immeasurable and long lasting, I really think we’re just beginning to understand the impact of, for example, removing the AP’s access, and what that will do to local news organizations.”

–Kirstin McCudden, U.S. Press Freedom Tracker managing editor

Journalists and news organizations wrote in with queries ranging from field reporting safety to how to manage online harassment to what happens if they are subject to a punitive IRS investigation and how to protect confidential sources in this new political environment.

“The unknown is very unsettling. And right now, this is uncharted waters for the United States. Journalists don’t know what to expect and that is causing concern when it comes to protecting their data, how to store that data and how to ensure it’s as safe as possible,” said CPJ’s digital security advisor Ela Stapley.

In this heightened climate, journalists are growing increasingly concerned about the security of their digital communications, a concern that has grown even more acute following Bondi’s revoking of the Justice Department policy against subpoenaing journalists.

These worries of increased digital threats parallel an uptick in concern about the possibility of physical harassment and intimidation of reporters. CPJ research has shown that more civil unrest combined with an increasingly militarized police force have created less safe reporting conditions for journalists in recent years.

While no mass demonstrations in the United States turned violent during Trump’s first 100 days in office, the memory lingers of the unprecedented violence that journalists faced while covering Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 or covering the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol when journalists were physically assaulted. And, outside the context of protests, there is a concern among reporters that increased polarization in the country could provoke bolder and more violent responses from extremists in their everyday work.

“If the administration says it’s fine to attack journalists, bad actors can become emboldened to use violence against journalists as well,” said Colin Pereira, CPJ’s journalist safety specialist, who has worked as a media security advisor for 22 years. “Both the far right and the far left have attacked journalists. It’s from both sides,” said Pereira. 

Pereira said that these concerns have been reflected in the safety training and questions he fields in his capacity at CPJ. In some ways, a lot of the safety issues, actual and potential, are of no surprise after Trump’s first time in office. “But the speed, that’s what has surprised me this time around,” said Pereira. “Newsrooms now need to have support structures to assist and help journalists manage threats long-term” — and they need to do it quickly, he said. 

The changing safety atmosphere has already been felt by local reporters, even those covering beats that were previously perceived as safe, such as the statehouse. Smith, the editor-in-chief of the Kansas Reflector, told CPJ that the statehouse felt different, on edge, in a way that it hadn’t before.

 ”I’ve been over here covering the legislative session every year since 2018, and it has never been this tense in the State House. There’s just sort of a mood or something that’s hard to quantify. There’s more anger, more bitterness,” he told CPJ.

The recent detention of non-citizen students who have shown support for pro-Palestinian causes has created a general atmosphere of uncertainty about freedom of expression in the United States, and whether traditional protections now apply exclusively to those who do not counter the administration or the causes it champions.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to imply as much when he said at a press conference, in reference to the case of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk who was detained in connection to a op-ed she co authored in her school newspaper, “if you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus, we don’t want you.”

(DHS has accused Ozturk of engaging in activities in support of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, though neither DHS nor U.S. prosecutors have substantiated that claim.)

This has led to an uptick in queries and requests to CPJ and other organizations for advice on immigration risks for journalists who are not U.S. citizens – not an area journalist safety organizations have traditionally focused on in the United States.

“These comments from Rubio justifying the arrest of a person who wrote an Op-Ed are terrifying for every foreign journalist in the U.S.,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial at the Reuters Institute, in a post on the social media platform Bluesky. “Ozturk was in the country with a student visa. But what about journalists with an I-Visa [the visa given to foreign media representatives]? Will they be expelled if they publish something Trump doesn’t like?” 

University professors who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for their safety have told CPJ that some students have asked to have their bylines removed from articles about campus protests, fearful that their work could draw unwanted attention, whether from authorities or activists.

“[The reporters] do feel that they can be just detained or [that officials may] just take their work visas from them just without a notice or something else, or if they get arrested or detained in one of their [border immigration] processes just from doing their work.”

–Maritza Félix, founder and CEO of Conecta Arizona news website

Journalists covering immigration who regularly cross U.S. borders have also expressed concern about being detained and pulled aside for secondary questioning about their work, especially if their reporting counters the administration’s narrative. In response to these concerns, CPJ released its first safety guide for journalists crossing the U.S. border. And these concerns are not unfounded. CPJ reported how, during the first Trump administration, secondary screenings of journalists opened the door for agents to potentially obtain sensitive source material without a warrant. For those without U.S. citizenship, the fear is even more acute.

“We have people in different immigration stages or journeys in our team,” said Maritza Félix, the founder and CEO of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language nonprofit news website. Some of the reporters, Félix said, are hesitant to go near the border, even though they have legal status in the U.S.

“[The reporters] do feel that they can be just detained or [that officials may] just take their work visas from them just without a notice or something else, or if they get arrested or detained in one of their [border immigration] processes just from doing their work,” Félix said.

The changing safety calculus for journalists has also made some reporters hesitant to call attention to themselves. Previously, an accolade or a scoop was seen as a career boost, whereas today it may come with the possibility of being targeted and used as an example in order to deter aggressive reporting. Even previously anodyne topics have become politically charged, and information about journalists’ personal lives or their families can be excavated online and used to create smear campaigns against them, or worse.  

“ I was thinking about the abuse that the administration officials have heaped on Jeffrey Goldberg, just in terms of the personal insults,” said Jordan Green, a reporter for Raw Story focusing on far-right extremism, referring to attempts from the Trump administration to discredit The Atlantic editor-in-chief’s reporting on government officials using Signal, a commercial encrypted messaging app, instead of more secure channels to discuss details of an upcoming attack by the U.S. against Houthis in Yemen. Goldberg was added to the group chat accidentally and subsequently reported about what he witnessed. “It just seems kind of emblematic of how journalists will be treated when they do work that is kind of effective and breaks through,” Green told CPJ.

Conclusion

The United States is now at a critical juncture concerning both the future of freedom of the press and democratic institutions more broadly. To meet these urgent demands, CPJ and partner organizations are working with newsrooms across the country to form a united front against the rising tide of threats facing independent, fact-based reporting.

“Journalists are always the first to be attacked when democracy declines and the actions of the current U.S. administration should be ringing alarm bells for every single journalist, every single newsroom, and every single person in the United States,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “This is not a time to be complacent, or to shrug off these behaviors. If we let the abnormal become normal, many more freedoms will be at risk – no matter what your politics”.

CPJ and partners have filed amicus briefs, sent letters and briefings to Congress, and are working behind the scenes to assist with specific safety needs of journalists. And the needs have never been greater in modern times. 

When CPJ created a dedicated U.S. program in 2016, it was to address a shifting safety paradigm for journalists in the United States, and that safety training was no longer something strictly for journalists working in war zones. Over the past decade, we have recorded a crescendo of threats to reporters at federal and local levels.

CPJ has published reports on the past three administrations’ relationships with the press, admonishing each for actions that threatened media freedoms nationwide, and could set harmful precedents globally.

This administration, however, is different. In the first 100 days, we have seen it take actions the consequences of which will take decades to repair. One of Trump’s first executive orders was allegedly intended to restore freedom of speech. However, the actions that he and his administration have undertaken have served primarily to protect speech that supports their narratives, purposefully mischaracterizing fact-based reporting as biased. It is essential that CPJ, civil society organizations, and newsrooms alike work together to document and counter the harmful actions outlined in this report.

For the past four decades, CPJ has worked to protect reporters and news organizations as they worked to document issues ranging from the state of a community’s information infrastructure to multinational corruption schemes. The organization’s research has shown the devastating impact targeted, persistent threats can have on the media, and how they stifle the public’s ability to stay informed about what is happening in their country and community.

Credits

For this report, CPJ interviewed dozens of journalists; reviewed its records of safety training for thousands of journalists in the U.S. since 2022; and consulted other free speech organizations. CPJ also offered the White House, the Federal Communications Commission, news organizations, and various other institutions and individuals named in this report a right of reply, or we included their responses to allegations based on information available in the public domain.

Katherine Jacobsen, CPJ’s U.S. and Canada program coordinator, is the writer of this report. Prior to joining CPJ as news editor in 2017, she wrote for The Associated Press in Moscow and covered Ukraine for outlets including Businessweek, U.S. News and World Report, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera English.

David C. Adams, CPJ’S Caribbean correspondent, provided additional reporting for this report. He has covered Latin America and the Caribbean for the last 36 years and was previously a senior editor at Univision News and Miami bureau chief for Thomson Reuters.

---

Featured image: President Donald Trump speaks to the press while departing the White House en route to Florida, in Washington, D.C., on April 3, 2025. (Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria)