Objection: They're Coming for the Press

The U.S. just dropped to 64th on the global press freedom index. What that looks like—and why I'm proud to be doing my own form of journalism.

photo by Eliza Orlins

Today is World Press Freedom Day. The UN General Assembly proclaimed May 3 as World Press Freedom Day in 1993, marking the Windhoek Declaration, in which African journalists declared free, independent, pluralistic media a fundamental right. Thirty-three years later, the United States ranks 64th in the world on Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 Press Freedom Index. We’ve dropped seven spots in a single year, sitting behind the UK, Germany, Canada, and dozens of countries you’d never guess were beating us. What’s happening here is a deliberate, coordinated campaign run from the White House.

The Trump administration filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal over its Epstein letter story. They’re suing The New York Times. They extracted a $16 million settlement from CBS over a “60 Minutes” edit that Trump didn’t like, and weeks later, the FCC approved Paramount’s merger with concessions that included installing a “bias monitor” at CBS. ABC settled, too. There’s a pattern at work. The administration files or threatens a lawsuit, then leverages federal regulatory pressure against the parent company until a settlement comes, and the next story chills before it ever gets filed.

In January, the FBI raided the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post reporter, and confiscated her devices. She’d been reporting on a federal employee. The chilling effect on every source she’s ever worked with, and every source any reporter might cultivate from now on, is the point.

The White House Correspondents' Association no longer controls the White House press pool—the Trump administration does, picking which journalists get into the room. At the Pentagon, longtime offices for The New York Times, NPR, and Politico were handed to outlets selected for friendliness; most major newsrooms surrendered their Pentagon credentials rather than agree to Pete Hegseth's restrictive new coverage rules, and they're still breaking Pentagon stories from the outside. Reporters in the field have it worse. Federal agents have physically assaulted journalists covering immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and Don Lemon and Georgia Fort have both been arrested while doing their jobs.

Congress eliminated $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funds for NPR and PBS, and the administration has gutted Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia—the outlets that beam American journalism into countries where independent media barely exists. The V-Dem Institute's 2026 Democracy Report puts U.S. freedom of expression at World War II levels, and 2025 matched the deadliest year on record for journalists worldwide, with 126 killed.

This is what authoritarianism looks like in real time. The methods vary—lawsuits, funding cuts, regulatory leverage, friendly buyers picking up media properties—but the goal is the same. Make journalism legally and financially risky enough that newsrooms back down before a story even gets filed. That’s the playbook Orbán ran in Hungary and Putin perfected in Russia.

Here's where I come in. I spent fifteen years as a public defender in Manhattan, which meant reading indictments and statutes, writing motions, and explaining the law to clients and jurors who'd never been to law school. Last year, I started doing that translation work full-time and posting it everywhere I could reach people—YouTube, Substack, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Bluesky, X, Facebook, LinkedIn. The skills transferred over. I still read the court filings and the bills and the executive orders and the briefs filed at the Supreme Court, and I still tell you what they actually say.

That's journalism. And it's journalism done from outside the institutional press, where the reach can match or beat the original outlets. Independent creators have been driving more eyes to important stories than the major newsrooms that broke them. The administration has nothing to leverage against me because I have no parent company facing FCC merger approval, nor a board of directors that can be pressured into a settlement. The work runs on the First Amendment, primary sources, and an audience that wants the unvarnished version of what’s actually in the document.

A small example: after I wrote about CNN’s investigative “Rape Academy” piece, I connected with the reporters who published it. They thanked me for bringing renewed attention to their reporting, and I thanked them for doing the work that made my piece possible.

I’m one of thousands of independent creators, reporters, and small newsrooms doing this work. Hell Gate, THE CITY, City & State, New York Focus. The Baltimore Banner, Charlottesville Tomorrow, Outlier Media. Substack writers whose names you’d recognize and plenty you don’t know yet. Local reporters earning almost nothing to file public records requests and show up at school board meetings.

Legacy newsrooms need to recognize how much of this work is now happening outside their walls. Independent creators and small newsrooms are not side characters in the media ecosystem anymore; we are part of how reporting travels, how audiences find it, and how people understand why it matters. The future of journalism depends on institutions and independents working in symbiosis: national newsrooms doing investigations that require legal teams and institutional resources, local outlets covering what national outlets miss, and independent creators doing their own reporting and analysis while also translating, amplifying, contextualizing, and driving people back to the original work.

On World Press Freedom Day, the UN’s 2026 theme is “Shaping a Future at Peace.” The view from the United States in 2026 makes that theme hard to read with a straight face. The American press is being asphyxiated by lawsuits and gutted by funding cuts at the same time that reporters are being physically assaulted at protests and shut out of the briefings where major decisions get announced. None of this is normal.

I’m proud of the work I get to do, and prouder still of the people doing it alongside me, often with fewer resources and bigger stakes. If you’re reading this, you’re part of the answer. The way to back independent journalism is to actually pay for it—a Substack subscription, subscribing to your local paper, supporting reporters when they break something important, and showing up when reporters are being targeted by people with power. The powerful want this work stopped. Don’t let them have it cheap.

On a day like today, the most concrete thing you can do for press freedom is back the journalism you read. If my work has been useful to you, a paid subscription to Objection: Everything is how it keeps going. Everything I write here is funded by readers, not advertisers, and not by any institution the administration could lean on for leverage. If you’ve been getting value here for free, World Press Freedom Day is a good day to start paying for it.

The First Amendment is not self-enforcing. It survives because we keep using it.

Thank you for being here. I mean it from the bottom of my heart.

♡ ,

Eliza