If you’re about to get eaten by a shark, you’re not going to be thinking about the need to preserve threatened ocean species, right? It’s the sort of dilemma that often confronts us: whether to focus on an immediate threat or a long-term dilemma. And that’s where we who are concerned about the free press find ourselves these days. I spent three decades running newsrooms, and more than a decade before that as a newspaper reporter, so you know that freedom of the press must matter to me. And it’s clear, I’d say, that the essential right to free speech – which underlies all other freedoms – has never been more at risk, from both immediate challenges and long-term threats.
We’re observing World Press Freedom Day – actually, it’s several days of activities, which began Saturday. Each year, World Press Freedom Day spotlights the fundamental human right to freedom of opinion and expression. Right now, that’s at risk, in the U.S. and globally.
But as in many situations, there’s both acute risk and extended peril. World Press Freedom Day this year is focused on the latter – specifically, on artificial intelligence. Around the world, there are ongoing conversations about the opportunities that AI presents for press freedom: It can make information easier to access; it can enable more people to communicate across the world; it can speed how information flows globally.
But AI can also make big tech platforms even more powerful as gatekeepers of information by enabling them to filter and control what people see – which can reinforce biases and political divisions. It can be used to support censorship, to spread false information, to increase online hate speech.
And AI presents a financial threat, too, that could restrict the power of the free press. That is, generative AI tools reuse journalistic content without fair payment – which takes income away from the organizations that create original reporting – like newspapers and not-for-profit journalism organizations – and channels that money instead to tech platforms and AI companies. So the rich get richer, and those who are dedicated to giving citizens the information they need continue to crumble.
So you can see why World Press Freedom Day this year focuses on artificial intelligence. We need a thoughtful global approach to AI. But acting thoughtfully and planning globally are not at all characteristic of the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation these days.
And that’s the shark that’s circling: It’s Donald Trump, with his intentional and brutal attack on the core right of Americans to free expression and to a free press. (2:30)
From gutting Voice of America and other beacons of journalism globally to barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t use the words he tells it to use; from pushing the FCC to investigate media companies based upon what they broadcast to threatening to subpoena and prosecute reporters who use leaked information; from moving to defund public media to filing frivolous lawsuits aimed at intimidating honest media coverage; from rewarding platforms that are essentially right-wing propaganda outlets to targeting law firms that represent media clients, Trump is showing how little he cares about free speech as a Constitutional right and a human imperative. And he is pushing America toward a darker future where what we know can be limited by what an authoritarian leader wants us to know.
So, yes, it's hard to focus on the broader concern about AI when the immediate threat is POTUS.
Reporters Without Borders publishes a World Press Freedom Index every year, and these days the U.S. isn’t in the top categories of nations with “good” or even “satisfactory” press freedom, countries like Canada and Australia, the U.K. and most of western Europe. No, press freedom in America is now rated as “problematic” -- like most of South America and the Mideast – and falling.
There has been some pushback to Trump, and free speech advocates have scored some wins against the repressive regime in Washington. Courts have sided with AP and ordered their reporters’ and photographers’ White House access restored, and a judge forced Trump to reinstate more than a thousand people who work for Voice of America and other broadcasters. Among major media covering the White House, plenty of journalists are standing firm and reporting accurately about Trump even as the owners of their platforms try to make nice with the president to preserve the profits that his egomaniacal bullying put at risk.
But what we all need to understand is that the First Amendment is not self-reinforcing: Free speech has no army. Except for us.
We mostly don’t get energized about free speech until it’s what we want to say that gets targeted – until it is us who are being silenced or chilled. Trump’s overt hostility to facts and his disenfranchisement of honest media outlets encourage misinformation and disinformation – which presents a threat to democratic stability.
That’s why we need to stand up for independent media; it’s why we need to hold the Trump enablers’ feet to the fire; it’s why the immediate threat on this World Press Freedom Day demands our attention even more than the quite valid emerging concerns about AI.
That circling shark is hungry, the sea is choppy, and our freedom is at risk.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.