The main thrust of the 2025 report was that “economic pressure,” including “ownership concentration, pressure from advertisers and financial backers, and public aid that is restricted, absent or allocated in an opaque manner,” is compromising the independence of journalists.
“Guaranteeing freedom, independence and plurality in today’s media landscape requires stable and transparent financial conditions. Without economic independence, there can be no free press,” said RSF Editorial Director Anne Bocande.
“When news media are financially strained, they are drawn into a race to attract audiences at the expense of quality reporting, and can fall prey to the oligarchs and public authorities who seek to exploit them,” Bocande said.
“When journalists are impoverished, they no longer have the means to resist the enemies of the press – those who champion disinformation and propaganda,” she added.
“The media’s financial independence is a necessary condition for ensuring free, trustworthy information that serves the public interest,” she concluded.
This contentious notion is a very far cry from the traditional understanding of press freedom, which is usually seen as threatened by authoritarian regimes who throw reporters in jail. If the great new threat to “press freedom” is that media organizations are not receiving enough government welfare, then many will conclude there is no real threat to press freedom at all.
In years gone by, advocates of press freedom have cited the rise of state media as one of the great threats to real journalism – and one of the worst sources of disinformation. RSF now seems to be arguing that only lavish compulsory funding of media organizations can protect press freedom because requiring them to earn their keep by competing in a free marketplace of money and ideas is inherently corrupting.
There is still plenty of the old-fashioned “throw reporters in jail” assault on press freedom around the world, to be sure, but the RSF report asserted that the “economic indicator” is at its “lowest point in history,” and that is what dragged the overall freedom index down to its catastrophically low score.
“News outlets are shutting down due to economic hardship in nearly a third of countries globally. This is the case in the United States (57th, down 2 places) Tunisia (129th, down 11 places) and Argentina (87th, down 21 places),” the report said.
The report hyperbolically declared the United States to be “leader of the economic depression,” as “vast regions are turning into news deserts.” Local journalists complained it was “difficult to earn a living wage as a journalist,” while the press is supposedly operating in an “increasingly hostile environment.”
These assertions will come as surprising to news-saturated Americans, who struggle to keep up with the firehose of news content blasted in their faces around the clock from the alleged “news deserts.”
Unsurprisingly, RSF concluded this information crisis was largely the fault of President Trump. The press freedom organization was driven to distraction by Trump cutting funding for the very same type of state media organizations that used to be seen as a major threat to journalistic independence:
President Donald Trump’s second term has already intensified this trend as false economic pretexts are used to bring the press into line. This led to the abrupt end to funding for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which affected several newsrooms — including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — and, as a result, over 400 million citizens worldwide were suddenly deprived of access to reliable information.
Similarly, the freeze on funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) halted US international aid, throwing hundreds of news outlets into a critical state of economic instability and forcing some to shut down — particularly in Ukraine (62nd).
Nowhere in RSF’s analysis is the press itself held to account for its dire economic circumstances – which are due, in no small part, to the media losing the confidence of its audience with outrageous disinformation and false reporting, such as the endless lies told to conceal former President Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental condition.
It is absolutely laughable to complain about the damaged “economic independence” of major media outlets without acknowledging that years of poor product, insane levels of political spin, and a demonstrated willingness to withhold information that hurts the media’s preferred political narratives have driven audiences away in droves.
No one forced outlets like CBS News to stoop to the despicable levels of disinformation and political partisanship that might be about to get them sued into penury. They did that to themselves, because they wanted their preferred candidate to win a presidential election.
Press freedom outlets that wish to be taken seriously need to acknowledge that political partisanship on that level is a gigantic threat to press freedom and journalistic independence. Insisting that reporters themselves cannot possibly threaten press freedom is childish. Reporters who are willing to chant disinformation like “Maryland Man” in unison on the command of the Democrat Party are far more of a threat to journalism than Donald Trump could ever be.
President Trump has also been far more willing to talk to the media than his predecessor Joe Biden, to the point where his Cabinet meetings are like public town hall sessions. Left-wing media have taken to complaining Trump’s Cabinet is too devoted to public relations.
Trump incessantly makes himself available to reporters and, while he verbally spars with them on occasion, he is not oppressing or silencing them. He talks to reporters even though he knows they are deeply hostile towards him. Biden, on the other hand, hid from the media as much as possible, and reporters were caught cooperating with his handlers to stage press conferences. That was a threat to journalistic independence that groups like RSF should have pondered at greater length.
The RSF report eventually got around to remembering that media “entirely controlled by the state” is a big problem, lamenting the rise of “foreign influence” laws invoked by domineering regimes to suppress information. Most of those laws are themselves peddled as cures for disinformation, hinting that the information war landscape remains complex. Some of the worst censorship in the world is justified with arguments little different from the one RSF’s report advanced against disinformation.
Shockingly far down into its report, RSF remembered that China exists, and its “propaganda model” is spreading through the authoritarian world with alarming speed. Somehow, the depredations of a Communist regime that uses the world’s largest censorship machine against its own subjects, and wages endless information war against everyone it does not control, was presented as less of a threat to press freedom than President Trump defunding a few American state media outlets.
RSF’s opinions on disinformation and media oppression seemed to depend largely on whether the authors of the report liked a particular government or not. Thus, the report summary claimed that “the Israeli army has been annihilating journalism for over 18 months,” without mentioning whether anyone else in Gaza might be interested in spreading false information or suppressing independent journalism. The report summary condemned Israel on four separate occasions, without mentioning Hamas – one of the most persistent and dangerous sources of disinformation in the world – at all.
Breitbart News
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