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NEW YORK, May 02 (IPS) - World Press Freedom Day 2025 Pressures on the press are piling up. Like an avalanche gaining speed yet unnoticed by most people in the valley below, freedom of the press is being relentlessly trampled over - despite the valiant efforts of a few.
Farhana Haque RahmanFor as long as we can remember, authoritarian regimes have harassed, jailed, ‘disappeared’ and killed troubling journalists. The numbers keep rising. Now under the fog of war, media workers are losing their lives to the bombs and bullets dispatched by even elected leaders, while around the world journalists are intimidated through lawsuits, or silenced by government budget cuts.On top of all this, marking World Press Freedom Day on May 3, UNESCO is aiming this year to focus thoughts on what it diplomatically calls the substantial ‘new risks’ as well as the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI), already widely deployed in newsrooms, and by fraudsters.
For incisive information on journalists targeted worldwide, organizations like Reporters Without Borders (RSF) not only collate the data and keep detailed records but also campaign on our behalf, as in lobbying the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against journalists in Palestine.
In its 2024 roundup, RSF notes: “In Gaza, the scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible… In 2024, Gaza became the most dangerous region in the world for journalists, a place where journalism itself is threatened with extinction.”
RSF counts over 155 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza and Lebanon and two killed in Israel since the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023. This number includes at least 35 who were “very likely” targeted or killed while working, many clearly identifiable as journalists but shot or killed in Israeli strikes. “This was compounded by a deliberate media blackout and a block on foreign journalists entering the Strip.”
Sudan is described as a “death trap” for journalists caught between military and paramilitary factions. And outside war zones, seven journalists were killed in Pakistan in 2024, five assassinated in Mexico, and five killed in a violent crackdown on the July/August 2024 protests in Bangladesh.
Of the 550 reporters behind bars around the world by the end of the year, 124 were in China (including 11 in Hong Kong), 61 in Myanmar, 41 in Israel and 40 in Belarus.
Of the 38 media professionals jailed in Russia, 18 are Ukrainian. RSF dedicated its report to Ukrainian freelance journalist Victoria Roshchyna, whose family were informed that she died in captivity in Russia on 19 September. No explanation was given.
Just last month (April), a Russian court sentenced four journalists to 5-1/2 years each in prison, accusing them of extremism for working for an anti-corruption group founded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny who died in captivity in February 2024.
What’s more, all these regimes are giving a thumbs-up to the March 15 gutting of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, as well as the dismantling of USAid which, for example, helped support independent journalists in Myanmar.
China applauded, calling VOA “a dirty rag” and “lie factory”. Cambodian strongman Hun Sen cheered the cuts of “fake news” RFA.
RFS says press freedom deteriorated in the Asia-Pacific region, where 26 of the 32 countries and territories saw their scores fall in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
“The region’s dictatorial governments have been tightening their hold over news and information with increasing vigour,” RFS said, while commending regional democracies, such as Timor-Leste, Samoa and Taiwan, for retaining “their roles as press freedom models”.
But what is perhaps most alarming about the insidious deterioration of press freedom around the world is that autocratic regimes are very successfully mastering the dark arts of propaganda, while mainstream traditional media in more open societies are losing people’s trust.
The 2025 Trust Barometer compiled by Edelman, a big American PR firm, found of the 28 major countries it surveyed that China ranked highest in the “trust of media” category with a 75 percent rating, while the UK came next to last with 36 percent. This contrasts with RSF’s press freedom index which ranks China 172 out of 180 countries and territories, and the UK 23rd.
Reflecting on 25 years of surveys and referring broadly to the West, CEO Richard Edelman said media became the “least trusted” institution in 2020 as “information became a bitter and contested battleground used to manipulate, drive societal wedges, and fuel political polarization”.
Which brings us to Unesco’s words of warning over the AI revolution on World Press Freedom Day.
Yes it enhances access to and processing of information, enables journalists to handle vast amounts of data efficiently and create content, improves fact checking etc.
But, the UN agency adds: “AI also… can be used to reproduce misinformation, spread disinformation, amplify online hate speech, and enable new forms of censorship. Some actors use AI for mass surveillance of journalists and citizens, creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression.”
AI-generated fake videos posted on social media, such as images of firefighters rescuing animals in the recent Los Angeles wildfires, have already gained tens of millions of clicks.
Recent BBC research into four publically available AI assistants found 51percent of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. This included 19 percent of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, while 13 percent of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.
We have been warned. And that is before the boffins perhaps succeed in birthing Artificial General Intelligence with the goal of creating machines as intelligent and versatile as humans. The very concept then of Press Freedom may no longer exist.
Farhana Haque Rahman is Senior Vice President of IPS Inter Press Service and Executive Director IPS Noram; she served as the elected Director General of IPS from 2015-2019. A journalist and communications expert, she is a former senior official of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
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© Inter Press Service (2025) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service
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