AMY GOODMAN: Reporters Without Borders is warning press freedom has fallen to its lowest level since the group began publishing its annual World Press Freedom Index 25 years ago. According to the group, more than half the world’s countries fall into the difficult or very serious categories for press freedom, as journalism is increasingly criminalized across the world.

Over the past 25 years, the index charted how press freedoms have deteriorated here in the United States. In 2002, the U.S. was ranked 17th in the world. In the latest index, the U.S. is down to 64th, falling seven places since last year. Reporters Without Borders, RSF, says, quote, “US President Donald Trump has turned his repeated attacks on the press and journalists into a systematic policy,” unquote.

Reporters Without Borders says the state of press freedom is most catastrophic in the Middle East and North Africa. The group notes more than 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army since October 2023.

We’re joined now by Clayton Weimers, the North America director for RSF, for Reporters Without Borders.

Thanks so much for being with us. You’re in Washington, D.C. In fact, you were one of the journalists at the Washington — the White House Press Corps dinner the other night. And we’re going to talk about that in a minute, but first this report, Clayton. Talk about your findings.

CLAYTON WEIMERS: Yeah, and thank you for having me, Amy.

The findings are really stark. We have never measured a lower average number in these scores that we give every country for press freedom on our index in the 25 years that we’ve been doing this. We’re seeing deterioration pretty much across the board, both in authoritarian countries and in democracies.

And one of the really startling findings is that the legal indicator, one of the subscores that we look at, has deteriorated the most. And what we’re seeing is the erosion of the legal protections intended to safeguard journalism and everyone’s access to information. But we’re also seeing the weaponization of other types of laws, especially national security laws, against journalism. These are the laws that are supposed to keep us safe, but often, in practice, are being used to stifle journalism and free speech.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the United States, 64th in the world for press freedom, when freedom of the press is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

CLAYTON WEIMERS: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what the parameters are and how it’s gone from 17th to 64th.

CLAYTON WEIMERS: It’s been a long backslide for the United States on the index. And look, it’s tempting to lay all of this at the feet of President Donald Trump, and to be clear, he is the single biggest threat to American press freedom today, but the mere fact that we fell from 57th last year tells us that this isn’t just a Trump problem. We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country. And I think that shocks a lot of Americans when they hear it, because, as you said, press freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment. Journalism is the only profession actually called out by the Bill of Rights. But when you dig into it, it becomes a little bit less surprising.

You think about the economics of the news industry right now, thousands of jobs lost over recent years, an average of two local newspapers closing every week in this country, and tens of millions of Americans living in news deserts. Meanwhile, there’s a great deal of consolidation of the media, with fewer and fewer people owning the airwaves and owning the conduits of digital information. We have a crisis of trust in the news media. The esteem that the public holds journalism in has never been lower. We have politicians regularly emboldened to attack individual journalists and media outlets.

And, you know, we have a safety problem in this country. There is a startlingly high incidence of violence against journalists. And what we’ve especially seen in 2025 is violence committed by law enforcement agents, particularly masked, anonymous law enforcement agents who are policing protests, particularly the No Kings protests or anti-ICE protests, and journalists getting caught up in that, dozens and dozens of very violent incidents against journalists, sending them to the hospital, causing journalists to be blinded — one lost a finger — concussions, visits to the ER. These are very serious conditions.

In fact, it’s caused us to introduce a new program that provides independent and freelance journalists with protective gear. That’s the kind of program we’ve been running for years in places like Ukraine and Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo. And it really is a sad state of affairs that we now feel compelled to do the same thing in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Lebanon, about Israeli attacks on journalists there. Last month, Israeli forces killed the prominent Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil, a correspondent for the daily newspaper Al-Akhbar. In 2024, Amal told local media she had received an Israeli death threat warning her to leave southern Lebanon or risk decapitation. This is what she said.

AMAL KHALIL: [translated] I received direct targeting on my phone from the Israeli Mossad. They threatened to kill me. They literally said, “We will separate your head from your shoulders if you don’t leave from the south.” They advised me to leave the south.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what happened to Amal and the photojournalist she was with as she was covering an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon and then fled into a house for protection, and then Israel bombed the house.

CLAYTON WEIMERS: Well, that’s right, and it didn’t stop there. We know that Amal initially survived the strike. We were aware of her position, as was several of our colleagues in the international community. And we were urging the Israelis to allow the Red Cross to get through in order to access her and hopefully save her. But for hours, the IDF refused to relent its bombing campaign, even though they knew very well what was happening. They allowed — not only did they target Amal with an airstrike, they then allowed her to die by denying ambulances access to the site.

It’s the latest in a series of quite literally hundreds of targeted killings of journalists while they’re doing their jobs as journalists, not just in Gaza, but also across the border in Lebanon. The targeted killing of journalists in Lebanon has been going on since the very beginning of the war. I’m thinking back to Issam Abdallah, a Reuters journalist who was killed just across the border in Lebanon in the first weeks of the war in a targeted double-tap airstrike.

And so, this is really just a policy at this point to target journalists, and also, to add insult to injury, by slandering them and calling them Hamas terrorists. These are journalists who are known to us. And we do — we do the work to ensure that every journalist that we are counting in our data is, in fact, who they say they are, is a reporter. And for the IDF to slander their memory like this really is just beyond insulting.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to what has recently happened here. In January, FBI agents raided the home of The Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. Authorities seized her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. She spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce. Matt Murray, the executive editor of the Post, said in a staff message, quote, “This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work.” According to the Post, investigators reportedly told Natanson she wasn’t the target of the probe. A warrant obtained by The Washington Post cited an investigation into a government contractor with a top-secret security clearance who has been accused of taking home classified intelligence reports. Just this week, Hannah won a Pulitzer Prize, along with her colleagues, for their reporting on DOGE. The significance of this, Clayton? And what happened to her?

CLAYTON WEIMERS: I don’t think we can overstate how dangerous that raid is. It is unprecedented for the FBI to raid the home of a journalist and seize both their professional and personal devices. They took her laptops. They took her phones. They took her Garmin watch, which suggests that they are tracking her movements. And there are legal protections against this. There’s the Constitution, obviously, but there’s also the Privacy Protection Act, which flatly rejects — which flatly makes searches like this illegal. And in fact, when the government went to court over this against The Washington Post, the judge admonished the government lawyers for failing to disclose the specific legal protections that they should have when they sought the warrant. And so, you know, we’ve now had two judicial decisions that have ruled that this search was improper.

And what I think is really scary about this is, if you dig deeper into the government’s justification, they cite possible violations of the Espionage Act that they thought Hannah may have committed, which is a preposterous conclusion for them to draw, but, unfortunately, not totally unexpected. You know, the Espionage Act is an overly broad piece of legislation from World War I that makes no distinction between an act of journalism and an act of espionage. And at RSF, we’ve long warned that there is this sort of back door that the federal government could use in order to target journalists, and we’ve been urging reform of the Espionage Act going back a long time.

And, you know, viewers of this program may remember, the Espionage Act is also what was used to prosecute Julian Assange. And our argument at that time was, you know, whether or not you think Julian Assange is a journalist is kind of beside the point. What Julian Assange did was publish secret government documents, and fundamentally, that is no different from what other journalists are doing, like Hannah when she obtains leaked information from whistleblowers in the government.

And I also want to point out that Hannah is a really talented reporter who has communications with hundreds, if not over a thousand, sources in the government who are trying to blow the whistle on wrongdoing and corruption. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that she’s the one who was targeted, because that has a profound chilling effect on anyone else being willing to come forward and blow the whistle when they see something wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Clayton Weimers, I wanted to also ask you about your experience at White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. You were at the dinner when a gunman rushed a security checkpoint. The suspect now faces a number of charges, including attempted assassination of President Trump. Can you describe what happened? You were at dinner at a table with Georgia Fort, is that right? A journalist who was arrested recently in Minneapolis.

CLAYTON WEIMERS: That’s right. And Georgia’s case also really exemplifies the weaponization of the Department of Justice against journalism. She was arrested and charged for her reporting in Minnesota along with Don Lemon, and it’s really outrageous that those charges are moving forward. And I know it was an act of courage for her to go to that dinner and be in the same room as the president and the officials who are actively pursuing her and trying to put her in jail. And, you know, we were sitting together and —

AMY GOODMAN: Raised her — before you talk about the experience at the dinner, just because you’ve told her story, who was arrested along with former CNN anchor Don Lemon, let’s go to Georgia Fort when she came on Democracy Now! and talked about her arrest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, where protesters confronted a top ICE official who served as pastor there.

GEORGIA FORT: My home was surrounded by about two dozen federal agents, including agents from DEA and HSI. I asked to see the warrant. My mother was here. My mother asked to see the warrant. They did show us an arrest warrant, which was then sent to my attorney, who verified its legitimacy. Since it was an arrest warrant, we decided that it would be safest for me to exit through the garage, so that we could lock the door to our home behind me.

And so, I surrendered. I walked out of my garage with my hands up. And I asked the agents who were there to arrest me if they knew that I was a member of the press. They said they did know that I was a member of the press. I informed them that this was a violation of my constitutional right, of the First Amendment. And they told me, you know, “We’re just here to do our job.” And I said, “I was just doing my job, and now I’m being arrested for it.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Georgia Fort describing her arrest in February on Democracy Now! She was with you at the White House correspondents’ dinner. So, you both went under the table?

CLAYTON WEIMERS: Yeah. Well, you know, one minute I was actually telling Georgia and one other person sitting with us about this new protective gear program that RSF introduced in the United States, and the next minute we’re all taking cover under the table because there was a loud bang, and Secret Service agents rushed in, guns drawn. And frankly, we didn’t know what was going on. But, you know, it was just coincidental that we had just been talking about the risks of violence that journalists are increasingly facing, and a moment later, we were faced with a really stark reminder of what those risks can entail.

And frankly, this is something that’s going to continue. But journalism is a really unique profession, because you have an obligation to go towards the story, to go towards the chaos. And I saw so many journalists around the room, you know, eagerly trying to document what was going on, because that’s their job. And, you know, that’s a reminder of why this job can be risky, but also why it’s so essential. We just can’t understand what’s going on in our world without journalism.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the president is using the attack on the White House correspondents’ dinner to justify the, what looks like now, billion-dollar ballroom that he wants to build at the White House. He said no taxpayer money would be used for it. And now, apparently, it’s looking like they’re putting it into the ICE budget. And I’m wondering, you know, in that justification even that night, saying it’s because of events like these that we would need to have the full military protection of such a ballroom, your thoughts, Clayton Weimers. I think of Eugene Daniels, the former head of the White House Correspondents’ Association, saying, “We would not want to have it at the White House.”

CLAYTON WEIMERS: Look, billion-dollar ballrooms are a little bit outside my area of expertise, but I agree with Eugene. It would be inappropriate for the White House correspondents’ dinner to take place at the White House. It’s not the president’s dinner; it is the correspondents’ dinner. The president is an invited guest. And the idea that it would move into the White House, I think, really violates the spirit of an event that is intended to celebrate the First Amendment and the excellent journalism being done by the White House Press Corps. And so, yeah, I agree with Eugene there.

AMY GOODMAN: Clayton Weimers, I want to thank you for being with us, director of Reporters Without Borders in North America. We’ll link to the new RSF World Press Freedom Index at democracynow.org.

When we come back, Beirut-based independent journalist Lylla Younes. She will join us here in New York.

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AMY GOODMAN: “La Línea,” performed by Julieta Venegas in our Democracy Now! studio. To see our interview with Julieta in English and Spanish, go to democracynow.org.