Smearing, harassing, criminalising and killing is no longer the exception for journalists
JAMES CAMERON MEMORIAL LECTURE 2026 – MARCH 4, 2026 – LONDON
It is January 2000; an aspiring student journalist is on a two-week work placement in Plymouth.
She writes stories on local music concerts, mix-ups over the introduction of the metric system for selling fruit and vegetables, clashes between local school sports teams, the building of a new community centre. She interviews strangers in the street about their favourite books as part of a nationwide survey and for their views on dentists. She covers sports, politics, arts, charity, business. And she knows, as she has known since she was six years old, that all she wants to be is a journalist.
It is January 2026. A photographer heads to cover protests in Minneapolis in the United States. As he tries to live stream and take photos of the crowd that has gathered to protest immigration enforcement in which a protestor was shot dead, he is tackled to the ground by immigration officers and pepper sprayed. He is handcuffed and arrested. And in that moment, the moment when he is hurled to the ground by officials in combat gear, clutching a face mask he’d bought in a local hardware store to protect himself from tear gas, the photographer thinks only of one thing. He must protect the images he has captured of these events – and he throws his camera out from under him in the hope someone will save it.
The journalist in Plymouth, on a two-week placement with the Evening Herald, was me. Then a postgraduate diploma student here at this very university. The photographer is John Abernathy, one of hundreds of journalists in the United States now grappling with a surge in violence against the profession.
We dreamed a lot of dreams when we were at City. I dreamed of being the Director General of the BBC. A friend of being the Editor of The Sun. Some wanted to be political reporters, others sports, some wanted to write about arts and culture, others economics and finance. We knew that over the years many would leave the profession. Some went on to great success in the very careers they envisaged, others took unexpected turns into academia, the civil service, and entertainment.
But what none of us could have predicted was how radically the environment would change for the profession itself. That the kinds of preparations journalists used to undertake to cover war zones would be needed to cover protests in North America. That journalists covering Westminster or the White House would regularly receive death threats. That a journalist in a European Union country might be killed for their investigative reporting.
But that is what has happened. Now, this moment, is the most dangerous time in recent history to be a journalist. Last year, a record 129 journalists and media workers were killed worldwide, the highest number ever in the more than 30 years that the Committee to Protect Journalists has been documenting such data. For the past three years, more than 300 journalists were in jail at the end of the year – including in countries that are supposed democracies. Journalists are subjected to daily online harassment, including threats of death and rape. They are smeared by those in power and mistrusted by those without it.
And yet – although this is the worst time in the world to be a journalist – it is also the most important time.
Today, I want to examine why journalism has become so devalued, why journalists have become so demeaned, and why those whose job it is to deliver facts, to speak truth to power, to expose corruption and injustice, are now in greater peril than at any time in recent history. I also want to share what we can do about it.
And why – if we want to live in anything approaching fair and just societies, ones that uphold rights and freedoms for all – it is essential that we step up to defend a free press — in deeds not just in words.
First, let me tell you a little bit about the Committee to Protect Journalists, the organisation I now lead. Based in New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists was founded in 1981 to defend press freedom and journalist safety worldwide. One of our first advocacy campaigns was in support of three British journalists arrested in Argentina while covering the Falklands War. A letter from then CPJ Honorary Chairman Walter Cronkite helped spring them from prison.
Sadly, the days when a letter and a stern word could provoke such a result are long gone, so CPJ now works in three ways:
• We research and document threats to press freedom globally,
• We provide direct assistance to journalists at risk,
• And we advocate on behalf of those targeted for their work.
Last year, we provided more than $1.3 million in direct financial assistance to journalists needing emergency support, covering everything from the cost of legal fees for reporters wrongfully imprisoned for their work, to medical bills and trauma support for journalists attacked and harassed in retaliation for their reporting, to exile assistance. We reached an unprecedented total of 3,877 journalists last year – more than 5 times the number of the previous year.
It’s no surprise those numbers have grown – because attacks on the press have grown exponentially in the past decade. In 1992, when CPJ first started systematically documenting attacks on the press, 56 journalists and media workers were killed. Last year’s number is more than double that. In 1992, there were 113 journalists in jail. Last year’s number is more than triple that.
In 1992, Mark Zuckerberg was 8 years old, the launch of Google was still six years away, and Facebook and Twitter would not emerge for more than another decade.
Now, the internet and social media dominate communications, and online harassment – especially of women and those from marginalised communities – is rife. Let me give you one recent example. In 2023, Sabrina Schnur, a young female reporter at the Las Vegas-Review Journal in the United States wrote about the hit-and-run killing of a retired police chief. Schnur was the first journalist at the scene after the killing and also the first local reporter to talk to the police chief’s family. But after screenshots of a month-old obituary sparked accusations the Review-Journal was downplaying the death, Schnur was subjected to a slew of hate-filled abuse. Her email inbox and social media mentions were flooded with personal attacks. She was accused of being anti-white. Her photo was shared, and her office phone number circulated. The attackers hurled antisemitic abuse at Schnur, told her they hoped she would get cancer, that she would die. They found her private social media accounts and unearthed posts she’d made as a teenager, going as far back as 2015.
Schnur and her colleagues had more reasons than most to be concerned about online threats. A year earlier one of the Review-Journal’s leading reporters – Jeff German – was stabbed to death by a local official who was the subject of German’s reporting. The suspect first targeted German with attacks on social media.
How did we get here? Not by accident.
The decline in press freedom and journalism safety is directly tied to a decline in democratic norms and a rise in authoritarianism that we are experiencing worldwide. And no wonder. Autocrats and demagogues have long known that to control a population, you need to control the flow of information to that population. Targeting the press is the first step to stifling dissent.
If we want to tackle this, we need to understand the playbook for attacking the media, which in essence goes something like this: Smear, Harass, Criminalise, Kill.
Let’s start with smearing. This is one you may be familiar with. Name calling may feel like the petulant act of the playground bully but it’s remarkably effective. Hungary’s leader Viktor Orbán does it, smearing the press as “fake news,” former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte did it, calling them “presstitutes”, US President Donald Trump does it, calling journalists “enemies of the people” and most recently calling one journalist “piggy” and telling another who asked him about his ties to Epstein to “smile”.
More insidiously, we are increasingly seeing a tendency to smear journalism itself as a nefarious act – think of the way in which the US Secretary of Defence conjured images of journalists roaming the Pentagon as a security risk. What Pete Hegseth of course conveniently forgot was that journalists have operated successfully from the Pentagon for decades, while it was Hegseth himself who shared secure information about military plans on a Signal chat group in which a journalist had been mistakenly added. Rather than be seen as critical work in the public interest to expose abuses of power, journalism itself is being rebranded as a subversive act.
Smears escalate. By setting the tone at the top, those in power create a permission structure for harassment. Sometimes that might be formally orchestrated by those in power, more often it develops organically, among their supporters and sympathisers. Diaspora news outlet, The Haitian Times, for example, received a slew of racist abuse after it reported on the false claims made during the US presidential campaign about Haitians eating pets. In a demonstration of the online to offline risks, one reporter even had police show up at her house after a false report was made about a crime being committed there – a practice known as swatting.
Harassment does not just take the form of online or even physical abuse. It can be legal and regulatory as well. This includes the use of so-called SLAPPs – vexatious lawsuits that are designed to drain journalists and media organisations of money and morale. At the time of her murder in 2017, investigative Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 47 such suits. In July last year, CBS owner Paramount settled a case that legal experts widely agreed was spurious for $16 million – a case brought by none other than the US President himself. Weeks later the US broadcast regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, approved a multi billion dollar merger involving Paramount.
Harassment can also take financial form. Cutting funding or using public money to favour political friends and punish political enemies has long been a tactic of autocrats but we increasingly see this in democracies. Since Trump took office, his administration has all but eliminated funding for publicly funded media, mostly impacting local, regional broadcasters serving rural communities, as well as effectively shuttering Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia – all services that provided information to and about countries where media freedom is severely curtailed.
So, smearing, then harassment. These are steps one and two.
But it does not stop there. Because mud sticks. Demeaning journalists, branding them as cheats and liars paves the way for the third factor that is common to this playbook: actually criminalising journalism and journalists. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa has spoken extensively about the way branding of journalists as criminals by those in power helps soften the public up for subsequent actual criminalisation and arrest – and of course even killing. Years before the state launched lawsuits against her, the Philippines was readying the public to believe she was an actual criminal by painting her as one.
Dubbing journalists as criminals is a deliberate strategy intended to sow doubt in the mind of the public about their trustworthiness – and therefore about the trustworthiness of their information. It’s a means to control the narrative.
But criminalising journalists is not just about controlling public perception. It’s also used as a means to silence individual journalists – and to send a warning to other reporters and news outlets.
It is a tactic used increasingly, even in supposed democratic regimes. Take the example of Hong Kong where 78-year-old British citizen Jimmy Lai, founder of the independent Apple Daily newspaper, was given a 20 year jail sentence. Lai has been in jail in Hong Kong. Largely in solitary confinement, since 2020 on numerous charges, including sedition and collusion with foreign forces for having the temerity to publish a newspaper that covered pro-democracy protests. In Guatemala, José Rubén Zamora, who for decades has exposed government corruption in his country, was recently released from jail in Guatemala where he faced trumped up charges of money laundering. In both cases, the legal teams for these journalists have themselves faced targeted harassment and threats – and in both cases the newspapers they founded have been forced to shutter as a result of legal action.
And, of course, we have seen this over and over again in Gaza, where Israel repeatedly smears journalists as terrorists and militants, without providing evidence – as a way to justify subsequently killing them.
Killing journalists is the ultimate form of censorship. And no discussion of journalist safety in the current moment can avoid what has been the deadliest assault on journalists since CPJ began. Of the 129 journalists and media workers killed last year, 86 were killed by Israel. The majority of them were Palestinians. Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting records in 1992, making the Israel-Gaza war the deadliest on record for journalists. And let’s be clear. These are not the ordinary casualties of war. In at least 38 cases documented by CPJ last year alone, we believe journalists were deliberately targeted. This includes Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, whose life CPJ publicly warned was in danger after repeated, unsubstantiated smears by Israel against him. Following years of such threats, Al-Sharif was murdered on August 10, alongside three other Al Jazeera staff journalists and two freelancers in a strike on a tent housing reporters. Journalists are civilians. Deliberately targeting them constitutes a war crime.
The magnitude of Israel’s killings is exceptional, but – worldwide – the killing of journalists, the smearing of journalists, the harassment, the legal threats, the financial punishments – these are no longer an exception.
Ok. So at this point, you may be shrugging your shoulders and saying, “Who cares?” Maybe you think the media brought it on themselves. Maybe you hate the “lamestream” media and think we all deserve to be smeared, harassed and attacked.
I want to tell you why it matters.
It matters because information is a prerequisite for free and open societies. Attacks on journalists are the first sign of democratic decline. Study after study shows that attacks on journalists matter because they are a clear indicator that attacks on other rights, our rights, will follow.
It matters because journalism is essential for our everyday lives. Without it, we don’t have the information about the decisions being made by governments in our name or how our taxes are being spent. We don’t have information that might help keep us safer or healthier or might help stop abusive practices.
It matters because journalism is essential if we want to understand the world. In Gaza, it is Palestinian journalists who have been our eyes and ears for two and a half years so that we can understand what is happening there. With no independent international access allowed since October 7, it is local journalists who are bearing witness to the genocide that they are also living through.
Journalism is essential if we want to understand our own country. In the UK, it is journalists who have repeatedly uncovered government scandals. Journalists like my friend, former City alum, and multi award winning journalist Pippa Crerar, who – among other things – exposed the Partygate scandal. Harriet Harman, who chaired the parliamentary investigation into Partygate praised Pippa’s journalism in the Commons, saying: “This episode has shown that wrongdoing has not gone undiscovered and attempts to cover it up have failed, but it would have been undiscovered had not the press doggedly investigated.”
Journalism is essential because reliable, fact-based information can save lives. When wildfires broke out in California at the start of the year, local residents turned to local media for information about the outbreaks: about where was safe, how the fires were moving, what precautions to take. In many rural parts of the United States, there is no reliable internet. Local radio is the most important source of information, especially in an emergency. In rural Alaska, it is the local independent radio stations who are tasked with providing early warnings of tsunamis and extreme weather – stations whose funding has been gutted by federal cuts.
In the absence of independent, reliable fact-based media, a vacuum is created. One that is easily filled with lies, half-truths and propaganda.
We cannot afford to be complacent. Journalism has value, it has impact – and yet journalists are being killed at a faster rate than in any other time in recent history, journalists are being jailed in higher numbers than at any other moment in recent history. News deserts – places with no access to credible news and information about their local community – are spreading. Funding for independent journalism in and about countries with little or no media freedom has been slashed.
So, if we know journalism has value and if we know that it is under attack like never before, what are we going to do about it?
Well, firstly, we need to accept that current ways of operating are failing and we need to look for new ones.
One example of this is impunity. It is widely recognised that impunity – a failure to punish those responsible for attacks on journalists – creates environments that allows further attacks – more egregious, more violent attacks – to persist and flourish.
More than a decade ago, the United Nations established the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists as an effort to draw attention to this fact. Each year for more than a decade we at the Committee to Protect Journalists would publish a report on the worst offenders – the countries where most journalist murders had gone unpunished. And yet the numbers remained stubbornly and persistently high.
So, instead of thinking about what everyone else needed to do to address this, this year we took a look at ourselves.
And that’s why on International Day to End Impunity this year, CPJ decided to drop our annual Impunity Index. Measuring which governments were – literally – getting away with murder was a useful way to shed light on the issue a decade ago, but it’s no longer enough.
We are overhauling our approach to focus where we know we can have impact and on new initiatives that hold promise.
These initiatives include:
Firstly, pursuit of justice in key cases. Our experience in the past decade has shown that one of the most effective mechanisms for tackling impunity is a relentless pursuit of justice in individual cases. Going forward, CPJ is dedicating increased resources to a select number of such emblematic cases, supporting families and local communities in their often-lengthy fights to continue investigations and prosecutions.
Secondly, we are pushing for the establishment of a standing independent international investigative task force focused on violent crimes against journalists. Relying on perpetrators of crimes against journalists to lead investigations into those crimes and hold those responsible accountable will always make ending impunity an uphill if not impossible battle. We need an independent global body readily available to support investigations – local, regional or international – into attacks.
Thirdly, we need to see increased accountability from companies. Businesses play a key role in enabling attacks on journalists. CPJ is stepping up its focus on investigating and seeking accountability over the use of companies’ technology in cases where journalists are targeted or harmed. The increased use of drones is likely to be a particular focus in 2026.
We asked ourselves, “What can and should we be doing in this moment?” and it is a question we must all ask ourselves.
So here are some things you can do as an individual:
1. Spend money! Invest in local media
The evisceration of local media has been credibly linked to worsening outcomes for communities, including loss of community cohesion, lack of oversight and accountability leading to poor spending decisions, increased corruption, and even rising local taxes.
If you don’t already, do it, go out today and subscribe to your local news outlet. Or someone else’s. When the Kansan local newspaper the Marion Country Record in the US was wrongfully raided by police a few years ago, subscribers flooded to support the outlet – including many who lived hundreds of miles away. One Florida man told the Record’s editor he subscribed because he’d read local newspapers as a boy and missed the sense of community (2,500 kms away).
2. Lobby your local authorities and governments, and your employers!
It is not enough for governments to say they support a free press. They need to demonstrate this in practice, both at home, and in their dealings with governments abroad – and they need to know their constituent’s care.
As voters, we can ask our elected representatives to make these issues a priority.
As employees, we can ask our employers to make this a priority. If you are an academic, does your university have programs for exiled journalists/ journalists at risk? Do your professional journalism courses include safety modules as standard? If you are a journalist, does your employer provide digital health checks or privacy tools? If the answer to these questions is no, ask for them. I can help you…
3. Let’s do our jobs as journalists.
When I started at CPJ three and a half years ago, the motto of the organisation was “using the tools of journalism to protect journalists.” To be honest, as a former reporter, I somewhat scoffed at this description. After all, we are not a news agency. We are not a newspaper of record. We are an advocacy organisation. But over the past three years, as I have watched our profession fail over and over again in its coverage of Gaza, I have come to realise how important it is for all of us to recommit to, and publicly champion, the core principles of good journalism. It is the very essence of good journalism – the ruthless pursuit and public dissemination of facts – that will be our strongest defence.
Recentring facts means explaining how we got them and why they matter. One of the reasons I would argue that journalists have suffered such a loss of trust in recent years – quite apart from some clear and obvious failures, including illegal phone hacking here in the UK – is that we assumed people understood what we did and what value we had. But as more and more individuals claim to be journalists or news outlets claim to be conducting journalism, those who are engaged in actual journalism – reporting to establish facts – need to do more to show how they arrived at the information and why they should be trusted.
Recentring facts also means celebrating your impact. When I became a reporter, I was told time and again that journalists didn’t like to report on ourselves. That reporting on issues facing the industry could be considered self-indulgent. But if we want people to understand the worth of journalism, we must report not just the news, but how and when our reporting has effected change.
Let’s be half as brave as our colleagues who risk everything to report the truth. I was asked in a recent interview what message I had for Western journalists covering Gaza. My response – although in slightly more colourful language – was “Do your job.” The job of a journalist is not that of a parrot – it is not simply to ask questions and rehearse what we are told. That’s not fact finding. That’s stenography. Our job is to dig deeper, to see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears where possible, and – if not possible – to gather as much information from as many sources as possible to establish the truth.
Instead of worrying about being perceived to take sides, our responsibility is to report the facts. It requires courage. Cowardice is the enemy of good journalism. George Orwell had this right back in his original proposed preface to Animal Farm. “Obviously,” Orwell wrote, “it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship… But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.” Animal Farm was published in 1945. What Orwell wrote then is as true today: our job as journalists is to stand up to the bullies – not to bow to them. That’s what CPJ wrote to Shari Redstone, former chair of Paramount, when we urged her not to settle with Trump over his lawsuit against CBS. Capitulation creates a precedent – and each individual capitulation weakens the entire ecosystem.
I am by no means saying this is easy. Journalism will always be risky as will defending it. It takes a certain level of defiance – a willingness to speak truth to power, to report things as they are, as we see them, and to place them in context – even, and perhaps especially, when it’s not what people want to hear. Doing it well takes courage and conviction. In 2009, prominent Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge was murdered by a group of men on motorcycles. He had been receiving threats for months but refused to stay silent about the injustices in his country. For the last decade, Filipino journalist – now Nobel Laureate, Maria Ressa has been subject to a relentless legal campaign intended to discredit, bankrupt, and ultimately silence the critical reporting coming from both her and her newsroom, Rappler. At one point, she faced a possible sentence of more than a hundred years behind bars. But Maria knows that the job of a journalist is to report the facts, not to bend to those who benefit from their burial. She refuses to stay silent.
More than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. Many have been deliberately threatened and warned explicitly by Israel to stop their reporting. All know the risks they take in wielding cameras when Israel has repeatedly targeted journalists even when wearing press vests and working from known press zones. They know that in the end facts are our superpower. They know that killing the messenger does not kill the message. So, they refused to stop. They refused to be silent. If we want to save journalists, if we want to save journalism, we all must do the same.
BY JODIE GINSBERG
CEO, COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS
Editors note:
This is the alert that the CPJ put out over the weekend in response to an Israeli strike on a media car which killed three journalists in Southern Lebanon.
