By Anne Godlasky, National Press Foundation President
World Press Freedom Day arrives May 3, 2024, with student journalists arrested on U.S. college campuses, with Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva still wrongfully detained in Russia, with the prior year ending in a near-record number of journalists killed and imprisoned worldwide.
It is against this grim backdrop, that the National Press Foundation joins with organizations in supporting journalists everywhere against authoritarian practices. We provide free training to journalists around the globe to help them better report on their communities.
Research shows that communities with local news have greater civic participation, less polarization and less corruption.
As former NPF board member Walter Cronkite said, “Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”
Yet the United States, long a beacon of democracy, has dropped to No. 45 on the World Press Freedom Index. While three quarters of Americans say press freedom is extremely or very important to society, only one-third think the media is “completely” free to report the news in the U.S., according to a new Pew Research Center survey, instead believing it is influenced by corporations and politics.
Public trust in journalism, journalism’s benefit to society and journalists’ freedom to report are inextricably linked. This World Press Freedom Day we urge everyone to support journalists by subscribing to the news, defending press freedoms and calling attention to violations of that freedom.
Other ways you can participate in World Press Freedom Day include tuning in to any of the following free livestream events (all times ET):
- 9 a.m. Updates on of Cases of Journalists Austin Tice, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kermasheva, National Press Club
- 9 a.m.-6:45 p.m. A Press for the Planet: Journalism in the Face of Environmental Crisis, UNESCO
- 9:15 a.m.-4 p.m. The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
- 1-2:30 p.m. Roundtable Discussion on State of Press Freedom of the Last Year, National Press Club
As threats against journalists extend beyond the physical, to online harassment, doxxing, AI-fueled propaganda, weaponized lawsuits and more, may we lean on the words of Paul Beckett when he accepted the NPF Chairman’s Citation on Gershkovich’s behalf:
“[F]ocus on NPF’s motto ‘making good journalists better.’ The way we can all do that in this room is to bear witness to those reporters whose freedoms have been denied – by taking time to think and talk about them, by being loud on social media about them, by contributing to organizations that advocate for them, by working together as an industry to support them, by pushing our elected representatives to do what it takes to protect them, by writing stories on abuses against all attacks on the media and by putting the broader cause of press freedom at the center of our newsrooms and at the center of all the journalism that we pursue.”
