freedom of the press

The Trump White House has gained a reputation for corruption, mistruth, and attacks on press freedom that goes against everything America wants to be known for in the world.

This new video from C-Span explores the "existential crisis" affecting news media outlets, governments and public diplomacy practitioners in the digital era, with a special hat tip to USC's exemplary public diplomacy programs.

Are restrictions on the press affecting non-state media and governments from broadcasting abroad?

It’s not a good time for freedom of the press. The non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders, devoted to supporting journalists worldwide, published its annual index this month. In six continents, the conditions for free media in 2014 became not just worse, but “dramatically worse,” according to the group’s “2015 World Press Freedom Index.”

Russian propaganda, often masquerading as legitimate news, is disseminated through state-controlled media to confuse, obscure, and shift the debate about Putin and to legitimize Russian aggression abroad.

According to The New York Times, a senior State Department official speaking before the meeting with Arab foreign ministers said Kerry planned to not only ask the Arab states to increase their public condemnations of ISIS, but also to “ask them to use their state-owned media, too.” 

Every year, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) publishes their World Press Freedom Index, which ranks every country in the world using the following six criteria: pluralism, media independence, environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and infrastructure. This chart lists the ten best and worst places to be a journalist today. The time-lapse maps below tell a more complicated story.

Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has ruled the country since 2002, and there has been widespread controversy over press freedom in the country, with many doubting that such a freedom even exists. As a matter of fact, the US-based watchdog Freedom House's “Freedom of the Press 2014” report has downgraded Turkey from the category of “partly free” to “not free” because of what the institution called “the worsening media freedom situation.”