Journalists experienced less physical violence at the hands of the State and the public compared to the prior period. Nevertheless, the change in presidential administration has increased hostility towards the media through dispiriting rhetoric and political and legal harassment.
Many fear the new administration will inspire state and local officials to target journalists over critical coverage and limit access and transparency, undermining public trust and harming the press's ability to inform the public. Already, talk of preemptive compliance to avoid government scrutiny has spread from the business world into the media sphere. That this assault on the press may be in the guise of a defense of "free speech" is potentially more insidious.
Over the past six months, the country registered a significant decrease in the number of assaults and attacks on journalists compared to the prior six months. However, members of the press remained the occasional targets of violent outbursts by police and the public.
Police shoved and kicked a photojournalist while he was attempting to document protests in Manhattan on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. Another freelance photojournalist was hospitalized and later filed a complaint against the Lancaster City Bureau Police in Pennsylvania after she was shoved to the ground by police while covering interactions and arrests of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters outside an October 2024 political rally.
A handful of local reporters covering less contentious events did not emerge unscathed, as a woman spat on a Fargo, North Dakota multimedia reporter setting up for a morning live shot. A photojournalist for WDTN in Dayton, Ohio, suffered injuries when a man struck the reporter with a cane in an attempted robbery in which two men were charged with the crime.
The car dealership manager attacked a Texas reporter for KPRC-TV, breaking the journalist's camera as he conducted an undercover report on the dealership allegedly duping a customer. A Colorado man tackled and choked a reporter for KKCO/KJCT in Grand Junction after following the journalist who was returning to the station in his news vehicle in what court documents show may have been a bias-motivated incident, with the attacker allegedly shouting, "This is Trump's America now."
Even sports journalists were not safe, as 76ers star Joel Embiid struck and shoved Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes following an NBA game this fall. Additionally, though not a physical attack, a ransomware gang took credit for a cyberattack affecting nearly 80 newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based company.
With President Donald Trump securing reelection in November, it did not take long for concerns about his antipathy towards the press to materialize into damaging and dangerous actions.
Brandan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) –– which oversees regulation of interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable –– has moved quickly to take action against press outlets. Carr ordered investigations into NBC-parent Comcast's diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, paralleling similar investigations into NPR, PBS, and CBS News. He also launched an investigation into San Francisco radio station KCBS after a broadcast provided the locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during operations in San Jose, California, and accused the station of failing to operate "in the public interest."
Echoing President Trump's civil action claiming bias in a CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast before the election, Carr sent a letter to CBS News seeking the transcript of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, to which CBS complied. Long a critic of content moderation on social media sites, Carr also aimed NewsGuard. This company uses journalistic methods to produce ratings for media outlets, accusing the company of censorship and demanding the heads of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet to list every product or service that relies on NewsGuard.
Roughly 1,300 journalists found themselves abruptly placed on leave when President Trump and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency ordered sweeping cuts and a halt to nearly all activities of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent agency of organizations such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Some United States adversaries and traditional opponents of free expression celebrated the move. Several of these employees also sued the administration, arguing that the shuttering of the agency violates the First Amendment and the separation of powers. In late March, separate courts issued temporary restraining orders blocking the closure of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America. USAGM informed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty shortly thereafter that "it had rescinded the order terminating its grant funding."
The Republican-controlled Congress has also set its sights on the press, summoning NPR and PBS to an oversight hearing accusing both of "blatantly ideological and partisan coverage" and threatening their government funding. In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed Trump's frequent accusations that the media was unfair to the President and told the American people lies. Though it predates Trump retaking the Oval Office, an FBI agent in Wisconsin visited the home of independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who published an unflattering dossier about then Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance during the run-up to the 2024 election, in what was viewed as a blatant attempt to intimidate and silence Klippenstein and others reporting on these rumors.
Public officials at the state and local levels also sought to target content they found objectionable with threats of criminal or civil action. The Florida Department of Health threatened prosecution under the State's "public nuisance law" to demand stations pull a political ad attacking a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Florida Constitution that was in the November ballot. On the other side of the country, the San Francisco city attorney directed an independent tech journalist to remove details from multiple articles published in October 2024 from a sealed arrest report of a tech company CEO and to refrain from further publishing these materials. In late February 2025, the Chancery Court of Hinds County, Mississippi, reversed its prior order requiring the Clarksdale Press Register to remove an editorial from its website only after the Clarksdale Board of City Commissioners voted to dismiss its suit against the paper voluntarily.
Public officials in New York and Ohio used their public platforms to condemn journalists leading up to the election, with New York Representative Elise Stefanik declaring she would seek to pull funding from NPR after a reporter for North Country Radio misidentified the location where Stefanik voted, even after the reporter later took down the social media post and apologized. Similarly, Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith took to Twitter to call the Indiana Daily Student, the student newspaper for Indiana University Bloomington, "WOKE propaganda" and a "waste of money," reiterating these sentiments in an interview with the paper where he said the State should investigate the university's "covert" use of taxpayer dollars in supporting the paper, despite the paper clarifying that it does directly not rely on such funds.
The most public fight between the press and the Trump administration involves the removal of the Associated Press (AP) from the White House Press pool, purportedly due to the news agency's refusal to amend its style guide and refer to the body of international water known as the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America," a new moniker bestowed by executive order. Media organizations – including the IAPA – broadly decried the exclusion through letters prepared by the White House Correspondents' Association, which has traditionally arranged presidential pool access, and the Reporters Committee. The AP sued the administration to enjoin its continued exclusion. On April 8 a federal judge ordered the White House to restore The Associated Press’ full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. The next day, the government filed a notice of appeal. The move was part of the Trump administration's more significant push to take control of the White House Press Pool, changing its composition to provide greater access to organizations less critical of the President. In late February 2025, the White House seized control of the composition of the Press Pool, displacing the White House Correspondents' Association.
Policies and actions taken at the state and local level have also affected press access. In November of 2024, local law enforcement forcibly removed journalists from Board of Supervisors meetings in Shasta County, California, and the staff of a Chicago alderman told a journalist to leave a community meeting in February 2025. Police in Indiana disrupted the means of reporting, confiscating cameras from at least three journalists covering a murder trial and allegedly deleting footage from at least one.
At the state legislative level, a court upheld new policies from the Utah legislature explicitly excluding "blogs, independent media, or other freelance media" from the list of journalists who may qualify for a press credential for the legislative session and providing greater discretion in denying such credentials. The Kansas House of Representatives progressed from confining journalists who cover the legislative body from a small table to now banning journalists from the legislature's floor and relegating them strictly to the public gallery above in a move that mirrors similar measures taken by the Kansas Senate two years prior.
In at least four court proceedings in the past six months, parties targeted journalists and their work product with subpoenas. Hopes of curbing such attacks, which undermine reporter source confidentiality, through federal legislation fell in December as Senate Republicans blocked efforts for a floor vote on the PRESS Act at the behest of then-President-elect Trump. The Trump administration announced in March 2025 that it would aggressively investigate and prosecute "leaks" from within the government and news organizations that published such information.
After the publishers of the e-commerce news site EcommerceBytes sued eBay, alleging the online auction site harassed sources and caused economic harm, a federal court ordered the publishers to turn over the identities of seven sources as part of the discovery. In an action brought against Google, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subpoenaed the tech news site 404 Media, seeking communications and documents from an investigative journalist who published a story on thousands of privacy violations related to information in Google's database. The Miami Herald was able to quash a subpoena issued by a Florida federal court in a defamation proceeding seeking communications between the paper, a reporter, an investigative journalism organization, and the airline company; of particular concern was the subpoena's request for documents regarding the Herald's internal editorial decision not to publish a story regarding allegations of criminal activity by Monarch Air. Journalist Gretchen Voss was spared from having to produce her unedited recordings and notes that Massachusetts prosecutors sought to compel in a murder prosecution.
Law enforcement has arrested considerably fewer journalists during the past six months than in the previous period. Still, continued coverage of protests and efforts to remove and relocate unhoused populations resulted in at least five journalists being detained, if not arrested, and charged since October of 2024. Coinciding with the Trump administration's revamped efforts to increase deportations of immigrants, freelance photographer Matthew Kaplan was detained outside of Gary, Indiana, while covering protests of Trump's planned large-scale deportations, though luckily, those charges were later dropped. With the current administration's deportation prerogative reaching deeper into communities nationwide and with local resistance emerging to such aggressive actions, the likelihood of further conflict between law enforcement and journalists attempting to cover these events only increases.
