Most Journalists Worried About Future of US Press Freedom: Study – The Hill
The story at a glance
- A new report from the Pew Research Center examined the views of working journalists on the state of the news industry.
- One of the main findings of the study is that more than half of the journalists surveyed said they were worried about the possibility of press freedom being restricted in the country.
- For years, the United States has been a model of press freedom, but a cultural shift has occurred that has led to more attacks on media workers.
More than half of journalists are worried about future restrictions on press freedom, according to a Pew Research Center report released on Tuesday.
According to the survey, 57% of journalists are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of press restrictions being imposed in the United States.
The survey of nearly 12,000 working journalists indicates that news professionals are also concerned about widespread misinformation and politically similar people obtaining information from the same sources.
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When asked to describe the industry in a single word, 72% of survey respondents used a word with a negative connotation, with some of the most commonly used words being “struggling” or “chaos”, says The report.
While the United States was once a model of press freedom, journalists have increasingly become targets of ridicule and violence in recent years. One example is the rate of attacks and arrests of journalists during the eruption of mass protests that took place after the murder of George Floyd.
In the protests that followed — which took place in the spring and summer of 2020 — there were 400 incidents of attacks on journalists and 129 arrests, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker.
Those numbers represent an 11- and 15-fold increase from 2019, according to data from Press Freedom Tracker.
The number of reported attacks on journalists fell in 2021, but still remained much higher than the years leading up to 2020. The Press Freedom Tracker recorded 144 incidents of attacks on journalists last year.
In part, the prevalence of misinformation has created a culture in the country where some Americans feel they cannot trust journalists, and that shift has led to animosity toward media workers, according to Reporters Without Borders.
In the Pew survey, reporters showed they were aware of the public’s distrust of news, with only 14% saying they thought the American public had a “great ” or a “fair” confidence in the information they obtain. press organs.
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Posted on June 15, 2022
