German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller said,
‘First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
This week, the President of the United States stood in front of the cameras, golden scissors in hand, cutting a ribbon to unveil a new helicopter landing pad at the White House and the world could not properly hear what he was saying. It sounds almost absurd, particularly given that it was Donald Trump, a President who loves putting up a show. But that was the spectacle in Washington after the television networks that cover the US President decided they would no longer participate in White House pool coverage after CNN was prevented from carrying out its assigned duties and, to the surprise of many, the decision to black out the reality-star President was taken even by Fox News.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico had already been banned from the White House after Trump accused them of publishing “fake news” and “fiction and lies”. The three organisations have since sued the administration, arguing that the ban violates their First Amendment rights. Other major television networks refused to replace CNN in the presidential pool, while other news organisations withheld photographs in solidarity.
So when Trump stood there with his golden scissors, the White House had to rely on its own video feed. Soon came the Trump TV: The Essentials Station, a White House-run stream promising viewers the administration’s ‘biggest moments’, ‘major remarks’ and ‘must-see highlights’ around the clock.
While US District Judge Tim Kelly denounced US President Donald Trump’s September 18 ban within 5 days, the White House messaging was ‘you don’t need those journalists, we will show you what happened.’ This is not simply an American story, it is a warning about how press freedom can begin to disappear and why India, too, should be paying attention.
The 2026 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index says that, for the first time in the Index’s 25-year history, more than half of the world’s countries now fall into the ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ categories for press freedom. The average global score across the 180 countries and territories surveyed has never been lower, with RSF pointing to increasingly restrictive laws, hostile political discourse and the growing criminalisation of journalism.
Because freedoms are rarely taken away all at once. They are chipped away gradually.
A journalist is denied access. One publication is labelled ‘fake’. A critical report is called malicious. A raid is conducted. Licences are questioned. A newsroom finds itself financially vulnerable. A government-friendly outlet receives privileged access. And somewhere in another newsroom, an editor begins wondering whether a particular story is worth the trouble. That is how the temperature rises.
Look at Trump’s relationship with the media over the years. ‘Fake news’ has been one of his most effective political weapons against the press. He has repeatedly attacked journalists and news organisations, at times calling the media ‘the enemy of the people’. And then came the confrontations that made the language of presidential-media hostility almost routine.
Think about the progression. First, discredit the journalist or media house, then humiliate them, then restrict access and finally make the public debate the journalist’s behaviour rather than the question the journalist asked. That is an extraordinarily effective way of changing the subject without ever answering the question.
When a powerful person repeatedly tells millions of people that journalists and media houses are liars, enemies or propagandists, eventually the public is encouraged to see scrutiny itself as suspicious. The media stops being the people asking questions on behalf of the public and becomes the problem. We have seen this play out repeatedly in Trump’s dealings with journalists.
In 2018, CNN’s Jim Acosta was told he was a ‘rude, terrible person’ by Trump during a White House press conference, after challenging the President on immigration. Trump told him to sit down and called him ‘the enemy of the people’; the White House subsequently suspended Acosta’s press pass.
Then came something even more revealing. In 2025, the White House restricted Associated Press access after the news agency refused to adopt Trump’s preferred name, ‘Gulf of America’, in place of ‘Gulf of Mexico’. AP journalists were excluded from presidential events and Air Force One, with Trump explicitly saying the restrictions would continue until AP changed its editorial policy. A federal judge subsequently ordered the White House to restore AP’s access, finding that the government could not punish the news organisation for the content of its speech.
Now think about it.
The issue was not whether an AP reporter had fabricated a story or whether a photograph was false. It was also not about a journalist breaching a security rule. It was about a government demanding that an independent news organisation use particular language and restricting its access when it refused something that should be the norm in a democracy rather than the exception.
A federal judge subsequently ruled that the government could not punish AP for the content of its speech, saying that if the government opened its doors to some journalists, it could not shut those doors to others because of their viewpoints. How can journalism remain independent if the government gets to decide not only what the media reports, but which words it is permitted to use?
And then the White House went further, creating a page targeting news organisations and journalists whose reporting it disputed, including what it called an ‘Offender Hall of Shame’, with categories such as ‘bias’, ‘lie’ and ‘left wing lunacy’.
A government publicly naming journalists as offenders is not merely another presidential complaint. It tells them — we are watching you. But have we forgotten what the job of the press is? It is to ask the question that makes power uncomfortable, not to please those in power. The answer to an uncomfortable question in a democracy is supposed to be an answer, not a ban, a raid, a threat or a government-produced replacement for the media that asked it.
And this is where India needs to look at itself. Because the methods by which press freedom is weakened may differ from country to country, but the pressure points are remarkably familiar. Sometimes it is censorship, sometimes ownership, sometimes witholding government advertising, sometimes the selective use of investigations and enforcement agencies, sometimes a raid and sometimes a legal notice.
And there is an important distinction that needs to be made here. A government, a company or an individual who believes that a journalist or publication has defamed them is not without legal remedy. India continues to have defamation laws. But a raid, a sweeping investigation or repeated coercive action cannot be a substitute for establishing whether a published report was true, false or defamatory. Because in this manner, the possibility of retaliation itself becomes a weapon. You do not have to shut down a newsroom to silence it. You only have to make everyone inside it wonder what might happen if they publish the next uncomfortable story.
That is how intimidation becomes self-censorship. And self-censorship is perhaps the most efficient form of censorship because the censor no longer has to enter the newsroom. The journalist carries the censor into the newsroom themselves.
And then a media owner starts worrying about what might follow. A reporter starts thinking about consequences before thinking about the story. That is the most sophisticated form of censorship: making people afraid enough to censor themselves.
There is a human cost to this pressure that is often invisible to the audience. The public sees a television anchor reading a script or a newspaper carrying a headline. It does not see the lawyer’s notice sitting on the editor’s desk, the police summons, the fear of prosecution, the possibility of arrest, the financial cost of fighting multiple cases or the pressure on an owner who knows that a difficult story could bring another round of scrutiny.
The result is often described casually as ‘sold media’ as if journalists simply woke up one morning and decided to stop asking questions. That explanation is too convenient. In some cases, editorial choices may absolutely deserve criticism. But the public also needs to understand what happens when a media ecosystem operates under sustained legal, financial and political pressure. Fear can shape journalism long before an audience sees the final product.
And this is why the number of journalists behind bars matters. And as per Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) records, ‘India has two journalists in prison and at least 15 journalists had been charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act since 2014’. The underlying fact is difficult to ignore- journalists are jailed or detained under security, criminal and other laws in connection with cases arising from their work.
The point is not that every journalist accused of wrongdoing is innocent. They are not above the law. The point is that journalism cannot remain free if the cost of getting a story wrong is potentially a criminal case, imprisonment or years of litigation while the cost of getting a story right is another form of retaliation. That imbalance itself can produce silence.
Of course, governments must be able to call out genuine wrongdoing. Media organisations are not above the law and journalists are not immune from accountability. But there is an equally important principle that must never be lost: The power to question a media organisation is not the power to intimidate it.
This is also where Indian media organisations need to ask themselves a difficult question: Where is our solidarity when the newsroom next door is raided?
And this is precisely why what happened in Washington matters far beyond Washington. The television networks simply recognised that allowing the government to remove one network from the pool and quietly replace it with another would create a precedent that could eventually be used against any of them. That is what media solidarity should mean.
It means recognising that the right to ask questions belongs to all of us. You do not defend press freedom because you agree with everything CNN publishes. You defend it because you know that if a government can decide which journalists deserve access based on whether it likes their reporting, every newsroom is eventually vulnerable.
And perhaps media houses should have understood this long ago. When one newsroom is targeted, the others should not be calculating how much access they can gain from its absence. They should be asking what precedent is being created.
This is where media owners need to understand something before they are forced to understand it the hard way: Solidarity is not charity, it is self-preservation.
The excesses of a free media can be challenged, corrected and ultimately rejected by the public but the silence created by fear or state control is far harder to detect because the public may never know what questions were never asked, what stories were never pursued and what investigations died inside a newsroom before they ever reached a reader. A free press can make mistakes but a frightened press can make democracy a mistake.
There is an old story about a frog. Put it in boiling water and it jumps out. Put it in cool water and gradually increase the temperature and, according to the story, it stays until it is too late. As a metaphor for democratic erosion, it is frighteningly useful. Because democracy can also be turned down by degrees. A little less access, little more censorship, little more government control, little more fear, little less dissent and a little less independent journalism. Until one day you look around and realise that democracy is at its weakest not because someone announced its death, but because everyone became accustomed to having a little less of it.
That is the trap.
Freedom does not disappear only when someone takes it away. It can disappear when people become accustomed to having less of it. And perhaps that is the greatest lesson from Trump’s escalating confrontation with the press. The danger is not merely that the leader of a democracy dislikes journalists. The danger is what happens when the public becomes accustomed to the leader deciding which journalists are legitimate, which news organisations are credible, which words they should use, which reporters deserve access and which version of reality should be broadcast directly from the government.
Because once that becomes normal, the extraordinary has already become ordinary and that is how democracies can change… slowly, quietly and incrementally. Until the temperature is so high that jumping out is no longer an option.
The media has to stand together, not when the attack becomes impossible to ignore, but now. Not only when a television network is denied access, but when a newspaper is raided. Not only when an editor is jailed, but when a reporter is threatened with prosecution. Not only when the victim is a media house we admire, but when it is one whose journalism we dislike.
Because the freedom of the press cannot be conditional on the quality of the press we happen to be defending that day.
An attack on one newsroom is an attack on the principle every newsroom depends upon. And if we allow that principle to be weakened because today’s victim is somebody else’s problem, we should not be surprised when tomorrow’s knock comes on our own door.