The Fight for Global Press Freedom: Journalists, Editors and Publishers Confront Rising Threats
Journalists addressed mounting pressure—and stood firm in their resolve to defend the truth.
On Monday, April 21, Columbia Journalism School (CJS) and The New York Times hosted The Fight for Global Press Freedom in the Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall.
The afternoon event, inspired by the urgent themes in A.G. Sulzberger’s November 2024 article, “How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America,” brought together journalists, legal scholars and press freedom advocates to explore how financial and legal pressures are increasingly used to silence investigative reporting.
Following opening remarks by Rebecca Blumenstein, President of NBC News and Chair of the Columbia Journalism Review’s Board, Sulzberger joined Dean Jelani Cobb for a fireside chat on the mounting challenges facing journalism education and the evolving role of the press in democratic societies.
“I always talk with people saying that we've seen this administration attack academia and attack news organizations,” said Dean Cobb. “And we are a news organization that exists in academia. and so we have the kind of Venn overlap of both of those things.”
Building on that conversation, a panel — moderated by Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia Journalism School — featured Aida Alami, James Madison Visiting Professor of First Amendment Issues at CJS; Juliana Dal Piva, Reporter for ICL Notícias and Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP); András Pethő, Co-Founder and Director of Direkt36; and Siddharth Varadarajan, Founding Editor of The Wire and former Editor of The Hindu.
“What is happening in the U.S. is being used by other countries, populists, and autocrats to say, ‘Hey, look, the U.S.: they have the First Amendment, but look at what the Trump government is getting away with,’” said Coronel. “U.S. journalists owe it to the rest of the world to fight back, so that this does not become an example to the rest of the world.”
The event concluded with remarks from Bruce Brown, President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Azmat Khan, Patti Cadby Birch Assistant Professor of Journalism and Director of the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism.
As global threats to journalism continue to grow in complexity, the event offered an unflinching look at the pressures facing reporters—and the determination required to push back.
Interested in learning more about press freedom at Columbia Journalism School? Visit https://journalism.columbia.edu/CJS2030/Democracy