• by Arda Nazerian , Op-Ed Contributor, Yesterday

The attack is not confined to the usual suspects. It comes from democracies as much as dictatorships, from algorithms and business interests, from exhaustion and technological disruption as much as ideology.

As a baseline shocking fact, a record number of journalists were killed worldwide in 2024. By mid-2025, the trend had not reversed. Dozens of reporters were jailed or killed in places like Gaza, Mexico, and Belarus.

But the deeper crisis goes beyond physical violence. It is the slow suffocation of truth through intimidation, litigation, and manipulation — often in countries that once held themselves up as beacons of free expression.

In supposedly democratic societies, elected leaders now routinely deride journalists as enemies, sue them into silence, and starve them of resources. Across Europe and the Americas, public broadcasting has been politicized and investigative outlets drained of advertising revenue. In Asia and Africa, governments have learned from the world’s loudest populists that smearing the press pays political dividends.

And even in the United States — long considered the gold standard of media freedom — the danger has begun to creep inward. The Pentagon’s newly announced policy threatening to revoke access for reporters who publish unapproved but unclassified information is a sharp reminder that the instinct to control the press is not confined to autocracies.

When the world's most powerful military begins treating independent coverage as a security breach, it sends a message that intimidation is fair game.

And it shows that even the U.S. — once the loudest champion of global press freedom — has become a source of imitation for autocrats, who gleefully quote American leaders attacking the “fake news media.”

Technology has turbocharged the decay. Social platforms, built to reward engagement rather than truth, now mediate how most people understand the world. Over half of global news consumers get their information primarily through social media, and YouTube alone reaches more people for news than any cable or network channel combined.

Algorithms now determine what citizens across the globe believe about their governments. Artificial intelligence adds another layer of peril: powerful tools for spreading disinformation at industrial scale, impersonating legitimate news outlets, and fabricating eyewitness accounts faster than any journalist can debunk them.

And yet, the gravest threat may be apathy. A society that ceases to care whether something is true is already halfway to tyranny.

When audiences grow numb to manipulation, and the word “journalist” itself becomes a slur, the result is a form of surrender.

That was the quiet consensus at a recent Concordia Summit panel on the global media crisis, supported by The Armenia Project, a communications-centered NGO based in Yerevan.

Armenia is one of the world’s precarious democracies: a reforming state surrounded by authoritarian regimes — Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, and increasingly, a backsliding Georgia.

For Armenians, the question of free information is not theoretical. It is existential. The same is true, increasingly, for the rest of the world.

The panel's participants — Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists; Jared Gensler, an international human-rights lawyer; Laura Manley, who heads Harvard’s Shorenstein Center; and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled Belarusian opposition leader — came from vastly different contexts. Yet they agreed on one grim conclusion: the assault on truth is systemic.

Ginsberg, whose organization tracks violence against reporters, warned that at least eight out of ten journalist murders go unpunished. She cited not just war zones but democracies — from Guatemala to Hong Kong to the United States — where journalists are now detained or harassed for uncovering uncomfortable facts.

The Pentagon controversy, she might have added, shows how quickly the logic of secrecy spreads once governments decide that control outweighs transparency.

Gensler described the legal warfare being waged against journalism — the rise of strategic lawsuits and regulatory capture, where governments weaponize courts and media regulators to silence critics. Manley highlighted the collapse of the information economy.

Newsrooms, already under siege, now face existential threats from AI and algorithmic dominance. Responsibility, she pointed out, must shift upward — to regulators, platforms, and policymakers.

And Tsikhanouskaya described what has happened in Belarus as a nation that has lost its informational oxygen, with independent news outlets having been outlawed and their staff branded as terrorists.

These are not separate problems — they are symptoms of a single disease. The assault on truth is a five-headed beast:

1. Political hostility — populist and autocratic alike — that delegitimizes journalism.
2. Legal and economic pressure designed to bankrupt or intimidate independent outlets.
3. Technological distortion that rewards outrage over accuracy.
4. Tech disruption of the classic journalism industry’s business model.
5. Public exhaustion and cynicism, which allow all of the above to metastasize.

The cure will require systemic remedies to match the systemic threat. This must go far deeper than mere efforts to resist — as we are seeing in the very broad rejection by journalists, and condemnation by press groups, of the Pentagon gambit. Several strategies present themselves.

First, treat information as infrastructure. Governments and donors must fund journalism the way they fund roads or electricity — as a precondition for democracy’s functioning. That means permanent financing mechanisms for public interest and local news, tax incentives for nonprofit outlets, and long-term support for exiled media.

Armenia, which has survived wars and blockades through its open digital networks, offers a small but vivid example of how access to information can sustain national resilience.

Second, legislate accountability. Independent regulatory bodies — insulated from partisan politics — should oversee both media ownership and digital transparency. Laws must shield journalists from predatory lawsuits, and international agreements should make impunity for the murder of journalists as intolerable as impunity for war crimes.

Third, demand transparency from technology platforms. The public has a right to know how algorithms amplify or suppress information. Generative AI tools must carry clear provenance labeling, and social platforms should be legally required to share data with independent researchers studying the spread of disinformation.

Finally, rebuild civic trust. Support local news. Subscribe, donate, and read critically. Resist the instinct to treat every journalist as a partisan combatant.

A functioning democracy requires a shared factual floor. When that floor collapses, so does everything built on it.

The challenge is global, but the consequences are intimate. Once the truth disappears, what follows is not simply ignorance — it is rule by whoever controls the narrative. The world has seen this movie before, in darker decades, and knows how it ends.

The fight for journalism, then, is not the fight of journalists alone. It is the fight of citizens, of democrats, of anyone who refuses to live in the dark.

As The Armenia Project’s sponsorship of the Concordia discussion made clear, small nations surrounded by authoritarian neighbors often understand this first.

The rest of us would do well to listen.