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00:00More on that. Let's bring in Clayton Wymers. He's the U.S. Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders.
00:06Such a pleasure to have you with have you with us on the program today.
00:09As we just saw in that report, you know, for the first time in history, the Bain Index for Press Freedom is at its lowest ever score.
00:17Just starting with the United States, help us get a grasp of just how much press freedom has slipped under Donald Trump.
00:53I have been taking hits year after year, especially the economic indicator due to massive layoffs in the media industry and the closure of newsrooms all across the country, creating a news desert problem.
01:04But in recent years, it's really become a political and cultural problem with the massive decline in trust between the public and the media and outright attacks by politicians, in particular, President Donald Trump.
01:17I should add, though, that everything that's happened in President Trump's second administration for the past hundred or so days has not been counted in the index data.
01:25So the decline is continuing before our very eyes and things are only getting worse.
01:31Now, Trump has so far asked, you know, financial support for state-backed broadcasters like Voice of America, but also for U.S. foreign development aid that assisted media outlets overseas.
01:41So how are these outlets confronting these economic pressures?
01:46Well, right now, the media organizations under the umbrella of the U.S. Agency for Global Media are off the air.
01:54In the case of Voice of America, which RSF is currently suing the government to save, it's off the air for the first time in 80 years.
02:01These are broadcast networks whose mission is to bring trustworthy, reliable journalism to hundreds of millions of people around the world who don't have access to reliable information, millions of people living under authoritarianism.
02:16And so taking away these broadcasts is just plunging them further into darkness, and it's opening the door to state-based propaganda and other types of harmful content.
02:28The people who are celebrating the demise of Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, the loudest, are in the Chinese Communist Party.
02:35They're in the Kremlin. They're in Tehran.
02:37These are folks who are very excited to be able to fill the void left behind by these independent broadcasters who've been shut down by the president.
02:46And taking the example of, you know, NPR and PBS, they're only partly funded by the U.S. taxpayer and, you know, rely heavily on private donations.
02:55So where do these private donations then come from?
02:58And is the reality that then that, you know, in such a case, media is wholly dependent on private funding?
03:05So the way that public media works in the United States is pretty complicated, and there's a lot of different sources of funding.
03:11But the federal dollars that go into public media, for the most part, flow towards the independent local affiliate stations.
03:21These are the radio station that you tune into at home or the local PBS station that you tune into, you know, on your television, many of whom, you know, really rely on these federal grants to help them make their budget.
03:35If you take away this federal funding, the effect is going to be the closure of dozens, if not hundreds, of local news outlets.
03:44And that's going to have a disastrous effect on the problem I already talked about of news deserts throughout this country.
03:50But it's, again, going to rob ordinary citizens of reliable sources of information about their community, about their country, about the world, as well as lifesaving emergency programming.
04:01In times of crises, public radio stations have proven to be amongst the most reliable sources of information, say, during the wildfires in Southern California or the recent floods and hurricanes in the Southeast, especially at a time when disinformation is so rampant online.
04:17People can trust that if they turn on their local NPR station, they will get information that helps them stay safe.
04:23Yeah, absolutely.
04:24And, you know, I think it goes without saying also that it's an extremely difficult time for independent media, most of all.
04:29So what can be said about the future of such media outlets?
04:33I mean, is there a viable way to stay afloat and continue fact-based reporting?
04:39Well, that's really the key question that's confronting the media all over the world.
04:43It's clear that we need new funding models, particularly in the developing world.
04:50The pullback of U.S. foreign aid has been disastrous for media development in other parts of the world.
04:56But it's not just the United States.
04:58European governments are also slashing their foreign aid.
05:01And some of the programs that get cut first are the media freedom programs.
05:06And this is funding for independent media.
05:07It's also funding for the infrastructure that undergirds free media.
05:11And when you take that away, it's just a boon to authoritarian censorship regimes who are investing more and more resources into pushing out their propaganda, their version of the media.
05:24It's really a shame.
05:26It's a shame indeed.
05:27Now, Donald Trump's war on the press is, of course, exacerbating the situation.
05:31But press freedom has been on a rather steady decline for the past decade or so, hasn't it?
05:38That's true.
05:39And in 2025, the factor that's leading to that the most is the economic indicator, as you alluded to there.
05:48And that's exactly because some of these problems are really universal, but also because regimes are now getting a little more sophisticated about controlling the press, whereas maybe kidnappings and assassinations were the preferred tool of the autocrat.
06:06Now they're turning more and more to economic pressure as a means of controlling the press.
06:11And to be clear, the arrests and the assassinations still happen and are a scourge for the press around the world.
06:16But we're seeing more and more use of, say, foreign agent registration laws or bans on international investment in the media, opaque and arbitrary rules about the disbursement of public media funding.
06:31All these tricks that make it really hard for the media to sustain themselves and also open the door to corruption so that the ruling elites can reward their preferred media outlets who are willing to parrot their talking points while punishing the ones they consider their enemies.
06:51All right.
06:52Clayton Wymers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders.
06:56It's great to speak to you.
06:57Thank you so much for your time today.
06:58Thank you for having me.