After nearly two years of chaos, conflict and constitutional crises, American voters on Tuesday expressed their overwhelming dissatisfaction with the state of the union. Now, Democrats need to decide what that mandate means for the next two years, while Republicans need to figure out their identity as a party in a fast-approaching post-Trump world. But all Americans need to grapple with what kind of country we want for generations to come.
No issue is more fundamental to that question, or as illustrative of the fragilities in our democracy, than press freedom.
What does a free and responsible press owe a democratic society? In 1942, as total war tested the resilience of free institutions across the globe, University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins and Time publisher Henry Luce set out to tackle a question that is arguably even more relevant today, with public trust in news as low as ever. Their radical experiment gave rise to the Commission on Freedom of the Press, better known as the “Hutchins Commission,” a landmark effort to redefine the relationship between press freedom, public accountability and the democratic good.
The commission’s final report, published in 1947, made the case for press freedom as social responsibility, arguing that news media enjoyed constitutional protection not as an unregulated entitlement, but as a public trust obligated to serve the public good. This view of press freedom creates a key distinction from free speech, a right less burdened by obligations of the speaker.
The six-odd decades following the commission’s work saw the greatest, if uneven, expansion of press freedoms in American history. The United States hit a new all-time low on the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index in 2026. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker , press freedom violations increased in 2025, with assaults on journalists more than doubling. The press freedom expansion isn’t just over. It’s being actively rolled back. That trend also coincides with the rise and fall of the public’s esteem for journalism.
This press freedom backslide is corroborated in the broader academic research on the state of American democracy. The United States suffered one of the biggest score reductions according to Freedom House’s “Freedom of the World 2026” report, which specifically cited restrictions on media as a cause. The Varieties of Democracies Institute (V-Dem) 2026 Democracy Report found that democracy in the United States has returned to levels not seen since before the civil rights era, with freedom of expression at its lowest level since the end of World War II (when the Hutchins Commission was formed).
Waning press freedom is both a symptom of and a cause of democratic decline. Experience and research warn that recovering from democratic backsliding is very difficult. Compounding the challenge, American democracy is receding at an astonishing pace, which V-Dem notes “is comparable to some coups d’états.” The institute’s founder told the Guardian , “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.”
American democracy is in crisis in no small part because American journalism is in crisis. Part of the problem is indeed the well-documented crisis of trust, but you can’t separate the trust problem from the deteriorating environment for journalism that inevitably contributes to it. Local news deserts grow larger each year. Surveillance technology, weaponized leak investigations and explicit government threats against human sources threaten routine reporting. Big Tech companies, which have increasingly aligned themselves with a presidential administration openly hostile to the press, design their algorithms to reward sensationalism and outright falsehoods while throttling legitimate journalism. Journalism is under incredible pressure from all sides.
Americans face a stark choice before us: allow the backsliding to continue and risk tipping further into authoritarianism, or reclaim our democracy by investing in the future of press freedom.
For obvious reasons, reform is inconceivable until a new president is sworn in. But with the midterms in the rearview mirror, now is the time to start looking toward the possibilities of the next administration. The problems are immense and the solutions ambitious, so the work needs to begin today.
One key lesson from our current political era is that norms are no substitute for laws, so we need to fill the legal gaps that leave journalists and journalism vulnerable to government abuse. Commonsense measures like the PRESS Act and robust state and federal anti-SLAPP laws are low-hanging fruit. But as the government grows more eager to invoke national security to suppress journalism, we should also pursue long-overdue reform of the Espionage Act, an archaic World War I-era law that makes no distinction between espionage and journalism. We should also modernize the Freedom of Information Act to safeguard this vital tool of accountability journalism.
Police targeting of journalists is on the rise. The Department of Justice rescinded prior guidance that restricted the use of subpoenas and search warrants against journalists. These protections should be codified into law. This isn’t a theoretical exercise. In January, the FBI illegally raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson , seizing her devices and compromising thousands of journalistic sources.
The problems confronting journalism extend beyond the legal domain, though. Two of the biggest threats to a free press in the 21st century are the economics of the news media market and a digital information ecosystem that is increasingly hostile to journalism. We have to think of press freedom beyond the traditional confines of safety and legal protections. You can’t save journalists without saving journalism itself. This will require the political courage to take on Big Tech and break its stranglehold on the pipelines that deliver digital content.
The next president and Congress should work together to restore funding for public media in a way that ensures its financial stability for generations to come. Congress must consider innovative solutions to fund the news, including requiring major tech companies, which benefit immensely from the content journalists produce, to pay for it. Call it the “you break you buy it” policy.
We can also expect a stalled debate over Section 230 of the Communications Act, which immunizes Big Tech companies from the content posted to their sites. It’s time to establish actual obligations these major tech companies owe to the public. If they really want to operate the digital public squares, they ought to act like it.
These issues are just the tip of the iceberg. We clearly need to make a concerted effort to examine and address these issues and more. But to meet this moment, we cannot simply recreate the Hutchins Commission.
The original commission was a top-down exercise rooted in elite academia and backed by publishing magnates. It was missing the public that press freedom serves. It also pulled punches on a number of key issues, like media consolidation, for fear of incurring the backlash of burgeoning McCarthyism. The 21st century requires a different approach: a working coalition of those who spend every day in the trenches fighting for the First Amendment, defending journalism, and building sustainable models for local news.
This work cannot end with yet another static academic report designed to gather dust on a shelf. It should provide an authoritative, consensus-backed policy blueprint for the next president, Congress, and state legislatures.
The Hutchins Commission understood that press freedom is not self-sustaining; it requires constant structural maintenance. Eight decades later, Americans must not merely rediscover that lesson. We must act on it.
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