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This week, the President AND the press came under attack. After an attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the Trump administration was quick to blame the media and threaten ABC over a joke that hurt their feelings. On this episode, Alex speaks to Brian Stelter, CNN’s Chief Media Analyst, about the chaos in the Washington Hilton and the FCC’s unprecedented threats against networks. Then Alex speaks to Simon Ostrovsky, a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, who recounts his harrowing capture in Ukraine in 2014 while reporting and talks about the need for the press to push back against Trump’s insults. Finally, Alex is joined by Clayton Weimers, Executive Director of Reporters Without Borders, USA, to talk through the release of the World Press Freedom Index which shows that journalism is under threat globally.

TRANSCRIPT

Alex Wagner: Hi everyone, it has been another runaway week. On Saturday night, a gunman stormed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, allegedly attempting to assassinate President Trump and his cabinet. It is the third attempt on the president’s life. The suspect, 31-year-old Cole Allen, wrote in a manifesto that administration officials were, quote, “the primary targets, prioritized from highest ranking to lowest.” Allen went on to write, I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets. If it were absolutely necessary. Over 2,000 journalists attended the event, the first correspondence dinner that America’s roast-averse leader has attended in his nearly six years leading the country. But before Trump could even speak, people were scrambling to hide under their tables as shots rang out. [clip of shots] After the attempted shooting for a few hours on Saturday night, there was a truce between the president and his press corps. And then Sunday came. In an interview for 60 Minutes, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked the president some questions he apparently really did not like.

[clip of Norah O’Donnell]: He also wrote this, I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. What’s your reaction?

[clip of Donald Trump]: Well, I was waiting for you to read that, because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people, horrible people. You should be ashamed of yourself reading that, because I’m not any of those things.

[clip of Norah O’Donnell]: Mr. President, these are the gentlemen’s words.

[clip of Donald Trump]: Excuse me, you shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. I feel very calm right now, other than a couple of your questions, which are meant to antagonize and totally inappropriate. But I feel calm. Even though the press treats me very badly. It’s hard to treat me, look I won the election, you know, people were fighting me, but for the most part it’s a very liberal or very progressive, let’s use the word liberal press.

[clip of Norah O’Donnell]: Do you think this will change your relationship with the press?

[clip of Donald Trump]: For whatever reason, we disagree on a lot of subjects. We talk about crime. I’m very strong on crime. It seems like the press isn’t. It’s not so much the press. It’s the press plus the Democrats because they’re almost one in the same. It’s like the craziest thing.

Alex Wagner: By Monday, the assassination attempt was the fault of Democrats and the media. Here is press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaking to the White House press pool that day.

[clip of Karoline Leavitt]: This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, yes, by elected members of the Democrat party, and even some in the media. This hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump day after day, after day for 11 years has helped to legitimize this violence and bring us to this dark moment.

Alex Wagner: And while Norah O’Donnell and the White House press corps may have gotten in an earful, the media figure bearing the brunt of Trump’s fury is Jimmy Kimmel, who last Thursday said this in a pretend roast on his television program.

[clip of Jimmy Kimmel]: And of course, our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at Melania. So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: The joke, of course, didn’t age well. Kimmel, for his part, has been adamant that it was a joke about just that, age.

[clip of Jimmy Kimmel]: It was a very light roast joke about the fact that he’s almost 80 and she’s younger than I am. It was not, by any stretch of the definition, a call to assassination, and they know that. I’ve been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence in particular, but I understand that the First Lady had a stressful experience over the weekend and probably every weekend is pretty stressful in that house.

Alex Wagner: On Monday morning, the first lady tweeted, people like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A few hours later, Trump posted to Truth Social that Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired. And then on Tuesday, federal regulators ordered a review of all station licenses owned by ABC, which airs Jimmy Kimmels show. The goal here is obviously to intimidate Disney, ABC’s parent company, to only broadcast Trump-aligned content. So. A gunman tries to assassinate the president and his top advisors, and now the president is trying to shut down ABC because the president and his wife believe the media are responsible. The irony here is that these days, journalists aren’t particularly safe either. There are personal threats to their safety and eroding press protections. There’s the president himself who personally attacks journalists often.

[clip of Donald Trump]: Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious, a terrible, actually a terrible reporter. And it’s always the same thing with you.

[clip of reporter]: Why do you blame the Biden administration?

[clip of Donald Trump]: Because they let him in. Are you stupid? Quiet, quiet piggy. You’re with who?

[clip of reporter]: ABC News, sir.

[clip of Donald Trump]: Fake news, ABC fake news. One of the worst, one of the worse in the business. We’re gonna go to the media company that released it, and we’re gonna say, national security, give it up or go to jail.

Alex Wagner: If Trump hasn’t limited his attacks to just nasty comments and veiled threats, he has also sued journalists and their employers to create a very risky environment for reporters. Here’s Trump on 60 Minutes again.

[clip of Donald Trump]: I’ve also won a lot of money from fake news media where they write falsely about me and not that I want to sue people because I don’t, but I bring lawsuits against the fake news. I brought lawsuits against your network and you paid me $38 million because you did something that was so horrible with Kamala. You put an answer down that wasn’t responsive to the question because her answer, her real answer was so bad, it was election-threatening. And you paid me a lot of money, and you tried to pull one off. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing that you did. So then when you say, can you get along, I can get along with anybody. But if people are going to cheat, if people going to be fake, you sort of don’t want to get along.

Alex Wagner: Attacks on the press, the erosion of free speech, is not a uniquely American problem. It is on the rise around the world, which raises the question, how much are we just part of the trend? And how much are we leading by example? I’m Alex Wagner and this week on Runaway Country, journalists in danger and media under assault. How the Trump administration is finding legal avenues to attack the First Amendment and what could be waiting ahead if we continue down this road. We’re talking to CNN’s Brian Stelter, an expert on the state of journalism news and the intersection of media and politics. Brian has been covering the battle between Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel, and he has a lot to say about the president’s strategy for silencing dissent. Not to mention he was at the correspondence dinner when the shots rang out. Then we’re speaking to Simon Ostrovsky, a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour, who, back in 2014, was producing a series for Vice called Russian Roulette. During this time, Simon was kidnapped by militants in eastern Ukraine and kept in a cellar for three days. We’ll talk to Simon about what it’s like to be held in captivity as a journalist and what scares him about the state of journalism in America. And then we’ll round this out by looking at the global context of press freedom with Clayton Weimers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. He’ll tell us about the brand new World Press Freedom Index, which is out today. But first, my conversation with CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter. Brian, welcome to Runaway Country. Brian Stelter, I’m thrilled to have you on this podcast. I am sorry for the week that you have had and it’s only Wednesday as we tape this, but let’s start with the last couple of days. You were at the dinner on Saturday. I saw you doing live coverage on CNN. And now we find ourselves in a moment where the administration is blaming the media for some of the motivation for people to go out and try and attack the president. And the president is launching a full on assault against ABC News for jokes made by Jimmy Kimmel. But the media went from being part of the target on Saturday night to seen as the culprit as we sit here five days later. How’s a week been for you?

Brian Stelter: You know how sometimes time feels like it slows down and sometimes it feels like speeds up? That’s what this week has been like. There have been moments that have happened in slow motion and then there have been moments that has been fast forwarded. So I’m sure that once I finally get a good night’s sleep, it’ll make a little more sense to me. Alex, were you in the room? I remember seeing you on Friday night at the parties. Were you there on Saturday?

Alex Wagner: I was not. I avoid that dinner for many reasons.

Brian Stelter: I figured you did. You know, listen, I get to say I was there for work, you know, because for me it was actually a media event and all my sources are in the room and that’s what I was doing on Saturday. I hadn’t even gotten to my table yet. I was on the other side of the ballroom talking to people from NBC and from Comcast. When, and I actually was already crouched down. I just realized this the other day when memories had started to come back. I was already crouched down because everyone else was eating. So I, you know how you go over to someone’s table and you kind of, you don’t want to be standing over them, so I was bending down. So I was like kind of already on the ground talking to a couple people and then I don’t quite remember how it happened but it was very sudden everybody else was on the round as well. And because I instantly called into the CNN control room and got my camera phone onto the air I feel like I almost had like a shield. You know, sometimes in these situations, you feel like your phone is a shield, so you are disassociated, you are somehow one step removed because you’re looking at it through your phone. So that is why, for me, it’s taken a little while to make sense of it. But I now realize that what everybody in the room went through was the equivalent of not an active shooter, but an active-shooter drill, an unannounced active-shooter drill. There’s like a dozen different ways it could have gone really badly. It could have been a shootout, yes. There could have a been a stampede. There could’ve been all sorts of things that could’ve gone wrong. Listen, I have to admit I was thankful to see officers rushing into the ballroom, but I was also aware that some of them were pointing their weapons toward the crowd. So, like I said, there’s a dozen ways it could’ve ended in tragedy. And what I’ve sensed in the last couple days, we’re talking on Wednesday, it’s been half a week at this point, I think the people who were there, the politicians, the journalists, some people are having a harder time than others. And everyone’s working on a different timeline, in terms of making sense of it and talking through it and processing it. So I get that it’s gonna take time for folks, because. You know, look, Alex, people that were there, they’re just like school children who have been in classrooms. They’re just people that where at the mall last week in Louisiana who had to run for their lives. This is like an ordinary experience in America, unfortunately.

Alex Wagner: But I mean, not, you know, usually the schoolchildren who make it out of a school shooting aren’t then vilified by the president. I’m just stunned that the reaction from this White House has been to suggest that the media is creating the problem, is giving rise to hateful acts like this. And that the lawsuit right now is not against, oh, I don’t know, gun manufacturers or the focus isn’t on mental health or whatever. It’s the president’s focusing his aim at the media because he doesn’t like what he’s hearing coming from the media. I just think it’s a stunning turn of events. As someone who covers the media, so with such a gimlet eye.

Brian Stelter: Wait, were you really surprised? Here’s what surprised me. I thought Trump would go after the press on Saturday night. Like, I thought, you know, so this happened at 8:30, 8:35 p.m. You know, Trump spoke in the White House at 10:30. I kind of figured that at that press conference, he was gonna blame the press for inciting violence. So my surprise was that he was very calm and composed and respectful on Saturday night. And it wasn’t really until Sunday when he complained about Norah O’Donnell, and then Monday when Karoline Leavitt blamed us for everything. I you know gosh, I guess I’m so I don’t know what that means about me that I expected this instantly. [laughs]

Alex Wagner: Well, I mean, you know, it’s a sign of the times, right?

Brian Stelter: It is a sign of the times.

Alex Wagner: You thought that it was going to happen on Saturday night and took all the way till Sunday morning for the attacks to start happening.

Brian Stelter: I guess overall, one of my fears during Trump 2.0 in general is that knowing what we know about the president’s rhetoric toward the media, that he will weaponize any event in order to further demonize the media. And so it makes sense that that’s where we are now. But you know, what you’re saying is what we should never lose sight of, that for some reason in America, we always skip the gun conversation, and it doesn’t have to be a gun control conversation, but just a gun conversation. Just a violence conversation. And for some reason, we do always skip that.

Alex Wagner: Well, I mean, I think that [both speaking] not all of us, not all of us. Let me let me just talk to you a little bit more about the relationship this White House has to the press, because before the event, if people aren’t familiar with this clip, I think we have it. You asked Karoline Leavitt the White House press secretary whether Trump believes in a free press and you brought up his efforts to demonize the media. Let’s just let’s just play that for people who missed it.

[clip of Karoline Leavitt]: He’s definitely the most accessible president we’ve ever had. So.

Brian Stelter: So I know you say he’s very accessible, but so often he tries to demonize the press. Is he coming here tonight admitting that the free press is an important part of the country and that actually he’s conceding that by showing up for the first time?

[clip of Karoline Leavitt]: Well, of course he believes that. That’s why he talks to journalists personally. Half of this room will have his personal phone number. And have spoken to him, he takes their calls, he answers their questions, and he tussles back and forth, too. I think he likes to hold people accountable.

Alex Wagner: Okay, okay, okay. When I think of the word accessible, I don’t think hostile is embedded into that definition. Like accessibility to me means open door, let’s have a conversation. Accessibility does not mean being asked a tough question and calling someone a horrible person and a disgrace. That’s not like what connotes accessibility to me. What do you think about the, I mean, and I would guarantee you, Karoline Leavitt believes the same thing in the aftermath of everything Trump has done and said in the last 72 hours. Would you buy the definition of accessible as written by this administration?

Brian Stelter: Well, I think accessibility has never been the problem. I think the problems have been accuracy and decency, and those remain problems today, just as they were last week. She’s using a narrow definition of accessible, and in some ways it lets her press office off the hook by saying, well, y’all have his phone number, so you know how to get a hold of him. And you know the reality is and by the way, I don’t have his number nor am I that interested I know my CNN colleagues can can reach him when need be. But that two or three minute phone call to the president is is no substitute for real access for real press conferences for real accuracy by the I mean, but don’t you think the real problems are accuracy and decency. Indecency is what we basically are talking about every day in one form or another, whether it’s weaponizing the government, or calling a reporter Piggy, or telling a reporter to shush, or calling one maggot. All of that, the throughline is indecency.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, and I think tough questions are not an expression of indecent behavior. That is the role of the press on behalf of the American public.

Brian Stelter: Yeah, nor even disrespectful behavior.

Alex Wagner: Exactly.

Brian Stelter: Tough questions are a sign of mutual respect for the public being the actual reason we’re all here.

Alex Wagner: More with Brian Stelter right after this break.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Okay, so let’s get to where we sit today, which is a fairly unprecedented maneuver on the part of the administration. The president and his wife did not like a joke that Jimmy Kimmel made on last Thursday about Melania being an expectant widow. There is nothing to suggest that Jimmy Kimmel had any inkling about what was gonna happen on Saturday.

Brian Stelter: No, no, of course not. Nor was it a call to violence, nor was it call for anyone to do anything terrible.

Alex Wagner: It is literally like a classic roast joke.

Brian Stelter: It’s kind of a boring joke. It’s like we’ve heard this a thousand times before, right? Melania and Donald Trump, they are very different age groups.

Alex Wagner: Yes.

Brian Stelter: And I also thought the other reference the joke was making was to the, again, very old narrative about them not liking each other very much, which, you know, people can dispute and debate, but I thought that’s what it was referring to.

Alex Wagner: There is a lot to unpack in the Trump marriage. Luckily, neither one of us is an expert in that strange and tortured dynamic. But—

Brian Stelter: I’m glad they’re happy.

Alex Wagner: Trump and his wife and the administration have responded by siccing the FCC on Disney, which is the parent company of ABC, and threatening to revoke Disney’s broadcast licenses. First of all, just as a piece of strategy, this seems way more escalatory than what the FCC tried to do the last time around, which was just to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Are you surprised by it?

Brian Stelter: Um, I am not surprised by it, but I’m slightly surprised by the timing, uh, and the strategy behind it. Day by day, another escalation, another attempt to chill freedom of speech, and we cannot predict the one that will be tomorrow or the next day. So you know, to some extent, all of this is surprising and it’s okay to remain surprised. But here’s why I did see this coming. I was in Florida in February. Was it February or March? No, it was in March. It was last month. I was February for a family vacation in Fort Lauderdale. I was at the airport flying home and Brendan Carr was right in front of me in line to go home. Brendan Carr, FCC chairman, Trump’s pal. So as soon as I saw Carr in line, I realized, oh, he must’ve been in Mar-a-Lago. He must’ve have been at Mar-A-Lаgо with Trump because he had posted a threat against broadcast station licenses the day before. I had just written a story about it. So, Carr and I are talking, you know, he and I do, he is a subject of my news coverage, so I know him well. He recognizes me at the airport. By the way, I’m probably the only person who would recognize the FCC chairman in line of the airport, but you know I…

Alex Wagner: We’re learning. We see his face more often, Brian.

Brian Stelter: I guess, yeah, that’s true. I guess he’s becoming a celebrity. So, you know, one of the things I said to him when we were waiting in line together was, I said, listen, if you actually ever went after a station’s license, well, first of all, none of them are up for renewal until 2028. So all of this is kind of irrelevant. And he made the point that there is a way through the law to challenge a license early, to call it up for a renewal early. So that made me think maybe that’s what he’s planning on doing. And then I said, well, even if you did that, this would take years. This would be a long, drawn-out legal process. And once you have a license, you basically keep the license forever. It’s very hard to take it away. And he hemmed and hawed and kind of implied that maybe there were ways to make it happen faster. So in retrospect, he clearly was thinking about how to do this. He clearly was kind of engaging in the thought process about what this would look like. So… I guess I say that just to keep in mind.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

Brian Stelter: He’s been chairman for over a year now. He’s had plenty of time to game out how this could work. And it seems to me with Kimmel, he sees an opening. However, let me just be fair to our Brendan Carr here. His insistence is that this is all related to DEI, right? He’s being probing Disney over DEI initiatives. I know it’s hard to get through this without laughing. He says that this just the latest step in that DEI probe.

Alex Wagner: I mean, I’m gonna allow myself a moment to be surprised that the reason that we’re talking about pulling ABC’s broadcast license is because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke. I mean what does it tell you about kind of the media that is most impactful for this president that it’s not, I mean it’s, look it, there is coverage of this president that is critical and I think rightly so. A late night comic making a joke about the first lady not liking the president of the United States, like that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. What is it about Kimmel? Is it just that Trump desperately wants to be hailed as a funny, dynamic, interesting person and he can’t handle when there are other funny, interesting, dynamic people who make jokes at his expense? I don’t know.

Brian Stelter: I didn’t pay a lot of attention in psychology class, so I won’t go there, but I see a couple things going on. You know, I think we’re talking about legacy media, the kinds of channels and networks and brands that Trump grew up with, that he cares deeply about and has for decades. We’re also talking about a segment of the media that is actually licensed by the government, right? Unlike CNN, unlike Crooked Media, there is a government relationship there that exists. Historically, that has not been exploited by the government to punish media outlets. But we’re talking about now an administration, and really a MAGA media and a MAGA base that views this as their one shot. I don’t know if it’s their one chance, but views this is as a chance in power to change things. And honestly, if you look at the, you know, take Benny Johnson’s Twitter feed. If you look at the rhetoric, the unhinged rhetoric from some of these MAGA influencers, you get the sense that they never think they’re ever gonna be in power again in their lifetime, so this is the one chance. To reform the broadcast system, to punish stations for liberal programming, to chill critical speech. Like that’s the impression I get when I look at these unhinged rants. And I bring those up because I think those are an important part of the story. I think Brendan Carr is not operating in a vacuum. He is hearing from MAGA media, he is hearing the criticism, he’s hearing the calls to do something. Remember the Trump post to Pam Bondi that he wasn’t supposed to put out in public where it was basically like, do something, you know? That’s what these Trump officials are hearing all the time. Why aren’t you doing something? Why are you just talking? Why aren’t you acting? So here we are. Brendan Carr is taking action.

Alex Wagner: I’m old enough to remember when they would offer these Toys-R-Us, like you could enter Toys-R-Us like before the store opened if you won the sweepstakes and you’d have an hour to grab as many toys as you could off the shelves. This is like the sort of FCC version of that, which is like do as much as you can in the store until the doors open for everybody else. You got an hour alone in Toys-R-Us, what are you going to do?

Brian Stelter: I’m going to send this to Carr. I want him to think about that analogy. He might agree with it. He has a list and it is—

Alex Wagner: I think I’ll just lose my license as a podcaster is what’s going to happen, but please go ahead and send it to—

Brian Stelter: I was going to say, he has a list that’s more than a dozen items long of all of the different—

Alex Wagner: Let’s keep me off of it.

Brian Stelter: No, no, not of people, thankfully, of pressure points. Well, he wouldn’t call them that. He would say actions, bold actions the FCC is taking. Because the point from his perspective is, he is taking action through a variety of ways. A lot of them are kind of nerdy, are in the weeds, about different segments of the media. And like it or not, it’s true. There are all of these different efforts underway. So yes, a DEI investigation, equal time probe of ABC’s The View, looking into retransmission negotiations between different companies. All of these pressure points, NPR, PBS, all of them. And so I think the strategy is put lots of bets out on the roulette table and see which ones work.

Alex Wagner: Go down as many aisles of Toys-R-Us as you can. Get as many different kinds of toys. Let’s just talk about how the moment is maybe different from the last time Jimmy Kimmel’s livelihood was threatened. You, my go-to source for all things media, just tweeted out a statement from the National Association of Broadcasters who were looking at the threats effectively being issued from the FCC to Disney, ABC and the National association of broadcasters is saying, The FCC’s broadcast license renewal process must be grounded in predictability, fairness, and transparency. Principles reflected in the license terms Congress established and later extended. The media bureau, that’s part of the FCC, their nearly unprecedented request for one company, ABC, to quickly reapply for all of its licenses rather than utilize its traditional enforcement process runs contrary to these principles and creates significant uncertainty for all broadcasters.” The statement goes on, but the net-net, Brian, seems to be like, you know, a curse on one is a curse of all of us. And we are going to stand in solidarity with ABC, and we are gonna make known publicly our displeasure that the FCC is doing this.

Brian Stelter: Yes, that was government speak for it back off Brendan Carr like back up get out of the way.

Alex Wagner: That is different. I feel like that’s the lessons learned because last time, you know, Kimmel was ordered off the air, basically ABC slash Disney took him off to the great vexation of their, you know, customer base and people were canceling their Disney plus subscriptions. It was a it was a real problem for their bottom line. And maybe they also just kind of regained their moral compass. I don’t know. But I wonder if you think that this means the, you know, the battle lines will be different this time.

Brian Stelter: Well, we’re talking about the broadcast industry’s trade group, their lobbying group. And if you look on their website, there was no statement back in September when Kimmelgate happened. There was no effort. There have been, like, the story of the broadcasts industry during Trump 2.0 has been, they’re like, you know, ducking, right? Like, trying not to get into a fight, trying to not show up and not to stand tall. So that is why the statement this week is notable, even though it’s like carefully worded and boringly, you know, DC language. It is still a message that there is United Front and that these broadcasters, which are all rivals, they all recognize that what Carr is doing to Disney is dangerous to all of them. So I think something has changed. A couple of things have definitely changed. Nexstar and Sinclair, which are the Trump friendly conservative tilt owned broadcast owners. The ones that pulled Kimmel back in September before ABC benched them all together, they have not taken the same action this time. Partly that’s because, you know, Kimmelgate reminded them that ABC has most of the power here and that benching Kimmel hurt those stations, hurt those owners as well.

Alex Wagner: People like Jimmy Kimmel.

Brian Stelter: That, you know, at least the people that are watching ABC at 11:35, they expect to see him every night. Furthermore, Disney was embarrassed by how it all went down last time, how they flip-flopped, how they suspended Kimmel but then brought him back a week later. They didn’t like all that blowback from Disney Plus subscribers who thought about canceling or did cancel. So all of that was bad for Disney. They don’t want to have a repeat of that. And then I think probably the biggest factor of all here is that Trump is even less popular than he was last year. And I know that he tries to put on a sense of invincibility, but every poll, including ABC’s polls and CNN’s polls, and all the rest, you talk about it all the time. We know the trend lines. I think if you are the head of Disney or if you’re the head one of these other media companies, you can’t be in denial about where the average American is right now, for better or for worse. You know, whatever you think of it, that’s just the reality.

Alex Wagner: Let me ask you one sort of big picture question because you work at CNN and it must be said that CNN is now, well, you are going to be under Paramount slash Ellison control at some point. You’re talking about sort of macro trends.

Brian Stelter: Yeah.

Alex Wagner: In terms of the power dynamic between this administration and its allies and the media firmament in the United States. And it feels for this moment. Like maybe media is realizing like you can stand up to pressure to change coverage or pressure to change talent, you can do it and there’s safety in numbers. What’s your level of optimism about journalism in America in the next three years?

Brian Stelter: [laughs] Oh. I am an eternal optimist, and I think I’m usually right. And I would make the case to you that even though we’ve lived through some really intense free speech tests in the past year, some First Amendment battles, I would argue that we’re mostly passing the tests. Like I wouldn’t give an A plus grade. I don’t know if it’s even an A grade, but Kimmel was back on the air after that drama last September. When media companies have pushed back against Trump lawsuits, they’ve been prevailing in court. The AP, all the legal actions have mostly pointed toward the press and against the president. There are all these data points that say to me that the First Amendment is actually holding up quite well, despite all the pressure that’s happening, and let’s look at Hungary as an interesting example.

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

Brian Stelter: This Kimmel story is a lot like Victor Orban’s Hungry. Leader wants to silence a comedian is an authoritarian story that we’ve heard from other countries. A leader trying to take control of media outlets and control coverage is a story we’ve heard out of Hungary. So I think Orban’s loss is a part of the story also. I think that we look at that and we see that people, not just in America, but in other countries, sometimes reject this behavior.

Alex Wagner: Especially when the autocrats in question painfully mismanage the country’s finances.

Brian Stelter: Well, right. There’s a lot of layers to it.

Alex Wagner: And destroy the health care and education systems while they’re at it.

Brian Stelter: And then the corruption story was a big part of what happened in Hungary and, you know, the word corruption is increasingly being used in the U.S.

Alex Wagner: Yes, luckily we have that we have all that going for us as well.

Brian Stelter: But to the extent that we hear about shady business dealings and financial self-interest of the Trumps, where are we hearing it from? Well, we’re hearing it it from journalists. And then we’re also hearing from Democratic politicians who repeat it. But most of that raw work is being done by newsrooms. So I’m an optimist mostly because the news is still getting reported, the stories are still being told. Yes, these media companies are under pressure, but it’s complicated. You mentioned Paramount, right? Trying to buy CNN and the rest of Warner Brothers Discovery. And I’ve been chronicling for months how Paramount has tried to have cozy relationships with the Trump administration. Right before the Correspondents’ Dinner, Thursday night in DC, there was this private dinner with Paramount CEO David Ellison and Bari Weiss and President Trump and a few CBS Correspondence. Kind of a strange situation because it was a closed press dinner with the press, right, with a news outlet. And, you know, there were some questions asked about what was going on inside that dinner. So then on Sunday, flash forward to Sunday. Who gets the first interview with Trump, the on-camera interview after the shooting incident? CBS, Paramount, Norah O’Donnell, 60 Minutes. And that interview was probing, it was fair, but it was tough. It’s exactly what I think the public wanted and expected to see out of CBS. So you see me kind of balancing the scales here, okay, you have an unusual dinner, an impression of schmoozing between Paramount and Trump over here on Thursday, but then you have strong journalism happening on Sunday. So as long as I see that that strong it as long we continue to see that happening I think that’s a part of the story of Paramount and Trump that we need to recognize. And that’s again the kind of, that’s why you’re hearing Optimistic Brian today.

Alex Wagner: Optimistic Brian, who’s hurting himself for insults hurled his way in the way of all journalists asking the tough questions, but believes in the journalist’s ability to get answers to those questions.

Brian Stelter: And it’s still happening, it is still happening. And, you know, there’s a lot of data points that indicate that even though a lot of people have tuned out of the news, there’s still a lot of the rest of us still paying attention, right?

Alex Wagner: It is great to have you on this program, Brian Stelter. As I say, I get all my media news from you and you are an invaluable resource for us as a country and a public. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for spending a little time with me and please come back again soon.

Brian Stelter: Thank you, you just made my day with that, thanks. [music plays]

Alex Wagner: Coming up next, my conversation with journalist Simon Ostrovsky, what it is like to report from a place where press freedom is not recognized.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Simon, thanks for coming on to Runaway Country and what a week to be talking about dangerous facing journalists. So we’re recording this in the wake of the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. And this is coming out on the same day that the World Press Freedom Index shows journalism very much in danger around the world and even in especially here in the United States. You know a thing or two about perils that face journalists. Take us back, if you could, to your time reporting for Vice and your kidnapping in the eastern Ukrainian town of Slovyansk, I think it is. For people who aren’t familiar with the story, what were you reporting on and what happened?

Simon Ostrovsky: Sure, and I mean, I was actually at the hotel where the White House Correspondents Dinner was when the shooting happened, so.

Alex Wagner: Oh wow.

Simon Ostrovsky: It was pretty scary, although I wasn’t at the dinner. I was on the second floor at the bar of the hotel. And so we were all a bit confused at the upstairs lobby when all the action was taking place downstairs and rumors were spreading around the building like wildfire. I mean, there was a good 10 minutes when everybody believed that there was a dead body and the shooter had been shot.

Alex Wagner: I mean, in those situations, as you know, it’s very kinetic and the information is not coming with great clarity. And the cell phone reception at the Washington Hilton is garbage. So in a way, the people inside the building were getting less information than the people outside the building. That’s so crazy that you were at the Hilton and you’re also a journalist who’s been kidnapped and faced, you know real extreme danger. Was that PTSD? I mean, what was that like?

Simon Ostrovsky: Well, you know, it’s funny, actually, because I just got back from Chernobyl. I was doing a story about the 40th anniversary of the nuclear accident and. I spent like about two days telling people about what it was like doing that before the correspondence dinner shooting completely eclipsed that entire experience and made it feel like just a walk in the park, honestly, because I didn’t feel unsafe while I was in Chernobyl. But here in the center of Washington, D.C. Um, there were a couple of moments that were scary and thank God nobody got seriously hurt. So all’s well that ends well. But uh, yeah, you know, it’s been a long time since my particular kidnapping incident, which was back in 2014. So the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2014 were very fluid and very confusing and there was no defined front line. And the Russian, or what they were called at the time, pro-Russia forces, which were actually emerged later, completely backed by Russia and armed by Russia, and even manned by Russia were sporadically taking over towns in eastern Ukraine and taking over important highway crossings and roads and so forth and putting their checkpoints on them. And we had to go through all of them to move around the area. One of the first towns to be completely taken over was this city called Slovyansk, and because it was new and it had just happened, all the journalists decided to post up there, and the so-called people’s mayor of the town, a guy who had essentially usurped power in the city, kidnapped the mayor and declared himself to be the people’s Mayor, was having these press conferences every day. Uh… And that uh… The international press corps was gathering I mean you have to remember how unprecedented what was happening in eastern Ukraine was at that time.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, little did we know we’d just Russia would start trampling all over sovereign countries, but at any rate.

Simon Ostrovsky: But it was a big surprise and this town getting taken over seemed like the next step in a new annexation that was going to happen in eastern Ukraine. So everybody was there and everybody was interested in what this so-called people’s mayor had to say. And a lot of what he was saying didn’t make any sense at all. And so, you know, a lot the questions at the press conference, from myself included, were putting those statements under scrutiny.

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

Simon Ostrovsky: And I think, looking back, because of my reporting at Vice, we had this style where we didn’t use voiceover to cover people’s conversations. We used subtitles. And so my interviews were carried out in Russian, and the responses came from local people in Russian. They were subtitled. What that meant in practice was that local people could view my reporting and understand 70% of what my stories were about. So as a Russian speaker, if you watched it, you probably wouldn’t know what was being said. Anyway, I got a lot of followers on my reporting that weren’t just our audience in America. They were our audience and Russia and in Ukraine because everybody could understand. And I think that’s why they decided to target me specifically of all of the foreign reporters that were there. They were most mad at me. Because they knew what I was saying.

Alex Wagner: Wow. What was captivity like?

Simon Ostrovsky: It was terrible. I mean, it was, bar none, the worst experience of my life. It was three days of hell. And it wasn’t because of how I was mistreated, which I was. I was blindfolded and beaten up and threatened and thrown in a literal dank basement with a bunch of other detainees. But it was this sense of not knowing what was going to happen next. That really makes the experience terrifying. And it’s just like we were talking about at the Hilton Hotel, there was 10, 15 minutes there when we didn’t know whether the incident was over. And those were the most worrisome 10, 15 minutes of the entire experience because we didn’t know if there was another shoe left to drop. And this was three days of that where I didn’t know whether I was going to make it out alive at any point in the sort of 72 or so hours that I spent there. And that was the most terrifying thing, because the Russian special forces that were posing as local rebels who had organized and orchestrated the entire so-called Russian Spring were I’m using this kind of, I suppose, I’ve learned since then, common practice of… Of receiving prisoners by intimidating them and brutalizing them in the first sort of day or days of their captivity in order to show you who’s boss so that you fall in line. And that involves mock executions and threats of death and humiliation and insults. So that was probably the first 10 hours. Of my experience there, and then eventually I was sort of allowed to stay with the rest of the people in the cellar who had already been through that and sort of things took on a more kind of normal pattern where they would bring us food and there were cigarette breaks and we can go to the bathroom and things like that, but.

Alex Wagner: Brutal. But brutal. I mean, the sense of vulnerability, the not knowing whether the worst was yet to come, I can imagine that’s just devastating and terrifying when you’re in captivity. When you think about that, that’s an experience that you had in Russia, right? But here you are sitting in the upstairs of the Hilton Ballroom or that you’re sitting in the upstairs at the Hilton Hotel and there’s a gunman, which I’m sure at some point, nobody knows who the target is. Maybe it’s just a mass shooter, maybe it someone targeting journalists, maybe it’s someone targeting the president and his cabinet. We know from the suspect’s manifesto that it’s probably the president and his cabinet, but it just as easily could have been a gathering of some of the most prominent political journalists in the country.

Simon Ostrovsky: Yeah, we had no idea.

Alex Wagner: You know, when you think about the way in which journalists have been targeted in Russia and in other parts of the world, whether in some parts of world they’re killed, they’re captured, do you imagine anything like that ever happening in the United States? I mean, what’s your level of confidence at someone who’s actually been through this? And then was at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.

Simon Ostrovsky: Well, I think what’s really worrying is the demonization of journalists in a lot of quarters, where we get lumped in with some of the online propagandists who don’t behave as objective journalists who check their information. And therefore, we sort of get painted with the same brushes, people who are basically influencers on the internet. And when we get lumped in… We’re sort of branded and it makes it easier for people who are justifiably upset with what is happening online and what is in this country with seeing us as part of the problem and declaring us to be the enemy. And so you do get this sense that at any moment there could be an attack against journalists because of this permissiveness that I. That I want to say exists in the current discourse in the United States, and the government officials play a big part in that too, because they openly berate at press conferences journalists and insult them to their face and call them the enemy when they’re speaking to the public. What’s surprising to me is I’ve never been in a White House press conference, but what’s to me is that the journalists just sort of sit there and take it. You know, when I see that kind of humiliation, you’re just gonna take it because it’s the president of the United States or it’s the spokeswoman. I mean, okay, sure, maybe you’ll get kicked out and you won’t be able to come back and somebody else will have to do the job for you. But at some point you gotta ask yourself, like, do you have any self-respect?

Alex Wagner: Well, I got to wonder what you thought when you heard, I mean, to that end, the president is asked a question by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and his response. It’s about the the suspect’s manifesto. And he’s he responds and says, you’re a horrible person. And then he later calls her a disgrace. And there is—

Simon Ostrovsky: I saw that.

Alex Wagner: What did that what did what did you hear when you when you heard him call her a horrible person and a disgrace?

Simon Ostrovsky: I mean, what I didn’t hear was her push back on that at all. You hear about people walking out of interviews. I’ve had people walk out of interview, rip their microphone off. Um, and I suppose, you know, you could put it down to journalistic professionalism, having thick skin.

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

Simon Ostrovsky: Sort of being willing to take the abuse to further the goal of what you’re trying to do with getting the information to the public. But I think sometimes we take that a little bit too far. You know, we’re not just punching bags for the people that we’re interviewing. We’re trying to do a job. And if you get disrespected, like, I mean, if if somebody treated me like that in an interview, I would probably end the interview. And I would say to them, you don’t have the right to speak to me in this way. And if my editors wanted to then go and punish me for that, so be it. But I think we’ve got to stand up for ourselves more. And we’ve gotta sort of take the fight to the people that we’re interviewing in a more active way than we do at this point, I think.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, I think there are just a lot of things that were happening in that interview. The first is the access piece, which is something journalists, especially ones covering the White House, are loathe to have rescinded because getting in there and getting the pass is difficult as it is. There’s the corporate overlords at CBS, the Ellisons who have tried to explicitly curry favor with this administration. And then there’s just the being freaked out, I think, which you can see a little bit of that dynamic of being called horrible names by the President of the United States. Just as a person, I think that that’s kind of withering, but I understand.

Simon Ostrovsky: It’s happening every day.

Alex Wagner: Yeah and I understand what you’re saying about not only is it not okay to treat members of the press like that because they’re representatives of the American public, it also establishes a new normal that it is routine for the president to call journalists pigs and enemies and disgraces and that we journalists and therefore honestly the American public should accept uh verbal abuse if not worse coming from the president of the United States and his administration.

Simon Ostrovsky: Yeah, I think that’s very eloquently said, because it sort of sets the tone for what is acceptable, you know, just as you described, and it’s totally unacceptable. It’s acceptable from anybody on the street to talk to you with disrespect like that, but especially from one of our highest officials, from our highest official. Yeah, it’s been something actually that’s been bothering me more and more lately, that I’ve been running through my head and wondering, you know, how would I react if I was put into a similar situation? Because I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my two decades as a journalist, and I think it was probably the worst treatment I ever got was at those press conferences that I was describing before I got kidnapped. Um, where the, uh, the so-called people, people’s mayor of Slovyansk, um, was accusing me of being partisan and lying and, you know, bringing fake information, uh, to him in my, in the form of my questions. Um, because, you, know, simply because I was questioning the narrative, uh that he was putting out there about. You know, Ukrainians being a fascist regime that deserved to be suppressed. And we know how that ended in my situation. You know, when people are talking to you in that kind of language and when people are being aggressive, there’s something behind it. There’s something that they want to do. And I think they’re going to go, this is the signal that they wanna go after us and they want to do bad things so, like with any bully I think you have to push back.

Alex Wagner: And I would just say, there often, it’s not just one journalist in the room, it’s many journalists in the rooms when Trump does this, when administration officials do that. And it is incumbent upon all of us in the room and otherwise to push back, not just the target of the present assault.

Simon Ostrovsky: We also need the backing of our editors, you know, our news organizations and our editors have to have our backs. We need solidarity. We need them to know that when we’re put in difficult situations, we can count on them to support us and be behind us and take our side. Even if it’s not, you know temporarily conducive to the bottom line and that you lose access. One of your reporters loses access. They shouldn’t be punished for that because this job isn’t about being humiliated on a day-to-day basis. That’s not what we’re here to do, and we shouldn’t have to take that.

Alex Wagner: Well, Simon, I think it’s very telling that the verbal assaults were coming before the actual assaults when you were covering the beginning of the war in Ukraine. It’s super essential to have your perspective on all of this. I’m really grateful for it. I am glad that you’re okay. I’m sorry that you were at the Hilton. Also, if I see you anywhere, I’m walking the other way immediately.

Simon Ostrovsky: Trouble follows.

Alex Wagner: Trouble follows. Simon, thanks for joining Runaway Country. It’s great to have your perspective and your thoughts and your shared experience.

Simon Ostrovsky: It’s been great to be on the show, Alex, thanks for the invitation.

Alex Wagner: What does this all look like at the global level? After the break, my conversation with Reporters Without Borders executive director, Clayton Weimers.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Clayton, thank you for joining me to help me get a better assessment of what exactly is going on around the world and here at home as far as it concerns, one of our most important freedoms, freedom of the press, freedom speech. You guys are out today, Thursday, with your kind of Bible of press freedom, which scores countries around the world on on how free and fair their press is. And I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, this is the lowest scoring year for press freedom across the entire world. Is that right?

Clayton Weimers: That’s true. So if you look at the raw scores that we give every country, the aggregate score of every country put together has never been lower and we’ve reached a point where more than half of the countries on this map behind me are either in red or dark orange, which are the worst places you can be at the trend is definitely going in the wrong direction.

Alex Wagner: Wait, can you just explain to me what it practically means for the scores to be going down? I mean, you guys are measuring this stuff across certain different areas. So for the laymen, what does that mean on a slightly more granular level?

Clayton Weimers: So we look at five indicators of press freedom, economy, safety, legal infrastructure, political climate, and socio-cultural climate. And we’re seeing declines pretty much across the board in those five indicators. Those indicators get their individual scores, and then we put those together for the full country score. And that’s how you get a ranking in the end. But the indicator this year that has taken the biggest hit is that legal indicator. And it’s been pretty consistent across the board. And when you dig into it, you see what’s happening is essentially two things. One, you have legal infrastructures that are intended to protect press freedom are eroding, crumbling, under attack, or just weakening in general. On the other hand, you have laws that are maybe intended for national security or government secrecy purposes that are now being weaponized increasingly against journalism in the name of protecting national security, but we all know what’s going on here.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, and I want to dig into the security piece a little bit because that sounds all very familiar when I look at what’s happening here in the United States. I know if we talk about our own country, we’re now 64 on the list. The US went down seven spots. Can you elaborate? I mean, I have a guess as to why we’re less free than we were last year, but maybe you can on the factors that led to the U.S. falling seven spots.

Clayton Weimers: Definitely. Well, this is a new all-time low for the United States on the index. Now, obviously, anyone who’s been paying close attention or even a little bit of attention has noticed that the president of the United State is extremely hostile towards the press. In Trump 1.0, that really manifested itself in daily insults and attacks and you are the enemy of the people and the failing New York Times and all that stuff, which, you know, the greatest hits that we all know and love. But at the end of the day, You know, it was damaging, but it was rhetoric. In Trump 2.0, the big difference is his administration has taken some really concrete steps to weaken our institutions, especially freedom of the press. And that’s gonna stay with us for years, if not a generation. And I’m talking about things like defunding public media. Going after the U.S. Agency for global media and Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, suing media outlets and forcing, in some instances, capitulation in the form of the multimillion-dollar settlement payments that were totally unwarranted, weaponizing government agencies like the FCC and the Department of Justice to go after both individual journalists and media outlets. So just. This week, we’ve had the FCC come out and say they are looking at revoking all of ABC’s licenses because the president can’t take a joke. We’ve also seen the Department of Justice go after journalists, Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had both her personal and professional devices seized and taken away by the FBI in a raid that I always try to avoid using this word in the Trump context, but it’s unprecedented. You know, sometimes the word keeps getting used because it’s the only apt one. We haven’t had an instance of the FBI just going in and seizing journalist devices in quite this way. And she wasn’t even the target of the investigation. So that’s really started with stuff.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, and especially when you stick through the list, it’s just and culminating in this week where he’s talking about revoking the entire broadcasting license for a network because a comedian on that network made it a joke a week ago that he and his wife didn’t like. When you say these kind of changes in the U.S. Are here to stay or that they could be longer than the next several years that Trump serves, how do you see that happening? I mean because I think a lot of people think. Okay, well, we have a bully and a demagogue and maybe even an autocrat in office who’s wielding every lever of power he has against anyone who’s critical of him. But the reasonably minded people that inherit the White House after Trump, presuming it’s not JD Vance or Marco Rubio or someone who studied at Trump’s knee, do you actually think that this is a structural change to the way in which we curb freedoms in terms of the press in the United States.

Clayton Weimers: Well, it’s kind of up to all of us whether or not these changes are here to stay. And some of it can be swept away with an election. You know, the name calling from the podium, banning the AP from the White House because they won’t call it the Gulf of America. You know those things won’t last into. An administration that values press freedom a little bit more. But some things will stay the same. Public media had all of its funding taken away. That can’t just come back overnight. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has shut down. Similarly, the Trump administration took Voice of America off the air around the world. It’s lost its audience of over 300 million people worldwide. You can’t just get that audience back. You certainly can’t win the trust back once people think that you’re actually just propaganda for the U.S. Government. Now, talking about structural problems, I would be remiss not to point out that it’s really easy to think this is just a Trump problem. It’s not just a Trump problem. And so you alluded to this by saying we fell from 57th to 64th this year. We were already at 57th.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, right.

Clayton Weimers: I think that’s kind of surprising to a lot of people who say, well, we have the First Amendment and we have a pretty robust press that’s always a thorn in the side of the government. Now, all of that’s true, but the U.S. has been experiencing a sustained decline in our index for the better part of the past decade. And that spans multiple administrations. It spans Congress going back and forth between both parties. And what that tells me is these are structural deficiencies that we have not addressed. And Trump is an exacerbating factor. He didn’t cause all these problems, but he’s pouring gasoline on the fire.

Alex Wagner: I kind of wonder if we could dig into the legal piece of it, because to me, that seems the most alarming development in all of this, the way that the justice system is being weaponized to prevent people from telling the truth. And also, when we talk about the permanence of all this, perverting the legal system is not something that’s easily unwound based on if there’s a new administration in town. There’s a precedent that’s been set, and the legal you know, our body of law and the courts are very much, well, accepting some of the Supreme Court decisions, precedent is important, right? So can you talk a little bit about the ways in which the manipulation of the legal system is maybe even more pernicious than the usual methods of attacking the press and curbing its freedom?

Clayton Weimers: Definitely. I’ll come back to that Hannah Natanson example, the Washington Post reporter, the justification that the FBI used for why they were permitted to, or in their view, permitted to seize her devices was they thought she may have violated the Espionage Act.

Alex Wagner: Right.

Clayton Weimers: That is a big… Step in a direction that the Justice Department has never really been willing to go in the past. And so, people will remember Julian Assange was being prosecuted under the Espionage Act and that was the whole debate there is, did he violate the Espionage Act by publishing government secrets? And back then, the reporters without borders position was Julian Assange may not be a journalist. But what you think he is doesn’t really matter here because the DOJ’s indictment just describes journalism. It describes working with a source to obtain government information and then publish it. And that’s what Assange did. And that as it stood could have included any journalist or any publisher who published anything based on government secrets. And those were charges that were brought by Trump 1.0. Famously, President Obama did not want to go there because of the quote “New York Times problem.” They could not figure out a way to indict Julian Assange without opening Pandora’s box and potentially opening a precedent to using the Espionage Act to go against journalists, which we haven’t seen since World War I. Now… This is one of those legal structural deficiencies that we have just failed to address over the years and that has left the door wide open to abuse. The Espionage Act is this archaic law that was written during World War I. I have talked to Senate staffers who said they had to go audit a law school class before they felt comfortable even starting to write an amendment to the law because they couldn’t understand what it said. When a law is written that vaguely and so impossible to understand, it’s desperately in need of reform. And Donald Trump is now illustrating exactly the problem, because the Espionage Act does not distinguish between a spy and a journalist. That’s a huge problem.

Alex Wagner: Because in the wake of September 11th, the U.S. enacted these laws to prohibit the dispersal and the exchange of defense secrets and national security information, we have more infrastructure for secret keeping. And therefore, the violation of those laws governing secret keeping is more, I mean, we’re developing prosecution for this stuff in a way that’s different from other I guess I wonder how much are we part of a global problem and how much are we actually innovators in the field?

Clayton Weimers: Yes. And what I mean by that is I really see it as a feedback loop, an authoritarian feedback loop. We export these types of tactics, but we also are importing them. A lot of what we’re seeing the Trump administration doing this year, we saw in Hungary for the past decade. We saw in Turkey and Russia and Indonesia and the Philippines, it’s not new. There’s a playbook here that’s being shared pretty widely. So none of this has really shocked us or surprised us because it’s what we predicted would happen all along. Maybe the speed at which it’s been rolled out has shocked us. But I remember in. November 2024, just after Trump was reelected, we had a meeting to brainstorm all of the different threats that we thought we should be on guard against in the next Trump administration. And we came up with a list of 24 big picture things. And within the first year of his presidency, he had checked off 20 of them.

Alex Wagner: Wow. Did he get a copy of the list? I’m kidding.

Clayton Weimers: But that just goes to show, this is a playbook that they’re running, it shouldn’t surprise any of us. But the good news is, if they have a play book, we can have a pay book too. We can fight back against these things, and the people of Hungary just said very loudly that they don’t like Orbánism, and ushered in what we hope to be a new era for press freedom and freedom more largely. That can happen here too, but again, I have to stress, one election, not going to solve all our problems. It will be a step in the right direction, potentially, but we need to have a hard conversation as Americans. We value press freedom, or at least we say we do. Why aren’t we doing more to protect it?

Alex Wagner: Well, yeah, and I would say to people who are skeptical that this matters, because you have independent media outlets, and what does it matter if legacy media is under fire? And see, first of all, that doesn’t protect, just going after the biggest guy on the field doesn’t actually protect the other players. But secondly, press freedom, and correct me if I’m wrong here, seems to be almost like a placeholder for freedom more broadly, right? If you have a system where you don’t value freedom of information and freedom of speech and freedom of the press, you probably don’t value other freedoms either, do you?

Clayton Weimers: Press freedom is the freedom that allows all the others. You can’t have any freedom without press freedom. How do you participate in a democracy if you don’t have access to good information? You can make an informed vote without journalism. Similarly, how do you understand the economic forces that control your world? You can do that without someone who’s able to dig in and tell the stories of what’s actually going on. And increasingly, the world is, you know, getting even more complicated in terms of where the power shifts are happening. Who are the major private actors that are important? You know, we have the biggest companies in the world right now didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago. This is a huge change in how the world operates. Simultaneously, we had a huge changes in how people are getting information. And oh, by the way, those extremely powerful companies are the ones controlling the flow of information. That’s a big part of it.

Alex Wagner: I mean, when we talk about how the information ecosystem has changed in the last several years, it bears mentioning, this is in your report, in 2002, 20% of the world lived in a country where the state of press freedom was categorized as good. 25 years later, less than 1% of world, of the worlds population, lives in a a country that falls in the category of good press freedom. What happened, Clayton? I mean, what, I mean less than 1% of the globe lives in a country or lives in a place where there’s good press freedom, how do you explain that? Is that a function of so much of the information going through these major channels like Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and those platforms being censored in parts of the world? I mean how do account for that staggering decline in freedom?

Clayton Weimers: It’s really all of the above. You know, I’ll come back to those five indicators I talked about. And if you dig into the data on all of them, we see things going in the wrong direction across the board. But when you look at those countries that are getting it right, what you see are legal institutions that are powerful enough, not to just punish violations of press freedom, but to prevent them altogether, to disincentivize them. You see a political culture where it is unthinkable for a politician to verbally abuse a journalist, and that has ripple effects all the way down, and that affects the sociocultural indicator, whether or not there’s a high esteem for journalists and for the media at large, and whether there’s high level of media literacy in the country. And then a really important factor, quite honestly, is funding. You know, the economics of the news are crumbling, and it’s not just happening in the United States, it’s happening all over the world. But the countries that seem to have weathered that storm the best are the ones that are maintaining fairly robust public media funding. But here’s the key, it’s independent of political control. It’s not enough to say, oh yes, the government is doling out money, taxpayer dollars are funding the news. You actually need to have institutionalized separation between politicians and the news. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. You end up with state media and propaganda. Nobody wants that. What you want is a plurality of voices. And that’s possible. There are models out there that show it’s possible, but we just don’t have enough countries doing it.

Alex Wagner: Can you put the toothpaste back in the tube though, on the idea of a nonpartisan, nonpartisan fourth estate here in the US? I mean, it’s become, there’s a sense whether it’s accurate or not, that legacy institutional media is hopelessly corrupted by liberal influence. I mean the president was saying this on 60 Minutes. There’s no difference really between the media and the Democrats. You all support the same things. You’re all working in lockstep. I mean once you’ve poisoned the well and have half the country roughly thinking that if you come from a mainstream media outlet, And some independent outlets, you are not doing anything but furthering a partisan agenda. How do you reset on that? I mean, I kind of just wonder, I know this is a philosophical question more than it is a research-based question, but like, can you un-poison that well?

Clayton Weimers: I think you can, but I think it’s very difficult and it’s not gonna happen by chance. It will take a very long time. And that’s why I keep coming back to these structural deficiencies that we need to solve. It won’t be enough to elected administration in the future that respects press freedom. We need one that’s going to actively enact reforms and signal a sea change in how we approach these issues and really try to lead by example. By setting the tone of how we respect the idea of press freedom. And I want to talk about something that I don’t think we do enough of as press freedom advocates in this community. Press freedom is not the rights of journalists. And it sometimes comes across that way because we’re always waving our arms and yelling about a journalist who’s been arrested here or one who’s being killed there.

Alex Wagner: Which is important nonetheless.

Clayton Weimers: But at the end of the day, press freedom is everyone’s right to access reliable information. We defend journalists as a means to an end because of the social function that they fulfill, not because they’re some special class of citizen. And I think that sometimes gets lost in this discussion is when the president attacks press freedom, it’s not that he’s attacking the New York Times or MSNOW or Alex Wagner. He is attacking every American citizen because press freedom is our right. That’s why it’s enshrined in the First Amendment. That’s the only profession that’s actually name-checked in the Bill of Rights.

Alex Wagner: You’re so right. I mean, I think it’s not about thinking about journalists. So they are important. It’s about the people reading the journalism, which is all of us. I got one. We’re going to try and end this on not the most despondent note possible, which is some people are doing it right. And they’re, as usual, people in Scandinavia on every index. Happiness—

Clayton Weimers: And Dutch.

Alex Wagner: I mean they’re just like right there. They’re like right. They’re they’re not Scandinavians, but man, they ride bikes a lot and. Anyway, progressive cultures in Northern Europe. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are in the top five. I assume the Netherlands is up there as well, as you say. What should we be paying attention to or learning from their examples?

Clayton Weimers: One thing that’s really tricky about this is a sort of chicken and the egg question. These are also the countries that perform really well on democratic surveys. So the question becomes, are they strong democracies because they have a free press? Or do they have free press because they’re strong democracies? And I think the answer is once again, yes, because you can’t have one without the other. They reinforce each other. And so it’s not just that we need to. Dig in and reinforce press freedom, we need to reinforce democratic institutions across the board and chief among them is press freedom but doing that alone doesn’t really solve the broader problem and press freedom the whole point here is that it serves democracy and so we need we need be doing an all-of-the-above approach. You look at what’s going on in these countries and they have strong approaches to rule of law. They have strong approach to civil rights and civil liberties. They have a strong approach to freedom of the press. It all works in tandem. So, what I really would hope that we start talking about is a cultural change. How do we get back to this best version of ourselves that we’ve always imagined ourselves to achieving? But let’s be honest, the United States is as much an idea as it is a country. And we’ve never fully embodied the principles that were set out in the Declaration of Independence. And we may never get there, but it’s always a goal we should be striving for. I never wanna let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We just need to work every day to do a little bit better.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I don’t think we’re edging towards perfect being the enemy of the good. [laughs] We’re pretty far from it. I think the idea is there’s always a step you can take towards improvement, right? And certainly there are many, many, many steps on our path. Clayton Weimers from Reporters Without Borders USA. Man, thank you for giving us a glimpse into the sickness that ails us and how we might cure it. It’s great to hear from you. Thanks for joining the show.

Clayton Weimers: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Alex Wagner: That is our show for this week. Please don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. And if you’re not sick of me yet, please take a look at my Substack, How the Hell with Alex Wagner. Last but not least, if you have been impacted directly by the Trump administration and its policies, send us an email or a one-minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge thank you to everyone who has written in already. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.