Challenges to press freedom

Last week, news came of the death of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in a “double tap” strike by Israeli forces. Her killing seemed so blatantly targeted that the Lebanese government has termed it a war crime.

Such violence is not a one off: the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 129 journalists were killed in 2025, the highest figure since the committee began collecting data over 30 years ago. Israel, the committee says, was responsible for two-thirds of the deaths.

Khalil, a loved and respected journalist in her native Lebanon, was simply doing her job. She knew she might be targeted, she had received multiple death threats, but she carried on reporting the destruction of towns and villages across southern Lebanon, and the displacement of communities she had grown up with.

To Antoine Bernard, advocacy director of Reporters without Borders (RSF), her death is the latest example of shooting the messenger. “We are in times where facts have become a target, hence journalists have become more of a target,” he told Inside Geneva.

For more, listen to the latest episode of our Inside Geneva podcast below:

Uncomfortable truths

From the Middle East to Russia and to Mexico, where reporters exposing organised crime are mercilessly slaughtered, and now to the US, where bullying and spurious legal action is being used to silence them, journalists are being punished for reporting truths which are uncomfortable to those in power.

“The role of journalists has never been under such pressure and the sector itself is suffering,” says Irene Khan, who also joins us on Inside Geneva. Khan is the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, and she is especially concerned that we “make sure that freedom of expression and media freedom […] is protected because it is an extremely important pillar of democracy”.

Khan highlights the punitive legal actions increasingly mounted against the media, which she views as “outrageous”, and designed to have a “chilling effect”, making editors nervous to publish. But she also points to the financial pressure: the rise of social media platforms has starved traditional media of revenue and of audience. What’s more, those platforms are flooding the information space with mis- and disinformation, much of it deeply polarising, and very far from traditional facts-based journalism.

Our third guest on Inside Geneva, Chris Morris, a former BBC journalist, is now CEO of Full Fact. The organisation is dedicated to finding and exposing mis- and disinformation in a bid to challenge the harm it can do. “It can sound a bit melodramatic,” Morris says, “but I do think we’re actually fighting for the kind of society we want to be”.

Full Fact also sees a dangerous imbalance between the pressure on professional journalists, and the unregulated, and increasingly unfettered, big tech firms, whose platforms offer “information” which regularly drifts into conspiracy, untruths, racism, and worse.

“Partly we’re fighting against bad actors wherever they may come from,” says Morris, “and partly we are fighting against the big tech companies, who are the most powerful organisations the world has ever seen.”

Freedom of expression has limits

All three of our podcast guests raised concerns about what they see as a manipulation of the concept of freedom of expression. Bernard of RSF points out that press freedom also means “a commitment to facts” and is in that sense “different from freedom of expression”.

Morris reminds us that when American President J.D. Vance spoke to the Munich Security Conference last year, he suggested that “anyone checking facts is censoring their own people. Misinformation is an old, I think he called it an ugly Soviet era word and anyone using it is trying to tell you what to think.”

Of course there is a profit motive behind all the dubious virtue signalling about free speech. The big tech companies, huge contributors to America’s economic success, don’t want any regulation. They don’t like Europe’s Digital Services Act, they have been resisting the UK’s online safety act. But their self-interested defence of “free speech”, now taken up so enthusiastically by the Trump administration, has found resonance.

Bernard fears journalists and mainstream media outlets have been slow to sense the danger. Khan believes the case must be made that freedom of expression does have limits.

“You have the First Amendment warriors talking about freedom of speech without any limit,” she points out. “But what they actually mean is freedom of speech for me, but not for you. Because when that happens, when you have freedom of speech without any barriers, then what happens is that we’ve seen a surge of hate speech, attacks against migrants, attacks, terrible misogynist attacks against women politicians.”

There’s no doubt that professional journalism, a place where facts are checked because they matter, is under enormous pressure. But all our podcast guests told me they found inspiration in the many journalists, all over the world, continuing their work. “I see journalists renewing their journalism, demonstrating bravery, courage, imagination, in the most dangerous and complex situations globally,” said Bernard, “and finding ways to continue reporting facts to their audience”.

“We have to celebrate their courage,” added Khan. “We have to stand up and say journalism is not a crime, it’s an essential pillar of democracy and all of us will be affected if journalism, that pillar is weakened.”

“There are battles ahead” said Morris, “but I think they are battles we can win and they’re certainly worth winning.”

It’s a concerning, but also an inspiring conversation – listen to it in full on Inside Geneva.

Edited by vm/dos