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To say press freedoms in the U.S. have taken a knock during the first year of Donald Trump’s second term would be a gross understatement.

Perhaps the most glaring example is the Department of Defense’s new policy requiring journalists covering the Pentagon to sign a pledge promising not to use any information that hasn’t been explicitly authorized. But the Trump administration’s attacks on a free press have also included other tactics, like the effort to dismantle Freedom of Information Act processes across federal departments.

The administration’s explicit attempts at censorship work alongside the more insidious ways in which press freedoms are eroded, like the right-wing capture of legacy media institutions and social media platforms by ideologues and billionaires.

“To be clear, all presidents and all elected officials have always objected to their coverage,” David Loy, legal director with the First Amendment Coalition, a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to promote and protect press freedoms, told Truthout. “But the Trump administration has mounted unprecedented attacks on freedom of the press.”

These attacks on press freedoms don’t stop at the federal level, however; they are also being inflicted by local governments seeking to undermine already-embattled local media. In Northern California’s Shasta County, for example, the region’s registrar of voters, Clint Curtis, singled out a local media outlet for exclusion on a press release distribution list after the publication had reported on serious questions about his proposed changes to the electoral process.

It hasn’t been all bad news, with the courts remaining a vital bulwark against such attacks.

In November, Marion County in Kansas agreed to offer an apology and pay a $3 million settlement to end a lawsuit stemming from police raids on the small Marion County Record newsroom and two homes in August of 2023, including that of Record vice president and associate publisher, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died of a heart attack the following day. The raids were precipitated by a news tip the Record had received about the driving record of a local restaurant owner who was applying for a liquor license. The police chief alleged incorrectly that the paper had illegally accessed these records.

In October, a California district court judge sided with the Los Angeles Press Club........

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