Press Freedom in the Americas Hits Record Low as United States Suffers Most Dramatic Decline in History of Annual Report

By andrew rose|America News World

The Inter American Press Association’s latest index ranks 2025 as the worst year for journalism across the hemisphere since tracking began, with the US falling from 4th to 11th place among 23 nations.

A comprehensive new report released this week has painted a deeply troubling picture of press freedom across the Americas, revealing that the region has sunk to its lowest point for journalistic freedom since tracking began six years ago.

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Jorge Beltran, a journalist who served in the Salvadoran military, poses for a photo on July 22, 2025, after fleeing the country for fear of persecution [Moises Castillo/AP Photo]

Most alarming of all is the steep and dramatic fall of the United States, a country long regarded as a global beacon of free expression and the First Amendment, which has now tumbled from fourth place all the way down to eleventh in a ranking of 23 nations across the hemisphere.

The report, released on Tuesday by the Inter American Press Association, known as IAPA, describes what researchers are calling a dramatic deterioration in unrestricted speech across the region.

The findings represent not just a collection of statistics and rankings, but a portrait of real journalists in real countries facing real consequences simply for doing their jobs.

Murders, arbitrary arrests, forced exile, and rampant impunity have become the defining features of journalism in some of the hemisphere’s most troubled nations, including Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela.

What makes this year’s report particularly striking, however, is not what is happening in authoritarian states where press suppression has long been documented and expected.

What has genuinely alarmed observers and press freedom advocates around the world is what is happening right now in the United States of America, a nation that has historically championed the rights of journalists both at home and abroad.

The report singles out the United States as an area of alarming decline, noting that while journalistic practice in the country technically remains protected by the Constitution and existing laws, the events of last year saw a significant and deeply concerning erosion of the safeguards that journalists depend upon to do their work freely and without fear.

A total of 170 attacks against journalists were recorded in the United States last year alone, a figure that would have been almost unthinkable to most Americans just a decade ago.

The report points directly to the return of President Donald Trump to the White House as a primary contributing factor in this decline.

Under his administration, critics and press freedom organizations have documented what the IAPA describes as the stigmatization of critical journalism, a damaging phenomenon in which news outlets and reporters who hold power to account are publicly attacked, delegitimized, and portrayed as enemies of the people rather than essential pillars of a functioning and healthy democracy.

Additionally, significant cuts to public media funding and the full closure of Voice of America, a long-standing government-funded broadcaster that carried American journalism and values to audiences around the entire world, have been cited as serious and lasting blows to the free press ecosystem within the country.

Beyond the United States, the situation in several Latin American nations has reached genuine crisis levels that demand the attention of the international community. Nicaragua and Venezuela continue to hold the grim and shameful distinction of being ranked as countries entirely without freedom of expression.

In Venezuela, more than 400 radio stations have been shuttered and 25 journalists were detained in the aftermath of the deeply controversial 2024 presidential election. The country scores a devastating 7.02 out of 100 on the report’s press freedom scale and sits dead last among all 23 nations evaluated in this year’s index.

El Salvador tells its own heartbreaking story. Now ranked 21st on the list, just above Nicaragua and Venezuela, the country under President Nayib Bukele has seen 50 journalists driven into exile in the past year alone.

Sergio Arauz, president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador, described what he called escalating repression, warning that journalism simply cannot be practiced freely in a country where the executive branch holds virtually unlimited powers with no effective legal oversight to hold it accountable.

Since 2022, the Bukele government has maintained a sweeping state of emergency that suspended key civil liberties and handed enormous authority to state security forces, all justified in the name of fighting crime.

A newly passed Foreign Agents Law now gives the government additional power to dissolve organizations that receive funding from abroad, a tool that critics say is designed specifically to silence independent voices and media outlets.

Eight nations in total have been categorized as high restriction environments for journalists this year, including Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, Peru, Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and El Salvador. On the brighter end of the spectrum, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Canada, and Brazil were recognized and commended as among the strongest protectors of press freedom anywhere in the hemisphere.

The message from this year’s report is one that every person who values democracy, accountability, and truth must take seriously and personally. When journalists cannot report freely, when they are attacked, arrested, exiled, or killed simply for telling the truth, it is not just journalism that suffers. It is society itself. It is democracy itself. And right now, from Washington to Caracas, across the length and breadth of the Americas, society is suffering deeply and the world is watching.