SDF

Ann Marie Lipinski is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She previously served as editor in chief and senior vice president of the Chicago Tribune, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for stories about government corruption. As editor, she oversaw stories that won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting, feature writing, explanatory reporting, and more. She was vice president for civic engagement and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. She is past co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a trustee of the Poynter Institute for journalism.

The world is living through a democracy recession that has spread to countries once seen as inoculated against the threat of authoritarianism. There are many symptoms of this, including government corruption and weakening of fair elections, but one of the most dramatic is the attack on the free press as a fundamental pillar of a healthy democracy. Some media have contributed to a decline in trust by diluting the quality of their journalism and taking a partisan approach to reporting the news. But they now confront increasing violence, imprisonment, economic intimidation, and cyber campaigns spreading propaganda about journalists, all part of a bulging toolbox used to undermine the media. In some countries, the attacks come from the highest political ranks, where “press freedom predators,” as Reporters Without Borders has named them, now sit at the top of a lengthening list of governments. But the victim here is not just journalism―it’s democracy itself.