Feb 5th 2026
Journalists can be infuriating. They simplify. They exaggerate. They sometimes get things wrong. They are disproportionally university-educated, middle-class and a bit left-wing, so their attitudes often jar with the rest of the population. When they act unethically—for example, when the BBC’s Panorama programme aired clips of President Donald Trump that had been spliced together in a misleading manner—people are rightly outraged. Trust in the news media has declined across the rich world, especially since the advent of social media allowed errors in reporting to be more widely reviled. So some people may not care much when they hear that journalism is in trouble. Yet it is in their interest to care.
Press freedom is in retreat worldwide. Since 2014 the global score on an index devised by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a watchdog, has deteriorated from no worse than it is in America today to as grim as it is in Serbia, where journalists covering anti-corruption protests are routinely beaten by police.
This matters for several reasons. It is not just that free speech is the bedrock liberty on which other liberties depend. It is also because critical journalism is an essential check on state power. If the mighty know that abuses will be neither exposed nor publicised, they are likely to commit more of them.
The Economist analysed data from about 180 countries over the past 80 years collected by V-Dem, a Swedish research project. We found a feedback loop between muzzling the media and unleashing corruption. It seems to go something like this. Politicians who want to rob the public have an incentive to gag the press. The tighter they gag it, the easier it grows to steal. And the more guilty secrets politicians accumulate, the greater their incentive to stifle future critical reporting. Our calculations suggest that if press freedom decays from “as good as Canada” to “as bad as Indonesia”, that is a good predictor that graft will rise from “as clean as Ireland” to “as grubby as Latvia”. The process is gradual, metastasising over several years, so voters may not notice until after the next election. It is worse under populist governments, which typically demonise their critics and seek to crush institutions that limit their authority.