NEW YORK CITY, New York: The year 2025 has been a rough one for journalists in the U.S. and many regions of the world.

The number of assaults on reporters in the U.S. nearly equals the last three years combined. The president of the United States berates many who ask him questions, calling one woman "piggy." And that has only added to the thinning ranks.

Worldwide, the 126 media industry people killed in 2025 by early December matched the number of deaths in all of 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and last year was a record-setter. Israel's bombing of Gaza accounted for 85 of those deaths, 82 of them Palestinians.

"It's extremely concerning," said Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "Unfortunately, it's not just, of course, about the sheer numbers of journalists and media workers killed; it's also about the failure to obtain justice or get accountability for those killings.

"What we know from decades of doing this work is that impunity breeds impunity," she said. "So a failure to tackle journalists' killings creates an environment where those killings continue."

The committee estimates there are at least 323 journalists imprisoned worldwide.

None of the journalists killed this year was from the United States. However, there have been 170 reports of assaults on journalists in the U.S. this year, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Many of those reports came from coverage of immigration enforcement efforts.

The Trump Influence

It's impossible to look past the influence of President Donald Trump, who frequently seethes with anger at the press while simultaneously interacting with journalists more than any president in memory, often answering their cell phone calls.

"Trump has always attacked the press,"  said Tim Richardson, a former Washington Post reporter and now program director for journalism and disinformation at PEN America. "But during the second term, he's turned that into government action to restrict and punish and intimidate journalists."

The Associated Press was Trump's first target when he limited their access to cover him because they refused to follow his lead to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Trump has also extracted settlements from ABC and CBS News in lawsuits over stories that displeased him, and is suing The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Upset with the perceived bias against conservatives on PBS and NPR newscasts, Trump and his allies in Congress successfully cut funding for public broadcasting as a whole. The president has also moved to shut down government-run organizations that beam news to all parts of the world.

"The U.S. is a major investor in media development, in independent media outlets in countries that have little or no independent media, or as a source of information for people in countries where there is no free media," Ginsberg said. "The evisceration of Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America is another blow to press freedom globally."

Others in his administration take Trump's lead, like when his press office chose the day after Thanksgiving to launch a web portal to complain about outlets or journalists being unfair.

Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has portrayed journalists as dark figures skulking around Pentagon halls to uncover classified secrets as his rationale for putting in restrictive rules for coverage. Not everyone has taken that lying down.

Most mainstream news outlets handed back their credentials to work in the Pentagon rather than agree to these rules, and are still breaking stories while working off-site. The New York Times has sued to overturn the regulations. The newspaper also publicly defends itself when attacked by the president, such as when he complained about its coverage of his health.

Due to a collapse in the advertising market, the news industry as a whole is more than two decades into a retrenchment, and as a result, every year brings more reports of journalists laid off.

A report by the organizations Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News revealed that in 2002, there were 40 journalists per 100,000 people in the United States. But as 2025 ended, it was down to just over eight.

However, despite these issues, reporters at mainstream media outlets are still working hard and can set the nation's agenda through their reporting.