The Cost of Telling the Truth

The Record

In 2025, 129 journalists and media workers were killed worldwide. It was the deadliest year for the press since the Committee to Protect Journalists began collecting data more than three decades ago. It was also the second consecutive year in which the annual record was broken.

For the fifth consecutive year, more than 300 journalists were behind bars at year-end. China held 50. Myanmar held 27. Vietnam held 16. Asia alone accounted for more than 30 percent of all imprisoned journalists worldwide, and has consistently ranked as the region with the highest number of journalists behind bars since records began in 1992.

These are not abstract statistics. Each number is a person who went to work to document what was happening in their community, their country, or their conflict zone, and did not come home. Each imprisoned journalist is someone sitting in a cell because they reported facts that a government found inconvenient.

Where Journalists Die

The geography of journalist killings tells its own story.

For both 2024 and 2025, the Israeli military was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings worldwide. The Israel Defense Forces has committed more targeted killings of journalists than any other government's military since CPJ began documentation. CPJ reporting has found that no one has been held accountable for any targeted killing of a journalist by Israel since October 7, 2023, or in the preceding 22 years.

Among those killed was Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher and Dropsite News, killed on March 24, 2025, in an Israeli strike on his car near a hospital in northern Gaza. He was one of the most well-known journalists remaining in northern Gaza. Israel accused Shabat of being a Hamas sniper without providing credible evidence.

In Ukraine, four journalists were killed by Russian military drones — the highest annual number of journalist deaths in the war since 15 were killed in 2022. French photojournalist Antoni Lallican was killed by a targeted first-person-view drone strike while reporting in Donetsk on October 3, 2025.

Journalists were also killed in Mexico, India, the Philippines, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia — countries with persistent patterns of failed accountability for press killings. In Saudi Arabia, journalist Turki al-Jasser was imprisoned for four years, then sentenced to death, then executed by the Saudi government.

Where Journalists Are Silenced

Imprisonment is the slower form of the same violence. It removes journalists from the public sphere for years, sometimes decades, and sends an unmistakable message to their colleagues: this could happen to you.

China leads the world with 50 journalists behind bars. The charges are often espionage or national security violations. Veteran journalist Dong Yuyu, a 63-year-old columnist for the state-run Guangming Daily known for advocating progressive reform and constitutional democracy, was arrested in 2022 while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to seven years.

Myanmar holds 27 journalists in prison, most arrested since the 2021 military coup. Journalists are also held in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.

Israel has imprisoned Palestinian journalists covering the Gaza war. The CPJ has documented cases of journalists subjected to torture in Israeli detention, and has called on governments to support independent, unimpeded media access to Gaza.

In the United States, CPJ documented 170 assaults on journalists in 2025, largely involving law enforcement. The Trump administration has threatened media with treason charges over war coverage, prompting CPJ to take what it described as a multipronged approach to addressing the deterioration of press freedom in the United States.

The Impunity Problem

The killings are not the full measure of the crisis. The impunity is.

In the vast majority of journalist killings worldwide, no one is held accountable. The path to justice is elusive even in the European Union: investigative journalist Jan Kuciak was murdered in Slovakia in 2018, and the businessman accused of ordering the killing has been found not guilty twice, with the Supreme Court ordering a retrial after finding procedural errors.

Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while wearing a "Press" vest in the West Bank in 2022. An investigation by Al-Haq and Forensic Architecture determined she was directly targeted. The US government has been criticised by CPJ for failing to pursue accountability for her killing, despite her American citizenship.

CPJ has called for radical reform of the ways governments investigate journalist killings, including establishing an international investigative task force and imposing targeted sanctions.

The Exile Pattern

An emerging pattern is the forced exile of journalists who can no longer safely work in their home countries.

Bolot Temirov, Kyrgyzstan's most prominent investigative reporter, runs anti-corruption outlet Temirov Live from exile in Europe after being beaten following a joint investigation with Bellingcat. Ecuadorian journalists Elvira del Pilar Nole and Juan Carlos Tito have joined a growing exodus of nearly 20 journalists who have left Ecuador in the past two years due to violence.

Tunisian journalist Ramla Dahmani works from outside her country. Two of CPJ's five 2025 International Press Freedom Award honorees were currently behind bars at the time of their recognition. Three had been forced to flee their home countries.

The exile of journalists does not silence them — many continue reporting from abroad. But it removes the local knowledge, the source networks, and the community accountability that make journalism effective. A reporter covering Kyrgyz corruption from Berlin can publish investigations. They cannot attend the court hearing, interview the witness, or be present when the consequences of their reporting play out.

Why This Should Concern Everyone

The instinct, for readers in stable democracies, is to regard journalist killings as a problem that happens elsewhere — in conflict zones, in authoritarian states, in places where the rule of law has broken down. This instinct is increasingly wrong.

The CPJ has documented a deterioration of press freedom in the United States severe enough to warrant a dedicated response programme. In the European Union, the Kuciak case in Slovakia and the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 demonstrated that journalist killings can happen in EU member states — and that justice can be just as elusive there as in any authoritarian country.

The hostile rhetoric towards journalists — "enemy of the people," "fake news," "treason" — that has become routine in several democracies is not merely political theatre. It creates the conditions in which attacks on journalists become normalised. When a government leader describes the press as the enemy, the message to the public and to potential attackers is clear. The rhetoric precedes the violence. It always has.

The 129 journalists killed in 2025 are the most visible casualties of a global press freedom crisis. The 300 in prison are its most sustained victims. The thousands who self-censor, who abandon stories, who leave the profession entirely because the risks have become intolerable — they are the invisible cost.

When journalists cannot work safely, the information that reaches the public narrows. The stories that would hold power accountable go untold. The corruption that would be exposed persists. The violence that would be documented continues without witness.

The cost of telling the truth, in 2025, was measured in lives. The cost of not telling it is measured in everything else.