The conditions under which journalists work have never been more perilous. A quarter-century of painstaking progress is being undone with alarming speed.

This year’s World Press Freedom Day carries an unusually sombre weight. The evidence, assembled by some of the most rigorous monitors of journalistic liberty, points to a global retreat of extraordinary scale. For the first time in a quarter-century of systematic measurement, more than half of the world’s countries now fall into the categories of “difficult” or “very serious” on the principal index of press freedom. The map, as one leading watchdog puts it, grows redder every year.

The numbers are unsparing. Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the Paris-based press freedom organisation that has published its World Press Freedom Index annually since 2002, released its 2026 edition on April 30th. The average score across all 180 countries and territories surveyed has never been lower. What had once been an affliction concentrated in a minority of authoritarian states now touches a majority of nations on earth. In 2002, the categories of “difficult” and “very serious” together accounted for just 13.7% of surveyed countries. In 2026, they account for 52.2%. That transformation represents one of the most dramatic reversals in the history of civil liberties monitoring.