In June, a man entered the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and shot and killed four journalists and a media worker . Their names were Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Wendi Winters, and Rebecca Smith. It emerged later that the shooter had been harassing and threatening the Gazette for years.Earlier this year, a independent music journalist Zachary Stoner was also shot and killed , bringing the total number of members of the press killed in 2018 in the United States to. (The US Press Freedom Tracker has not established the motive in the murder of Stoner, but there are some indications that it could be related to his work.)Before 2018, the last time a journalist was killed in direct reprisal for their work in the United States was in 2007 , with the murder of Oakland-based reporter Chauncey Bailey. In 2017, when the US Press Freedom Tracker —a reporting website and database attempting to systematically document press freedom violations in the United States—launched, we did not anticipate the need to track the number of murdered journalists, or to add a “killed” tag to the Tracker’s incident database.

The journalistic landscape in the United States is volatile, and 2018 has been a harrowing year for press freedom. The Tracker has documented more than 100 press freedom incidents since January, from murders and physical attacks to stops at the border and legal orders.



2018 saw an aggressive uptick in the number of leak investigations by the Trump administration compared to 2017. Five government employees or contractors have been charged with allegedly sharing information with the press—Reality Winner, Terry Albury, Joshua Schulte, James Wolfe, and Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards—and there could be others that have not been publicly reported.



Fewer journalists were arrested in 2018 than 2017, which was marked with high levels of protests, at which numerous members of the press were arrested. Though the number is still disturbing: at least 11 journalists were arrested while doing their jobs this year. In 2018, journalists were also arrested at protests, but others were arrested while documenting police interactions and courtroom proceedings.

Cases counted in 2017: 1

Cases in 2018: 4



Since 2008, the United States government has aggressively prosecuted journalistic sources. In eight years, the Obama Justice Department brought charges against at least eight people accused of leaking to journalists—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden.



At the end of 2017, the Trump Justice Department prosecuted one government contractor in connection with a leak case—Reality Winner. But by the end of 2018, the Tracker has documented another four cases—a significant uptick bringing the total number of prosecutions under Trump up to five.