Rana Ayyub, an Indian investigative journalist and opinion writer for The Washington Post, had to get an Indian court’s permission to leave the country and attend the 2025 PEN World Voices Festival. Patricia Evangelista, a trauma journalist and reporter from the Philippines, who had once felt safer in the United States than her home country, was now speaking virtually.
“It’s just a very strange time,” remarked George Packer, journalist, award-winning author, and a staff writer for The Atlantic.
Summer Lopez, interim co-CEO of PEN America and Chief Program Officer, Free Expression Programs, who moderated the closing night event of PEN America’s World Voices Festival—Under Siege: The Perils of Journalism in an Age of State Repression—offered some statistics. Reporters Without Borders in their annual Global Press Freedom report had said that press freedom globally had dropped from “problematic” to “difficult” for the first time ever. Committee to Protect Journalists recorded the deadliest year in history with at least 124 killed and 361 imprisoned.
The panel, which coincided with World Press Freedom Day, brought the three journalists together to discuss reporting under authoritarianism, tackling misinformation, and what it means to be in the field today.
The purpose of journalism in times of crisis
As a field rooted in recording the moment, it is only natural that journalism shape-shifts to fit the needs of the now. But even as speech gets pinched, the purpose of it holds shape.
Ayyub has had numerous police cases booked against her, most recently for a tweet from 2013 for allegedly hurting the majority sentiments in the country, 12 years after the fact. She said her assets and bank accounts have been frozen and she lives with her parents. She is frequently stalked, including by intelligence officers who have followed her on reporting trips.
Ayyub: “The kind of harassment I have faced is unprecedented. Despite all this, when I go to sleep at night, every day I sleep with my conscience telling me that you’ve done your job, and that’s what journalism means to me.”
Patricia Evangelista: “To operate as a journalist under crisis conditions, you have to work under negotiated expectations. You don’t think about the impact because people will applaud the extraordinary, the brutal. … The reason we do what we do is because, while political moments are fleeting, the atrocities are not.”
The reason we do what we do is because, while political moments are fleeting, the atrocities are not.”
-Patricia Evangelista
Evangalista, previously at Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa’s Rappler, reported on the drug war by former president Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
George Packer: “What is journalism for? It’s for two things: to hold the powerful to account, and the powerful can be state power, it can be financial power, iIt can even be social power; it could be the power of the law. And to tell the stories of people who can’t tell their own stories.”
Packer said though merely reporting events seldom brings justice, record-keeping matters as history will have something to say about abuses and the powerful eventually.
Erosion of truth and the rise of disinformation
Packer: “There are many threats coming at us right now in this country. The most worrying is our own irrelevance. It’s who is listening? Who are we reaching? Which part of the country believes us? How can we get them to believe us? If they don’t, do we even have a common reality, or has truth slowly begun to disappear? And everyone is now quite capable of producing their own reality, which has the consequences of creating a society that’s falling pieces. For me, that’s the real danger going on in this country right now.”
In India, it was Modi being celebrated as a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, if only for a moment, as misinformation made the rounds as tweets and on WhatsApp. Even though fact-checkers got to work, the news had already reached most households, the truth hardly mattering.
Ayyub: “Disinformation has been a political tool and people like us are victims of that because of the kind of narrative that Modi has set. Disinformation is not just on social media. It’s also happening insidiously by mainstream publications. It has made Modi a larger-than-life character … (and) played a big role in these leaders having this kind of power.”
On a personal level, journalists should focus on basing their reporting in reality.
Evangelista: “An autocrat speaks in the language of righteousness and everyone follows through, but the language is always big and broad and vocal. A rallying cry for patriotism. It’s necessary always to clarify the specifics. My job is mostly to ground that in that reality of the everyday, in the people who pay the price, in the lived reality. It’s essential to give the authority back to the vulnerable, instead of the morality to your autocrat.”
Where America goes, the world reacts
The first 100 days of Trump’s administration has been marked by significant attacks on free expression in general and the media in particular in the country. And when America falters, the ripples are felt all over the world.
Ayyub: “People look up to America as this beacon of free speech and democracy, and then they see and think, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ You looked down on us as this uncivilized nation, [now we are] doing better than you are. … When America is unraveling the way it is, it gives other people immunity and impunity because if America becomes like this, why can’t we? Because these are the people who have been telling all this time—we tell the world how you should behave with your press, how you should deal with your human rights. America was never perfect, but there used to be some checks and balances in the biggest democracies around the world. … So I think America is leading the way for all the wrong reasons at this point of time.”
Evangelista: “For a lot of us working from crisis conditions, we would guess why our stories matter to the rest of the world, and we would think of it as cautionary. What we were trying to say is, it can happen anywhere in the world, America is not an exception. … No one is exempted from autocracy. … The moment one thing is allowed, the moment we say well this is okay, this is ordinary, this does not affect me, then you go down and on. We’ve seen it happen to us. And when it happens to the United States, it can really happen to the rest of the world.”
Packer: “It’s just a very strange time. … It’s a jumble of things that we don’t know how to negotiate because we haven’t been through it before. So we just keep doing our job and wait for the other shoe to drop. But my greatest fear is that maybe we just don’t matter enough for them to go after us. We have to make ourselves matter. We have to really hit and dig and write the hell out of things and report the hell out of things. Because I have not given up on the idea that there is a truth and the truth still matters.”
Journalists shouldn’t have to be brave
From challenging governments to reporting on autocratic presidents and from war zones, a journalist’s job has become synonymous with bravery. But some journalists don’t want that title.
Evangelista: “Fear is a good thing for a journalist. … People choose to tell their stories. I don’t live with the danger they are living with every day and they chose to tell their stories. How dare I not, even when I am afraid? So if bravery needs to be spoken about, it’s the people who chose to speak to us.”
Packer: “A lot of the time journalists are being lazy, competitive, narcissistic. We like calling ourselves brave, and Trump has succeeded in convincing a lot of Americans that we are a special interest, that we don’t speak for the country or for freedom or for democracy or for truth, we speak for ourselves. I basically reject that, because, like everything Trump says, there’s just enough truth to it that sticks, if you let it, if you don’t fight it. So I would say we have to resist our own complacency. We don’t know when the test will come. It may not be obvious, it may not be a matter of bravery or buying a ticket to a war zone or writing something that you know is going to get you in trouble with the authorities. It may be the person that you should have talked to, but you didn’t, because you didn’t think they were important enough to talk to, maybe something very small that turns out to be a test of what kind of a journalist you are. We still don’t have the nerve, the inner resources, the guts to know exactly what we’ll do if it becomes like Duterte’s Philippines or Erdogan’s Turkïye or Modi’s India.”
Ayyub: “Please don’t call us courageous or brave, because in a way that expects this heroic act out of us. It expects [less] responsibilities of citizens of this country because they will say, she is brave, and absolve all responsibilities. It deprives me of my vulnerability, it writes off my own weakness, and deprives me of the fact that I am a very scared person. … No journalist should [have to] be courageous or brave to be reporting the truth. Why are we creating an atmosphere in which journalists have to be brave to be journalists and doing their jobs? … I think we need to redefine what brave and courageous in journalism means. We are just doing our job and we should just be allowed to do what we’re doing. We’re not doing anything extraordinary.”
No journalist should [have to] be courageous or brave to be reporting the truth. Why are we creating an atmosphere in which journalists have to be brave to be journalists and doing their jobs?
–Rana Ayyub
Erosion of laws that protect journalists
While there are laws across the world to protect the work of journalists, it might take a different shape going forward as administrations push against boundaries to dismantle the system in order to quell dissent.
Packer: “We have a First Amendment. It is the strongest protection of transgression in the world, and it is as good as the willingness of the public to support it. That’s what we’ve learned. … And once public opinion decides that free expression doesn’t matter—and by the way, this isn’t just the uneducated masses—-this can be the writers themselves who decide that free expression doesn’t matter. Congress, the courts, certainly the executive branch can’t be counted on to take it to the limit against an atmosphere that’s possible for free expression. So I’m fleeing to the First Amendment, and I’m hoping that my fellow writers and journalists will do the same and not make it easy for the autocrats to take it away from us.”
Ayyub: “The government celebrates the constitution but doesn’t believe in the constitution.”
Evangelista: “We have free speech in the Constitution, but in terms of act of law, libel is criminal in the Philippines, cyber libel has a period where you can file a case of more than a decade. So every sentence you write, you could go to jail here. So are there laws protecting journalists? It’s quite the other way around.”
I’m fleeing to the First Amendment, and I’m hoping that my fellow writers and journalists will do the same and not make it easy for the autocrats to take it away from us.
-George Packer
Journalists as activists
As record-keepers, it’s easy to see journalists as someone rallying for the rights of the people. But should they become activists and mobilize people instead of merely being recorders?
Evangelista: “I think we have a job: We have to promise not objectiveness but fairness and balance. I believe in free speech. There are values I hold sacred as a human being and as a journalist. But my job is not to mobilize. My job is to ask people why. I want to understand people, and if people mobilize because of what I write, that’s fair.”
Packer: “We should be activists for free speech, and that’s it. If we’re activists for everything else, we become less good as journalists. And that’s not a philosophical or moral statement. I’ve seen it over and over and over again in practice, in the work of journalists and writers, in periods when it was hard to resist activism, and they begin to lose the voice and the drive and the focus of what they’re actually supposed to be doing. And in fact, it makes it easier for the autocrats. It’s kind of a bonus for the autocrats, when the writers and journalists turn to activism. … Objectivity is a non-existent aspiration, but it’s an aspiration that we can’t afford to let go of. I think activism leads to losing those things that are the core of what we do, and in the end, you will be on the side of the oppressed because you’re a journalist, not because you’re an activist. ”
Ayyub: “We don’t have to be activists to be good journalists, but I do think we need to make a clear distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed when we write our stories. If we speak for the people who do not have a voice, if we speak for the marginalized, if I speak for my journalist colleagues when they are jailed, I shouldn’t be called an activist.”
How to get the public interested in the news?
Packer: “Trump is very good for the business of the mainstream media. It’s sort of a dirty little secret, but whenever he’s in office, subscriptions go up, viewership goes up. So what does that mean? Do we rely on an autocrat to sell stories? It’s kind of an unhealthy relationship that we have with this guy, because we both know he knows he sells newspapers and he gets an audience. I would like to think that in the world without Trump, people will still be interested in the news. That’s the test. Will you be interested in the news if Trump disappears tomorrow? I hope so, because there will still be news.”
Ayyub: “We’ve got to resist the temptation to be popular and just be ready to be unpopular. You’ve got to be ready to be isolated, alone. Some days, you feel insecure, you feel irrelevant. But know that the people out there really believe in your work. … They’re holding on to the fact that you are speaking on behalf of the marginalized.”
Evangelista: “My answer always used to be to tell good stories. Well, maybe that’s not enough. Maybe we’re not telling the story right. But stories are still the currency, so I think we owe it to the people we’ve covered to tell a story as well as possible.”
Want more?
Check out the panelists’ books:
- Gujarat Files: Anatomy Of A Cover Up by Rana Ayyub
- Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista
- Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer
