Why this May Day leaves me frightened
This is not just a sweet spring holiday, nor a time for ordinary dissent
On what should be a nice spring day, this is what I’m thinking about. (Photo by David Clode on Unsplash)
My sweet mother, born in Indiana in the 1920s, taught me that a little gentleman should give flowers to someone he loves on the first day of May. When I was 8, I gathered a couple fistfuls of violets from our yard and delivered them in a tiny basket to old Mrs. Supple, who lived over our back hedge. By the time I was 10, I was giving May Day flowers to a little girl down the street named Virginia, whose affection for me, alas, did not outlast fifth grade.
Later I learned that there are many different observances of May Day around the world. I’ve twice spent May Day in countries with strong leftist political parties, surrounded by lively celebrations of International Workers Day, including speeches, rallies and parades. Only a bit of that happens in America — including a small but earnest demonstration that I stumbled upon this May Day in New York City’s Union Square. It was a sort of catch-all protest, featuring chants about topics ranging from the evils of capitalism to the abridged rights of Palestinians. There wasn’t a whole lot of energy in it, to tell you the truth, as if the crowd was too well-experienced in the customs of sign-waving and call-and-response protest. So on a spring day too lovely to rile even a partisan crowd to anger, I chose to stroll a few blocks over to a neighborhood bar I knew from decades ago. I sat outside with a beer and a burger, and I felt good.
News reports covered bigger May Day demonstrations elsewhere about what Donald Trump is doing to America. But I kept thinking about what was really the more significant observance for my interests this week, namely, World Press Freedom Day, which by act of the UN occurs each May 3. As it happens, I came into World Press Freedom Day fresh from seeing Good Night, and Good Luck, the nearly sold-out Broadway drama that just earned George Clooney a Tony nomination. It’s a story of brave journalists during the Cold War fighting to uphold their ethical standards in the face of efforts by the government to manipulate the truth.
Re-read that previous sentence, please, but omit the words “during the Cold War.” What you have, then, is the reason you, too, ought to observe World Press Freedom Day — because today, in 2025, we have a lot of brave journalists fighting to uphold their ethical standards in the face of shockingly bald efforts by the government to manipulate the truth, and they have stories to tell. You can find those stories everywhere.
From tough journalists under fire, I learned this week that Oklahoma is implementing a new high school social studies curriculum that requires students to be taught the debunked claims (i.e., lies) of President Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Oklahoma’s new curriculum for public schools also will increase lessons from the Bible, and teach youngsters how the U.S. government is linked to specifically Christian values.
Also this week, from investigative reporters digging into secret government files, I learned about intolerably long wait times for mental health care in my state and how a foundation linked to a key health insurance company contracted by the state seems to be giving away millions of dollars without any public disclosure. Who do you suppose is getting what are essentially taxpayer dollars passed through a charity?
And this week I watched as the brave tradition of CBS News, so brilliantly depicted by Clooney and his Broadway colleagues, teeters on the edge of collapse. The billionaire owner of CBS’s parent company is negotiating with the bully of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over settling a frivolous lawsuit -- filed by the president quite blatantly to punish journalists for telling the truth. Of course, he also threatened to sue The New York Times for writing about his lawsuit in a way that displeased him.
This is not a normal springtime in America; it is a season in which free speech is under siege in what was once a nation with an envied reputation for freedom. Over the decades that I was a newspaper columnist and editorialist, I often wrote about World Press Freedom Day with a sense that for most American readers, it was an abstract matter: We, after all, had the luxury of a press whose freedom would be guaranteed for what seemed likely to be all time by the nation’s Constitution. In 2025, that no longer sufficiently protects us, because we are led by an administration that flagrantly slips past Constitutional boundaries, eager to vaunt its might to impress its advocates and cower its critics, never mind if it ultimately draws a rebuke from some courts with no enforcement powers. Intimidation is the tactic; suppressing truth is the point.
It was against that backdrop that I recorded my regular weekly commentary for Northeast Public Radio. While I usually link to that commentary at the end of this column, I’m going to share its text with you here. That’s because I’ve become convinced that the threat confronting us on this World Press Freedom Day is too important for me to not use every avenue I have — including here, in The Upstate American — to draw it to your attention.
I offer this in yet another context of May Day — namely, the universal cry of distress, signaling a life-threatening emergency. It’s derived from the French venez m’aidez, meaning “come help me.” I’ve done just enough sailing in big water to feel a chill at the very notion of a ship captain or pilot uttering the word “mayday.” But the seas we’re navigating are so troubled that the vessel of our freedom, the First Amendment, is taking on water.
Is it time to call mayday?
If you’re about to get eaten by a shark, you’re not going to be thinking about the need to preserve threatened ocean species, right? It’s the sort of dilemma that often confronts us: whether to focus on an immediate threat or a long-term dilemma. And that’s where we who are concerned about the free press find ourselves these days.
I spent three decades running newsrooms, and more than a decade before that as a newspaper reporter, so you know that freedom of the press must matter to me. And it’s clear, I’d say, that the essential right to free speech — which underlies all other freedoms — has never been more at risk, from both immediate challenges and long-term threats.
We’re observing World Press Freedom Day. Actually, it’s several days of activities, which began Saturday. Each year, World Press Freedom Day spotlights the fundamental human right to freedom of opinion and expression. Right now, that’s at risk, in the U.S. and globally.
But as in many situations, there’s both acute risk and extended peril. World Press Freedom Day this year is focused on the latter — specifically, on artificial intelligence. Around the world, there are ongoing conversations about the opportunities that AI presents for press freedom: It can make information easier to access; it can enable more people to communicate across the world; it can speed how information flows globally.
But AI can also make big tech platforms even more powerful as gatekeepers of information by enabling them to filter and control what people see — which can reinforce biases and political divisions. It can be used to support censorship, to spread false information, to increase online hate speech.
And AI presents a financial threat, too, that could restrict the power of the free press. That is, generative AI tools reuse journalistic content without fair payment — which takes income away from the organizations that create original reporting, like newspapers and not-for-profit journalism organizations — and channels that money instead to tech platforms and AI companies. So the rich get richer, and those who are dedicated to giving citizens the information they need continue to crumble.
So you can see why World Press Freedom Day this year focuses on artificial intelligence. We need a thoughtful global approach to AI. But acting thoughtfully and planning globally are not at all characteristic of the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation these days.
And that’s the shark that’s circling: It’s Donald Trump, with his intentional and brutal attack on the core right of Americans to free expression and to a free press.
From gutting Voice of America and other beacons of journalism globally to barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office because it won’t use the words he tells it to use; from pushing the FCC to investigate media companies based upon what they broadcast to threatening to subpoena and prosecute reporters who use leaked information; from moving to defund public media to filing frivolous lawsuits aimed at intimidating honest media coverage; from rewarding platforms that are essentially right-wing propaganda outlets to targeting law firms that represent media clients, Trump is showing how little he cares about free speech as a Constitutional right and a human imperative. And he is pushing America toward a darker future where what we know can be limited by what an authoritarian leader wants us to know.
So, yes, it's hard to focus on the broader concern about AI when the immediate threat is POTUS.
Reporters Without Borders publishes a World Press Freedom Index every year, and these days the U.S. isn’t in the top categories of nations with “good” or even “satisfactory” press freedom, countries like Canada and Australia, the U.K. and most of western Europe. No, press freedom in America is now rated as “problematic” — like most of South America and the Mideast — and falling.
There has been some pushback to Trump, and free speech advocates have scored some wins against the repressive regime in Washington. Courts have sided with AP and ordered their reporters’ and photographers’ White House access restored, and a judge forced Trump to reinstate more than a thousand people who work for Voice of America and other broadcasters. Among major media covering the White House, plenty of journalists are standing firm and reporting accurately about Trump even as the owners of their platforms try to make nice with the president to preserve the profits that his egomaniacal bullying put at risk.
But what we all need to understand is that the First Amendment is not self-reinforcing: Free speech has no army. Except for us.
We mostly don’t get energized about free speech until it’s what we want to say that gets targeted — until it is us who are being silenced or chilled. Trump’s overt hostility to facts and his disenfranchisement of honest media outlets encourage misinformation and disinformation — which presents a threat to democratic stability.
That’s why we need to stand up for independent media. It’s why we need to hold the Trump enablers’ feet to the fire. It’s why the immediate threat on this World Press Freedom Day demands our attention even more than the quite valid emerging concerns about AI.
That circling shark is hungry. The sea is choppy. And our freedom is at risk.
It is, then, a time to declare mayday? Or is it time to join those demonstrations, and do more — each of us — to bail water and save this ship?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
TELL US WHY PRESS FREEDOM MATTERS
This column argues that press freedom in America is imperiled by actions of the Trump administration, and it cites a few examples of reporting this week that underscore the value of a free press in America. Do you have other examples from your recent reading, listening or viewing that make you grateful for an aggressive press corps? Let us know, and we’ll pass them along.
TRAINING
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IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.
AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”
ENDNOTE
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-Rex Smith
Great column.
It may be helpful in thinking about the currernt threats to free speech to also draw lessons from what has already happened in terms of the erosion of rights. First it is important to remember that there are a lot of people affected by these threats and not everyone is about to be eaten by the sharkish process. So if we are resilient, all those who are not under immediate attack should speak up and be heard.
Second, we can learn from what has been happening and strive to do better in the present. We should try to remember that other countries have had this happen, this erosion of freedom, and the US is not immune, we may have been exceptionally lucky, but we are not exceptionally virtuous nor immune to the forces that have overtaken other countries.
Third, we much be very careful not to criticize everything that our current administration does or has done. Rather we need to keep our focus on things most americans believe in so that we can eventually hopefully be heard in areas where we are correct. For example, if it is true that France has put 10% tariffs on US autos, then some hard bargaining is not out of the question. But when lies accompany the bargaining, we need to focus on those.
Four, we should look for openings for arguments to counter unhelpful beliefs. For example, rather than attack tesla cars, which are in all our best interest, we need to keep the focus on freedom of expression, abuses of habeas corpus, and other insidious ideas and actions that threaten to undermine our currency and our standing in the world, e.g. soft power.
Just some thoughts ...