How press freedom was built over centuries, how Bangladesh is watching it unravel
When press freedom is weakened for too long, the watchdog is first leashed, then blamed for not barking, and finally attacked for existing at all
Last week, a mob attacked the offices of The Daily Star and Prothom Alo, vandalising and looting their premises, and setting the former's building on fire with many journalists still trapped inside.
But this was just a reiteration of the centuries-old practice of violence and intimidation against media organisations to silence them, not only in Bangladesh, but also globally.
Press freedom, as the world has learned, is rarely lost in a single moment. It erodes until journalists begin to censor themselves, and mobs feel empowered to do the censoring on behalf of the state. Bangladesh is now standing at that edge.
Yet the idea that journalists should be free to speak, question and investigate power is not modern, nor Western, nor accidental. It is one of humanity's longest political struggles, one that began not with newspapers, but with the belief that rulers themselves could be questioned.
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From fearless speech to printed truth
Long before the printing press, Ancient Athens had a word for what democracies desperately need: parrhesia — fearless speech. It was not merely the right to speak, but the duty to tell the truth even when it was dangerous. Philosophers understood that a society without parrhesia rotted from within.
That idea clashed with power when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in the 1440s. For the first time, ideas could travel faster than authority. Both Church and State responded instinctively: licensing, censorship, and official approval stamps became prerequisites for printing. Knowledge, once liberated, was chained again.
Resistance came in 1644, when English poet John Milton published 'Areopagitica', a blistering attack on censorship. Milton argued that truth does not need protection; it needs competition. Let truth and falsehood grapple freely, he wrote, and truth will prevail. This idea later became known as the "marketplace of ideas", a principle still central to modern press freedom.
But an idea alone could not protect printers from prison.
England's press did not become free through a grand declaration. In 1695, the Licensing Act, the law that allowed the state to censor publications, simply lapsed. Parliament chose not to renew it. Overnight, the press became free by omission, not protection. There was no shield, only the absence of chains.
That absence mattered. It showed the world that speech could survive without permission.
Still, none of this would have been possible without an earlier, almost accidental foundation: the Magna Carta of 1215. Often misunderstood as a free speech document, it said nothing about expression. What it did establish was far more dangerous to power — the rule of law. Clause 39 declared that no one, not even the King, could imprison or punish without due process.
For the first time, authority had limits. Without that idea, no journalist could ever be safe. A ruler could simply lock critics away. Magna Carta planted the psychological seed that rights exist independently of rulers, a seed that later grew into press freedom.
Turning privilege into law
The true breakthrough came in Sweden in 1766. While other European nations tolerated press freedom in practice, Sweden enshrined it in law. The Swedish Freedom of the Press Act, largely crafted by Finnish priest and parliamentarian Anders Chydenius, did two radical things.
First, it abolished pre-publication censorship entirely. Second, it introduced a revolutionary principle known as "offentlighetsprincipen" — the right of public access to government documents. Press freedom was no longer just the right to publish; it was the right to know.
This transformed journalism into a structural check on corruption. For the first time, the state was legally obliged to open its files to scrutiny.
Let us commend the ability of the media's enemies to constantly renew the nature of their attacks against journalism.
Twenty-five years later, the United States adopted a different but equally powerful model. The First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, did not grant rights; it restrained government. "Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." This concept of "negative liberty" placed the burden permanently on the state to justify any restriction.
Its spirit was born earlier, in 1735, during the trial of printer John Peter Zenger. Accused of seditious libel for criticising a colonial governor, Zenger's lawyer made a radical argument: truth should be a defence. The jury agreed. A cultural expectation was born, and power could be criticised if the criticism was true.
Freedom of speech did not stop at newspapers. Democracies built a final safety valve inside their legislatures.
The English Bill of Rights of 1689 established parliamentary privilege, absolute freedom of speech inside Parliament. Article 9 ensured that debates in Parliament could not be questioned in any court. This followed centuries of monarchs arresting MPs for dissent, including King Charles I storming the House of Commons in 1642.
Today, this absolute privilege means MPs cannot be sued or arrested for what they say in the chamber. It creates a crucial loophole for press freedom. If a journalist cannot publish an allegation without risking defamation, but an MP raises it in Parliament, it becomes public record. The press can then report it under qualified privilege.
There is one strict rule though: step outside the chamber and repeat the allegation, and the protection vanishes. The system forces responsibility while ensuring one place where truth can always be spoken.
The world formally recognised all of this only after the catastrophe. In 1948, scarred by the propaganda and censorship of the Second World War, nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 declared freedom of expression a universal right, valid through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The corruption connection
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published by Transparency International, measures how corrupt a country is perceived to be. Reporters Without Borders' Press Freedom Index measures how free journalists are. When the two are compared, a pattern emerges.
At the top of the press freedom rankings sit Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, all among the cleanest countries in the world, with CPI scores ranging from 82 to 90. In these nations, corruption is high-risk. A minister misuses public funds, and a newspaper publishes receipts the next day. Resignations follow swiftly.
At the bottom are North Korea, Syria, Somalia and Afghanistan, countries where press freedom is nearly nonexistent, and corruption scores plunge as low as 11 out of 100. There, corruption is low-risk. Journalists who ask questions are imprisoned. State media simply do not report theft.
The mechanism is simple: where journalists are protected, corruption becomes dangerous. Where journalists are silenced, corruption flourishes.
There is one famous exception, Singapore. With a CPI score of 83, it remains remarkably clean despite ranking poorly on press freedom. It achieves this not through scrutiny, but through extremely high government salaries and a powerful anti-corruption bureau. For most of the world, such an alternative does not exist. The press is the only watchdog.
Naming the predators
Reporters Without Borders continues to name what it calls the "predators of press freedom".
"Let us commend the ability of the media's enemies to constantly renew the nature of their attacks against journalism," RSF Director-General Thibaut Bruttin said earlier this year.
"While some politicians throttle reliable information, other predators murder or imprison journalists, while yet others manipulate media funding or use legal action to silence reporters… impunity is not inevitable," Bruttin added.
The 2025 list includes the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, Russia's Vladimir Putin and Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. Israel's Defence Forces are listed for the deaths of nearly 220 journalists under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Myanmar's State Peace and Security Commission and Burkina Faso's military junta appear alongside Mexico's Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
The list also reflects new tactics. Technology has become a weapon. Xi Jinping uses state-aligned chatbots for propaganda. Elon Musk's X has been used to harass journalists. The IDF conducts online smear campaigns. In India, the Hindu nationalist site OpIndia has intensified disinformation and harassment against critical reporters.
Predators no longer rely only on prisons. They use platforms, courts and mobs.
Bangladesh's long descent into press censorship
Bangladesh knows this pattern well.
Sheikh Hasina, prime minister from January 2009 until her ouster, has been listed by RSF as a predator of press freedom since at least 2014. The irony is bitter. As the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the nation's founding leader, she once stood against regimes that persecuted journalists.
Once in power, she reversed course.
Her consolidation of authority accelerated after the 2014 election, when opposition parties were denied access to the media. Criticism became intolerable. The Digital Security Act of 2018 completed the legal architecture of fear. Vaguely worded, it criminalised online content "liable to disturb public order" with up to seven years in prison, and imposed 14 years for "negative propaganda" against the Father of the Nation.
The law rendered entire subjects untouchable.
In its first two years, around 400 people were prosecuted under the DSA, including more than 70 journalists and bloggers. Prison conditions were so dire that writer Mushtaq Ahmed died in custody in February 2021.
Enforcement did not rely solely on the police. Supporters of the Awami League and its student wing, the Chhatra League, became street-level enforcers, attacking reporters, blocking coverage of protests, and turning elections into hostile zones for the press. Some journalists ended up in the hospital. Some never came home.
By 2021, Bangladesh ranked 152nd out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index.
The danger now is that repression has outlived its architect.
As legal protections collapse and trust in institutions erodes, mobs have begun to replace the state as arbiters of acceptable speech. Newsrooms are vandalised not by law, but by outrage. Journalists are threatened not through court summons, but through chants, fists and social media posts and messages.
This is what happens when press freedom is weakened for too long. The watchdog is first leashed, then blamed for not barking, and finally attacked for existing at all.
History shows where this leads. Societies without fearless speech become opaque. Corruption does not vanish; it goes underground. Power stops explaining itself. Truth becomes dangerous again.
