When Thibaut Bruttin, Director General of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), stepped up to deliver the inaugural lecture at Sciences Po Le Havre on Sept. 2, 2026, he came with a warning: the free press is losing ground almost everywhere, and the public has the most to lose.
The afternoon opened the 2026-27 academic year before a packed amphitheater, under a theme that has never been more urgent: the reliability of information in an age of disinformation and foreign interference. Jeanne Lazarus, Dean of Sciences Po’s undergraduate college, gave the opening address, and the Bureau des Arts (BDA) followed with a music and dance performance on press freedom. “I was very moved by the music and dance around freedom of the press,” Bruttin said.
For Bruttin, the afternoon was also a return home. A Sciences Po alumnus, he joined RSF in 2014 and has led it since July 2024. “I am a student of Sciences Po, deep in my heart,” Bruttin said.
The organization he leads runs a large Asia-Pacific bureau in Taipei and publishes the World Press Freedom Index, which ranks 180 countries using a tally of abuses against journalists and a survey of experts on each country’s political, economic, legal, social and security conditions. The 2026 edition recorded the lowest global average in the index’s history. When the index began, the average country was 72 out of 100, compared with 54 today.
Violence against journalists is returning, with more than 200 killed in Gaza alone. “Donald Trump has not been elected despite the media; he’s been elected because he repeatedly assaults the media,” Bruttin said. Platforms favor posts from friends over news, newsrooms are shrinking, and polls rank the media among the least trusted institutions.
“We might be seeing the beginning of an extinction event for the press as we knew it,” Bruttin said. He compared journalism to jazz, which still has its clubs and magazines but no longer sits at the center of culture.
In the lecture, he identified two main recurrent trends. The first is a backlash against the universality of press freedom, a view that casts a free press as something for “a white dude in Europe, fairly wealthy, fairly bourgeois.” The Chinese Communist Party has used international forums to present it as a Western idea, he said. Against that claim, he presented the people RSF defends, including Jimmy Lai, founder of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily, sentenced in February to 20 years in prison under the National Security Law, largely for what his newspaper published.
The second trend is the confusion between freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Bruttin pointed to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which names the two separately. In his reading, press freedom carries a duty to gather facts and bring them to the public, and it gives neither journalists nor their employers a license to broadcast their beliefs.
Bruttin called his picture of the situation “fairly bleak,” then turned to remedies. RSF refuses to defend propaganda that poses as journalism, he said, recalling a request from Russia Today for support against legal action in Latvia. “Freedom of the press was not invented for foreign powers to intervene in national political debates,” Bruttin said.
When Russian networks circulated fake videos of Bruttin on X, the company refused to remove them because the man in them looked like him. “Yes, it looked like me because it was an impersonation,” Bruttin said. RSF wants democracies to guarantee “due prominence” for news media online and a “new deal for the press” to fund reporting. “Sometimes we have subscriptions to TV platforms, or Netflix, and we don’t access it, but we just pay for it,” Bruttin said. “Let’s do that with the media.” Both the Russia Today letter and the fake videos on X show foreign interference working through the language of liberty.
The image that lingered came from a story Bruttin told midway through. In Hong Kong, he once met a North Korean woman who realized that a foreign visitor knew more about her country than she did, and she cried from shame. Her ignorance had been imposed by the state. In democracies, nobody needs to impose it: the information is there, often only a click or a subscription away, and people still let it pass. That is the ignorance Bruttin fears, built up one autoplayed video and one unopened subscription at a time.
The index makes the stakes plain: fewer than 1% of the world’s people live in a country where press freedom is rated good, and France, ranked 25th, is not among them. Censorship is the loss everyone can see, with its jailed reporters and shuttered newsrooms; while indifference works quietly, through feeds that crowd out reporting, and it needs no law to take hold.
Bruttin said that as a Sciences Po student 20 years ago, he did not see the need to follow the news every day—a confession that carried particular weight in a room full of aspiring diplomats and policymakers who will depend on reliable information to do their jobs. If free press is to outlast this decline, it will need readers who treat the news as a habit worth paying for. The students he addressed at the Rentrée Solennelle are among those who will decide whether that habit survives. 龍
