Democracy isn’t dying in darkness. It’s being killed off in plain sight.

Here’s what I tell people when they ask what it’s like to live in America right now: that autocracy doesn’t look like what you expect it to. It’s not (for the most part) boots on the ground and uniforms in the street — although we, of course, did see those, too, when President Donald Trump called in the National Guard following protests against raids by immigration authorities in Los Angeles.

But for the vast majority of those living here, we have not seen a dramatic upending of day-to-day life. People continue to go to work, schools continue to teach, courts continue to run, journalists continue to report.

And yet, that day-to-day veneer of normality masks a devastating reality: that America is now effectively an authoritarian regime — run by fear and fiat and guided by political expediency not principle, and where citizens’ ability to see, understand, or push back against these measures is being rapidly stifled by a calculated assault on the press and a capitulation to that assault by media owners who place profit over principle.

The announcement last week that Paramount Global had agreed to pay $16 million to settle a legal dispute — that experts widely agree is meritless — is the latest nail in the coffin. Trump was suing Paramount over the way its flagship 60 Minutes news program had edited an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

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As the media advocacy organization I lead, the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote in a letter to Paramount chair Shari Redstone last month, news organizations the world over edit interviews to meet word count lengths or broadcast timings; there is nothing inherently unethical or duplicitous about this. (There are plenty of examples where Trump’s own interviews have been edited, and where no lawsuits have resulted.)

Paying what Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) said amounted to a bribe in order to get approval for Paramount’s multibillion-dollar merger with Sundance Media would, we argued in our letter, do nothing other than signal to the current administration — not to mention any future administration — that it can interfere with or influence editorial decisions at will.

The response of a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team, who celebrated the settlement as a “win for the American people” delivered by a president holding “the fake news media accountable,” shows how emboldened this administration is in its dealings with the media — a media that is essential if the aforementioned American people are to fully understand, or even be told, what things are being done in their name.

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Those things include a significant increase in infringements of the very civil liberties and individual rights many Trump supporters say they hold dear: the right to speak freely without fear of coercion or intimidation, including the right to protest, or the right to a fair trial and due legal process.

This last is being used as another way to punish reporting that authorities would rather stay hidden, as we have seen in the case of journalist Mario Guevara, an Emmy Award-winning Spanish-language reporter who was arrested last month livestreaming a protest in Atlanta. Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist who is in the country legally, was initially held in local custody on misdemeanor charges that were subsequently dropped.

However, while in local detention, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued proceedings against him, and he was moved to an ICE center in southeastern Georgia. Though a judge ordered that Guevara could be released on bond, he remains in detention as this goes to press.

His was by no means the first run-in journalists have had with immigration officials in recent months. The same week Guevara was filming Atlanta protests, an Australian journalist was denied entry for his writing on pro-Palestine protests by university students. Immigration concerns are now among the top queries raised with the Committee to Protect Journalists by reporters in the United States, where we have seen a significant spike overall in requests for safety advice and assistance from journalists over the past six months.

Every attempt to prevent a journalist from reporting is a threat to the public’s right to know. But these are not isolated incidents or one-offs. These cases — from the Paramount legal settlement to Guevara’s detention — are part of a concerted and systemic effort to stifle independent reporting and promote a single, government-sanctioned narrative, one that is boosted by a relentless smearing of all media that do not toe the administration’s line as untrustworthy and unreliable, and by attempts to defund the independent public media on which millions of Americans still rely.

Public radio, in particular, remains a vital source of news and information for Americans in rural communities, especially at times of emergency such as hurricanes, floods, or wildfires. A recent congressional report found that the looming federal funding cuts to public television and radio in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” will mostly impact outlets in states won by Trump in 2024.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has more than four decades of experience in tracking threats to journalists and news outlets. We know reporters are among the first to be targeted when those in power want to conceal or coerce. We know that restrictions and attacks on the media never, ever stop there, which is why appeasing the bullies may offer short-term respite, but only emboldens them in the long run.

So while democracy is still being eroded in plain sight, now is the time to redouble our efforts to promote and protect the media exposing the erosion. Otherwise, we will all — Paramount included — be fighting in the dark.

Jodie Ginsberg is the CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists.