India slipped six places to 157 out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) early on Thursday, India time. Last year India was ranked 151 in the global media independence index. Pakistan, India’s nuclear neighbour, is ranked 153, up from 158 last year.
Norway holds the top spot as the best country for journalists for the 10th consecutive year, while Eritrea comes in last for the third year in a row.
The RSF said it had released the list “at a time when political pressure on the press is intensifying, authoritarian tendencies are growing and the media market is heavily weakened.”
This year, it said, “the Index’s analysis highlights an alarming deterioration in the conditions for journalism in many parts of the world, despite some isolated improvements, as 100 out of 180 countries and territories have seen their press freedom score decline.”
In India, the RSF said, “judicial harassment of independent media is intensifying, driven by the growing use of criminal statutes – defamation and national security laws among them – directly targeting journalists.”
The press in Pakistan “faces relentless waves of restrictions amid a fraught political climate in which authorities seek to control, and in some cases suppress, the dissemination of journalistic content,” the RSF said.
The US has been ranked at 64, down from 57 last year, with the RSF saying: “…journalists who were already fighting against economic headwinds and dealing with a crisis of public trust — among other challenges — now also contend with President Donald Trump’s systematic weaponisation of state institutions, including funding cuts to public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, political interference in media ownership, and politically motivated investigations targeting disfavoured journalists and media outlets.”
Since Trump’s return to office, “journalists have also been targeted on the ground during protests, reflecting a broader deterioration that amounts to one of the most severe crises for press freedom in modern US history,” the RSF said.
For the first time in the history of the World Press Freedom Index, the RSF said, “over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.
“Since 2001, the expansion of increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — has been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries.
“The Index’s legal indicator has declined the most over the past year, a clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide,” it added.