David McCraw, The New York Times' deputy general counsel, said in an on-the-record interview published Wednesday that the United States has fallen to 64th place on Reporters Without Borders' press-freedom index — below Botswana — and that the drop has drawn "shockingly little blowback" from Congress. [1] The interview, conducted by Seattle Times editor Brier Dudley for the Free Press Initiative column and syndicated to local papers including the Kirkland Reporter, ties that ranking directly to two cases McCraw has personally litigated this year.

One of those cases is the subpoena fight this paper covered in its July 29 account of the Justice Department's withdrawal of subpoenas against three Times reporters investigating security gaps aboard the Qatari-gifted jet given to President Trump. That piece argued the withdrawal was "extracted, not offered" — the product of a judge's rebuke, not a change of institutional heart. McCraw's new interview confirms the underlying dynamic the earlier reporting inferred: the retreats keep coming because courts keep forcing them, not because pressure on the press has eased. "It's unfortunate that the government sort of believes rights are a game of whack-a-mole," McCraw said. "We win one, and something else pops up, and we're going to have to go after that one as well. It's not the way it should be, but it's the way it is." [1]

The other case is a March 2026 lawsuit McCraw's team won over Pentagon press-pass restrictions, a ruling from U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman that the Department of Defense has since worked around with additional access rules imposed in June. [1] McCraw described the Pentagon fight as a matter of constitutional sequencing rather than politics: "The constitutional order should be that a court gets to decide if we're right or wrong," he said, "and that's one of the reasons we felt it's very important to press on." [1]

McCraw's team is six newsroom lawyers, supplemented by outside counsel — a shrinking category of legal infrastructure, he said, as local papers cut costs and lose the ability to fight in court at all. Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called McCraw "the dean of the in-house lawyers," someone who has "been doing it for decades and has a ton of respect within the industry." [1] McCraw pointed to a specific statistic to describe the scale of the trust problem underneath the legal fights: polling shows more than 70% of Americans say press freedom matters in the abstract, while trust in news organizations to actually deliver it sits below 30%. "That's the gap that we need to be addressing," he said. [1]

X's handling of the Botswana comparison shows exactly that gap in miniature. The statistic McCraw cited this week is not new — a post making the identical comparison, that the U.S. has dropped seven places since 2022 to rank 64th, below Botswana, circulated on X back in April, months before McCraw's interview existed. [2] Its return to circulation this week detaches the number from any specific legal case entirely; it functions as a standalone indictment of the country's press-freedom trajectory, cited and recited without reference to the Pentagon ruling, the subpoena withdrawal, or any of the litigation McCraw was actually describing when a reporter asked him about the ranking directly. Asked point-blank whether the U.S. is still "a beacon of freedom," McCraw gave a qualified answer that neither framing fully captures: strong on libel protection, weak on source protection compared to peer democracies, "somewhere in the middle" on access to information — but, he added, "if you see the countries around us on the list, I'm not sure that you'd want to practice journalism in those countries, no matter how things have devolved here." [1]

That is the actual state of the argument McCraw is making: not that the ranking is meaningless, but that it describes a system still functioning through courts even as it erodes through norms — a distinction that gets lost whether the number is deployed as case-specific evidence or recirculated as a slogan.

McCraw also connected the ranking to a structural problem MSM coverage of the statistic rarely mentions: the shrinking number of newsrooms with any legal capacity to fight back at all. His own team is six in-house lawyers backed by outside counsel — a level of resourcing few local papers can match as budgets shrink. He pointed to a run of landmark press-freedom cases that began at small outlets rather than national ones: Times v. Sullivan, the case that made libel suits against the press far harder to win, alongside decisions won by a Riverside, California paper and a Florida outlet with a circulation of 16,000. "You just won't see that again," McCraw said, arguing that the consolidation of legal capacity into a handful of large newsrooms is itself a press-freedom problem the ranking captures only indirectly. On that point, neither the case-by-case MSM framing nor the recirculated statistic on X has much to say — it is a structural argument that fits comfortably in neither box.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin