Every year of my journalistic career of nearly half a century, I have known only a free and independent press in the United States.

My professional start was in the 1970s. Those were years when Americans could see clearly how the press served democracy:

With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first by The New York Times, the American public learned of the failures its government had covered up during a long war in Vietnam that cost so many lives. And then there was Watergate, an investigation spearheaded by The Washington Post. U.S. citizens learned how their president had weaponized the government against his political adversaries, abusing his powers and sabotaging the Constitution.

In the decades since those revelations, I took for granted that my country would always enjoy press freedom — and that the First Amendment of our Constitution would guarantee it. I no longer take any of that for granted. I no longer assume that the constitutional order will hold in the United States. Or that the rule of law will prevail. Or that free expression — not just for the press, but for all Americans — will endure.

That is because we have a president who has demonstrated disdain for traditional restraints on his power. Because a majority in Congress remains servile. Because a majority on the Supreme Court has handed this president extraordinary authority and immunity. Because the president appears determined to lay siege to institutional pillars of democracy, with the press as a high-priority target. And it is because those institutions are proving to be more fragile and faint-hearted than I imagined possible.

And perhaps most concerning to me is that we now live in a time when people are unable or unwilling to distinguish between what is true and what is false. It is only natural — and, in a democracy, expected — that we will disagree about which policies are best. Yet today we cannot agree on how to determine a fact. All of the elements we have historically relied upon to establish facts — education,........

© The Japan Times