Press Freedom Is Under Fire Around the World
A dispute between an English local council and the newspaper that covers it shows how press limits are spreading to places once thought immune.
Illustration: Haley Jiang for Bloomberg
On the surface, it was a petty dispute, a fight between a local news outlet and a council official in the English county of Nottinghamshire, a region of rolling green fields and tangled forests best known as home to Robin Hood.
Council leader Mick Barton of the right-wing Reform UK party took umbrage with the Nottingham Post over an article in August that suggested a split in his party’s ranks. Barton froze out the Post: The council stopped sending press releases to the paper’s reporters or inviting them to events, and Reform councilors were banned from talking to the Post at all.