‘I live with that we didn’t struggle enough.’ A lesson from a Russian journalist-in-exile

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At a conference last week in Austin, Texas, exiled Russian journalist Mikhail Rubin told the audience how, in hindsight, there was not enough resistance when press rights began going away in his home country.

“We did not resist for the small things,” Rubin said.

After his panel at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, an annual meeting of global journalists, academics and funders, Rubin expanded for me how the Russian government was adept at taking “small steps and normalizing not normal things.”

Years ago, he said, independent journalists like him could follow the president around as a reporter in the Kremlin press pool. Then the Kremlin began to choose who could be close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and who got to travel with him. At some point, Rubin said, he was relegated to watching Putin’s speeches from the press center, via a broadcast conducted by Putin’s personal cameraman.

“The point was to keep independent journalists away from him so we wouldn't ask questions or look around.” This, Rubin knew, was not the reporting he wanted to do.

If that example rings familiar, it’s because I spoke with Rubin on April 27, the same day The Associated Press was back in court for a hearing as it fights its ban from the White House. Julie Pace, AP’s senior vice president and executive editor, took the stage the next day at ISOJ, saying the hearing was “substantive,” but that she had no sense of a timetable for when the judge would rule.

Within weeks of banning AP, the White House then wrested control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association to itself. WHCA president Eugene Daniels, while on a different panel at ISOJ, said he understood why it may not be intuitive to everyone how this is a big deal. But it is.

“At the end of the day,” Daniels said, “The people being covered should not choose the people that are covering them.”

'We didn't struggle enough.'

Rubin left Moscow in July 2021, after the Russian government declared him a “foreign agent,” and the news site Proekt, where he’s a deputy editor-in-chief, an “undesirable organization.”

“I live with that we didn’t struggle enough,” he says of the early days of disappearing independent press access to the government.

Rubin said in Russia, they were all waiting for the worst thing to happen before resisting. But, there is no “terrible barrier,” he said. “By the time you realize something is ‘terrible’ you will lose the ability to resist.”

The lesson, he said, is that it’s easier for Americans to fight now, not to wait until the small steps add up. “There’s no reason to wait for something ‘terrible’ to happen.”

He admitted he didn’t know what would happen in the U.S., but that he was hopeful given our long history with freedom of the press enshrined in our Constitution. “I believe in the system,” Rubin said.

Finally, as we were parting, I asked him, given his status, if it was OK to quote directly in this newsletter. Rubin was firm in his response: “If I had wanted to live in fear, I would have stayed in Russia. I didn’t leave to be afraid to talk.”

Press freedom aggressions in the United States, by category, for the first three months of 2025.

Other notable updates and incidents

The Tracker’s Denial of Access category already has five entries, significant in comparison to nine entries for all of 2024. Two of those are from the White House’s “small steps” around press pool access, but we’ve also heard from local journalists who have been turned away, blocked or otherwise disinvited from government events in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Chicago, Illinois; and Topeka, Kansas.

We’ve also captured more than a dozen Chilling Statements from powerful Trump administration officials, instigating leak investigations, oversight hearings and the gutting of government-funded news outlets like Voice of America. (In a spot of positive news, a federal judge said March 28 that he would issue a temporary restraining order, blocking any more efforts to close VOA or its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.)