VietnamWeek / Free Journalists Club
The year 2025 comes to a close without triumph and without consolation. We do not call it a defeat, nor can we call it a victory. It has been, above all, a year of survival — survival of institutions, of conscience, and of the right to speak truthfully.
The world exits 2025 with wars unresolved, civilian lives devalued, and principles once considered universal increasingly treated as bargaining chips. From Gaza to Ukraine, from the Middle East to Europe, peace is no longer upheld as a shared moral imperative but negotiated as a cold transaction.
In the United States, 2025 marked a troubling reversal of norms once thought secure. Press freedom narrowed. Education became politicized. Knowledge was pressured toward silence. Concepts such as diversity, equality, and inclusion were recast as threats. Immigrants, minorities, women, and LGBTQ communities became the most vulnerable targets in a political climate growing less tolerant of difference.
Independent journalism has not stood outside these shifts. We witnessed news removed from the airwaves, platforms subjected to surveillance, and personal data collected in the name of “national security.” Public discourse shrank incrementally, through administrative decisions that appeared technical, even mundane — yet cumulatively corrosive. In many places, books were censored, libraries and public media defunded, and dissenting voices worn down when they could not be silenced outright.
At the same time, a new challenge accelerated: artificial intelligence advanced faster than legal and ethical frameworks could respond. Journalism, literature, and artistic works were scanned, copied, and labeled “training data.” Creators lost control over their labor, while society risked trading human dignity for technological convenience.
And yet, 2025 was not defined solely by darkness. We also saw persistence. Independent journalists, writers, artists, scholars, and human rights defenders continued to ask questions when silence was safer, to write when conformity was rewarded. Culture did not vanish. Conscience was not erased. And the public, though exhausted, continued to seek the difference between truth and falsehood.
VietnamWeek and the Free Journalists Club move into 2026 with greater clarity:
Independent journalism does not exist to comfort power. It exists to remember, to question, and to resist the normalization of injustice.
We do not offer easy hope for the year ahead. What we carry forward is vigilance, responsibility, and a renewed commitment to practice journalism with integrity, even as the space to do so grows narrower.
If there is one memory worth preserving from 2025, it is this: even in the darkest periods, people can still choose not to turn away from the truth. That choice — often quiet, often costly — remains the final foundation of any society capable of correcting itself.
Editorial Board
VietnamWeek / Free Journalists Club