India’s Adani Group, US President Donald Trump among 33 on ‘Press Freedom Predators List’

Indian conglomerate Adani Group was named in Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2026 Press Freedom Predators List, alongside US President Donald Trump, who earned a spot in the rankings after missing the cut last year.

RSF profiled 33 “press freedom predators”, whose goal, it says, is to silence independent voices and trample on the right to information.

Adopting an ironic tone, the Press Freedom Predators List is a counterpart to RSF’s annual World Press Freedom Index. While the Index assesses the state of press freedom in countries around the world, this list shines a light on those who actively trample on it.

The predators are divided into five categories, directly drawn from the Index’s indicators: political, security, economic, legal and social.

The Adani Group, headed by Gautam Adani, India’s richest man and an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, made it to the list’s “Legal” category for bringing around 10 legal actions against more than 15 critical journalists and media outlets since 2017.

These cases form part of a systematic use of gag suits, combining civil and criminal defamation lawsuits, to silence independent journalism, RSF said.

Trump was listed as a result of his appalling record of attacks on the press in less than two years of his second term.

While he may not resort to the same deadly tactics as some of his fellow predators, he solidified his admission to this club of repressive figures and forces through a concerted effort in his second term to reduce journalism to political propaganda in the United States, which now ranks 64th in the RSF World Press Freedom Index.

RSF said his offensive against the press had increasingly gone beyond rhetoric and public policy, extending to physical restrictions imposed on journalists.

Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) also made the list.

In the “Security” category, everyone from the Israeli armed forces to Mexican cartels and the Chinese Communist Party was named.

RSF said Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, alongside the Israeli armed forces, had pursued its repressive policy against journalists in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, while Xi Jinping’s China “remains the world’s largest prison for journalists”.

A new addition to the category was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, following the detention of journalists from the fact-checking website Matsaddash and the shutdown of major news website Mada Masr.

The Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was also included citing Saudi authorities’ intolerance for any “news outlet that deviates from the official narrative, including privately owned media outlets.” 

Alongside the Adani Group in the legal category were Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In the “Economic” category, tech giants such as Alphabet and Meta, influential billionaires such as Bidzina Ivanishvili and Vincent Bolloré, and political figures such as Vladimir Tabak were also listed.

Decisions on which predators make the list are based on the attacks they carried out throughout 2026: using the machinery of the state to silence the media, resorting to physical violence against journalists or imprisoning them, financially strangling newsrooms, weaponising the law to jail or censor news professionals, and stoking hatred towards the profession.