What is the relationship between populist rule and the freedom of the press? Populists are personalistic leaders who seek to gain and retain power by establishing unmediated links with mass constituencies, who are otherwise relatively free of existing party and institutional ties. Populists rely heavily on the media to mobilize popular support and thus face strong incentives to control and dominate the press. Using a new dataset on populist rule in 86 countries from 1980-2014, this paper tests whether rule by a populist party is associated with a decline in press freedom relative to other types of party rule. It finds that populist rule is associated with a decline in most measures of media freedom relative to programmatic party rule. The effect is about a third the size of that for authoritarian rule.