a Better Bubble™
As a reporter on the press freedom beat, Liam Scott chronicled abuses against journalists at home and abroad for Voice of America. But he was shocked when the experiences of those on the other side of the page became his own.
In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suddenly gutting the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Scott and hundreds of colleagues have been or are set to be terminated imminently, and the international news service’s website hasn’t published a new story in months.
To understand more about how Trump’s anti-press tactics threaten the independence of public-interest journalism and what comes next for press freedom in the U.S. and around the world, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted an online webinar May 23 with Scott and Archive Team Co-founder Jason Scott, who is working to preserve VOA’s content should it be taken offline.
“After several years of covering press freedom issues, it still feels weird to be in the midst of a press freedom issue that is affecting me and my colleagues,” Liam Scott said. “There is actually a lot that is happening here that reminds me of what I’ve reported on in other countries.”
He also expressed significant concern for colleagues who are in the U.S. on visas. Without authorization to continue working here, they will be forced to return home to countries where austere rules about free speech can lead to jail time or worse, he cautioned.
“VOA has journalists now imprisoned in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Azerbaijan, and there are other journalists from Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia who are imprisoned in other countries around the world as well, just for doing their jobs,” Liam Scott said, referring to two other international news services long supported by the U.S. government. “So my immediate concern was if VOA and its sister outlets shut down, who is going to advocate for these reporters?”
Preserving VOA’s online content
While the fate of VOA’s employees hangs in the balance, so too does its website, a resource for readers who live in regions of censorship and can’t access this information anywhere else. Amid fears that the site and the reporting it hosts will vanish from the internet and leave behind thousands of stories, efforts are underway to preserve its contents.
Archive Team members, including Jason Scott, have created an “online footprint” of VOA’s website that contains over 400 gigabytes worth of stories. It’s paramount to ensure a replica of the site exists before its potential takedown, he said, because the work cannot be done retroactively.
“The conversation about whether or not to save something usually stops once it’s gone,” he added.
As a general rule of thumb, Jason Scott recommended that journalists keep multiple copies of their work in different locations, in the event they lose access to where their work is published.
Doing so is especially important in the current digital climate under the Trump administration, which has scrubbed countless federal webpages.
In that sense, said Jason Scott, it bears resemblance to a startup company.
“You move fast, you break things, you work it out later. If something can’t be explained to you in two seconds, get rid of it,” he added. This slash-and-burn approach, a Trump administration hallmark, can wreak havoc for preservation efforts because it evokes a digital “entropy” that can change data access on a dime, said Jason Scott.
While trawling internet data can be exhausting, so can reporting through censorship. Liam Scott, who has continued his work on the press freedom beat at outlets elsewhere, said it’s important “to not get fatigued” and to remember that threats and retaliation are often reactions to strong journalism, which underscores the need to protect the rights of those doing the work.
“Attacks on journalists are also attacks on the public,” he said. “Because when you’re attacking a journalist, you’re attacking the information that they’re trying to share with their audience — information that is so important for how we live our lives.”
Just as accountability is met with reprisal, archiving data is met with unpredictability. As the Archive Team compiles the work of countless VOA journalists who risked their lives to report the truth, Jason Scott said to remember that data preservation is an uphill battle. The power to decide what stays online often belongs to those with the most effective keys to the internet: powerful institutions like the government.
“Data is an incredible devil’s bargain,” he said. “Entropy is the house, and the house always wins.”
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