Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s now the 66th day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like. More press freedom news below.

Risking free speech won’t protect kids

Federal agencies are transforming into the speech police under President Donald Trump. So why are some Democrats supporting the Kids Online Safety Act, a recently reintroduced bill that would authorize the MAGA-controlled Federal Trade Commission to enforce censorship?

As Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) senior advocacy adviser Caitlin Vogus wrote for The Boston Globe, there’s never an excuse for supporting censorship bills, but especially when the political loyalists at the FTC are sure to abuse any power they’re given to stifle news on disfavored topics. Read the op-ed here.

We’re ready to sue if Paramount executives sell out the press

We’ve written previously about how Trump’s frivolous complaint against Paramount Global over CBS News’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris threatens the freedoms of other news outlets. Yesterday, Trump proved it by claiming his $20 billion damages demand is based on “mental anguish” due to the answer – which doesn’t even mention him. How’s that for a “snowflake”?

As we informed Paramount Global executives last week, we plan to file a shareholder derivative lawsuit if Paramount settles. We believe any settlement – let alone the eight figure range being discussed – would be an effort to launder bribe money through the courts and would damage Paramount irreparably.

Reports this week in the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere have noted that executives fear derivative liability if they settle. They should. Read more here.

Phone companies keep journalist surveillance secret

A letter by Sen. Ron Wyden about surveillance of senators’ phone lines has an important lesson for journalists, too: Be careful in selecting your phone carrier.

Wyden wrote his Senate colleagues revealing which wireless carriers inform customers about government surveillance requests (Cape, Google Fi, and US Mobile), and which don’t (AT&T, Boost Mobile, Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity Mobile, T-Mobile, and Verizon). Read more here.

Fallout from silencing Voice of America

As a reporter on the press freedom beat, Liam Scott chronicled abuses against journalists for Voice of America. But now, Scott himself is part of the story.

In March, Trump signed an executive order gutting the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Scott and his colleagues have been or are set to be terminated imminently, and the website hasn’t published a new story in months.

We spoke to Scott about his unique perspective on current threats to press freedom, as both a victim and a journalist covering them. We were joined by Jason Scott of Archive Team, who is working to preserve VOA’s content should it be taken offline. Read more and watch the webinar here.

Administration abuses secrecy rules

Lauren Harper, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, joined MeidasTouch Network’s Legal AF podcast, “Court of History,” to explain how the Trump administration is abusing secrecy to control the news narrative — and how an FPF Freedom of Information Act win revealed the truth.

Harper was joined by University of Maryland professor Jason Baron in a wide-ranging discussion with co-hosts Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz. Watch the video podcast here.

Federal police reforms repealed

The same week the Justice Department announced it was dropping federal oversight programs and investigations into more than two dozen police departments, including in Minneapolis, the city held a remembrance marking five years since the murder of George Floyd by a local police officer.

Police abuses of protestors and journalists during the demonstrations that followed Floyd’s murder led to the now-abandoned reforms, including consent decrees in Minneapolis and Louisville dealing with how police should interact with journalists covering protests and their aftermaths. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a project of FPF, has more. Read the Tracker’s coverage here.

What we’re reading

Greene County policy barring staff from speaking to press ‘unconstitutional,’ experts say (The Daily Progress). Local government employees should be able to talk to the press. But in Greene County, Virginia, they can’t. We told The Daily Progress that the county policy is unconstitutional.

Journalist sues LA county, ex-LA county sheriff for criminally investigating her (The Dissenter). It’s good to see journalist Maya Lau stand up for journalists’ right to not be investigated and harassed for doing their jobs.

How to stand your ground, in three (not so easy) steps (American Crisis). Institutions shouldn’t cave to Trump’s threats. Thanks to Margaret Sullivan for citing our plans to sue if Paramount settles with Trump as an example on how to stand your ground.

FBI visits me over manifesto (Ken Klippenstein). Journalists’ sources and newsgathering are none of the FBI’s business. They don’t seriously think Klippenstein was some kind of conspirator — they just want to intimidate him and other journalists.

freedom.press/issues/risking-f…

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.

youtube.com/embed/mPh-iQlQuMU?…

“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.”

freedom.press/issues/silencing…

The following was a letter submitted by an anonymous Pirate supporter using the pseudonym “Forward Thoughts”, sharing critiques of “Uncle Sam”. This article is apart of the project “Message in a Bottle”, allowing supporters of the US Pirate Party to submit editorial articles to the United States Pirate Party website.

Uncle Sam, the personification of the federal government, is supposed to be a beacon of democracy and good fortune towards the will of the people right here in the United States of America. However, he has gotten too big for his britches since the beginning. History highlighting this goes as far back as Uncle Sam exerting his power from the Whiskey Rebellion to recently using the Enemy Alien Act of 1787 to deport immigrant dissenters speaking out against the genocide happening in Palestine.

Every state relies on his charity to a certain extent, some more than others. How can we rely on our government to provide for its people when it directly meddles and persistently goes against the will of its people by starting wars and cutting funds to social programs, sometimes it creates on its own volition?

In a way, the American people receive assistance from the suits and ties of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., that assistance comes in the form of government regulations more so than it comes from funding assistance. Guns, voting, criminal penalties, taxes, immigration, etc. are always the hot button issues every politician or candidate running for office has on their agenda.

“I want to be controlled harder by my government” said no one ever.

In order to curtail exerting pragmatic force against the will of the people, there’s supposed to be a system our founding fathers put in place called “checks and balances.” How this works is there’s the executive branch consisting of the presidency and cabinet members, Congress which consists of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Supreme Court which consists of 9 justices.

However, what happens when all 3 branches reciprocate the same political ideology as one another? Who’s gonna stop these corrupt politicians from filling the coffers of themselves and of their allies (the oligarchy) they’re in cahoots with? Now we’re faced with a constitutional crisis where all 3 branches need to be severed like an infected limb.

Get this: Uncle Sam can exert his power over the economy on a whim. Right now President Trump is putting his hand up Uncle Sam as a puppet and he’s levying taxes on Chinese imports and other countries around the world. In retaliation, other countries he’s levied tariffs on are levying retaliatory tariffs against our imports into their countries. Consequently, prices on goods and services are rising. Stocks on the stock market are plummeting.

History is repeating itself. Remember back in US history class (well, hopefully you were taught this in US history class) about the Great Depression at the very end of the 1920s? Part of the reason why the economy went into a spiral was because of then Congress’s tariffs on foreign imports. Consumers no longer were able to afford products, therefore companies losing profits, especially those in the manufacturing industry, laid off workers.

Granted it wasn’t as if President Hoover bypassed Congress to make the tariffs happen, but my point still stands on how tariffs cause unintentional side effects to our everyday lives.

Lesson learned: tariffs backfire immensely on the economy.

Then President Nixon back in 1969 wanted to defund TV program PBS, Public Broadcasting Service. The nonprofit network was created to provide educational programming in a non-commercialized manner. It has brought us shows such as Sesame Street, Arthur, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, just to name a few.

Speaking of Mr. Rogers, he testified before Congress and managed to avert budget cuts for the nationally renowned TV station. Fast forward to present day 2025 — Republicans in Congress and President Trump are trying to cut funds for PBS. History is repeating itself yet again. Will we have a savior of PBS like we did back in 1969?

Lesson to be learned: PBS really is made possible by viewers like you.

Even at the state level, funding can be granted and cut based on the current majority party’s and governor’s ideology of that time. Pennhurst State School & Hospital in Spring City, PA is one of many examples of state government apathetic to the welfare of its people, especially a vulnerable population.

Opened in 1908 and closed in 1987, Pennhurst State School & Hospital was a product of an era of eugenics where those deemed unfit to reproduce in the Caucasian gene pool were euthanized or removed from society. Marginalized groups such as the epileptic and the mentally disabled were housed here, but soon grew to orphans, physically disabled, etc. Within a few years Pennhurst became overcrowded and conditions became deplorable.

In 1968, Bill Baldini did a 5-part segment on the conditions at Pennhurst exposing its wretched standard of living and abuse residents faced. There was a public outcry after the segment aired. Conditions seldomly improved from there on out until its closure in 1987. Fortunately, these residents were moved to boarding homes.

Have you ever heard of a Kirkbride psychiatric hospital? They’re long-term psychiatric hospitals designed in a batwing fashion with emphasis on natural light and air circulation. However, lack of funding and mismanagement had led to conditions in a handful of these facilities to be anything but cheery. In fact, it is what can easily be described as wicked.

Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in Trenton, NJ, under the direction of Dr. Henry Cotton, extracted organs and teeth from patients. In spite of high mortality rates and disprovable claims of cure rates, this persisted at the behest of Dr. Cotton during his tenure.

Philly (Philadelphia) State Hospital at Byberry opened in 1907. Unlike Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and others similar to Trenton, it was not made using the Kirkbride blueprints. This didn’t make the hospital any less susceptible to daunting conditions such as overcrowding, barbaric experiments, abuse, and neglect.

Props are in order to a conscientious objector named Charlie Lord, who between 1945 and 1946 was so appalled by the conditions he took note of that he covertly took photos and leaked them to the press. In these photos, raw sewage and naked men lined the hallways of Byberry.

Lesson to be learned: these residents were at the mercy of state politicians apathetic to their basic needs. Moreover and lastly, psychiatric hospitals such as the Kirkbride hospitals and disabled residential facilities such as Pennhurst are archaic and stunt personal psychiatric growth in patients.

Most states’ systems are designed to where property taxes fund our public schools. Back in the late 1800s, public schools were a shining gem of what America could be. Nowadays in many communities, our schools are nothing more than shadows of their former selves, meeting the minimum standards set by the state for funding.

Gone are the days of home economics and industrial shop classes. It’s all about standardized testing mandated by the state capital and even Uncle Sam, which is basically modern day phrenology. There’s educators and politicians who’ll justify this inane waste of paper by saying it measures how schools are doing with educating their students.

Standardized testing can be summed up in four words, it’s this: elite stay in control.

Lesson to be learned: standardized testing is a disease on our education system designed to punish lower socioeconomic schools and to keep those at the higher end of the socioeconomic.

uspirates.org/message-in-a-bot…

The Trump administration’s hostility to First Amendment rights extends beyond the press to nonprofit organizations, museums, colleges, and anyone else who might question his infallibility.

But his targeting of the press is a key component of the administration’s effort to appoint itself the country’s sole arbiter of truth. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Direction Seth Stern writes for the Daily Beast that in Trump’s view, “inconvenient truths and malicious lies are equally troublesome. They must be met with equal force.”

Stern urged journalists and others who value press freedom to treat these attacks not as passing storms but as existential threats.

Read Stern’s article here.

freedom.press/issues/when-alte…

A letter by Sen. Ron Wyden about surveillance of senators’ phone lines has an important lesson for journalists, too: Be careful in selecting your phone carrier.

On May 21, Wyden wrote his Senate colleagues revealing which wireless carriers inform customers about government surveillance requests (Cape, Google Fi, and US Mobile), and which don’t (AT&T, Boost Mobile, Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity Mobile, T-Mobile, and Verizon).

A handy chart at the bottom of the senator’s press release provides a quick summary.

Wyden’s letter was inspired in part by a Department of Justice inspector general report that revealed that the DOJ had collected phone records of Senate staff as part of leak investigations under the first Trump administration.

But that report wasn’t just about surveillance of the Senate. It also discussed how the DOJ surveilled journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN in 2020-21 as part of leak investigations related to news reporting about the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Investigators demanded telephone records from phone companies for the work and personal phones of journalists at all three outlets. In all three cases, the telephone companies turned over the records, which would have shown the numbers dialed, the date and time of calls, and their duration — information that could reveal the identities of confidential sources.

The telephone companies apparently didn’t notify the Times, Post, or CNN that their records had been sought, even though they legally could have done so. The DOJ also didn’t give the news outlets notice, taking advantage of internal guidelines that allowed them to delay notice to news media companies about legal demands for communications records from third parties in certain circumstances. (The rules for delayed notice from the DOJ remain in effect in the recently revised DOJ news media guidelines.)

According to the inspector general report, DOJ cover letters to the telephone companies asked them not to disclose the demands because the DOJ claimed it might impede the investigation. But the DOJ never sought a court order prohibiting disclosure. One prosecutor told the IG that nondisclosure orders weren’t obtained for the telephone companies “because the providers typically do not notify subscribers when their records are sought.”

That’s a problem, and it’s exactly what Wyden called out in his recent letter. Journalists can’t oppose surveillance that they don’t know about. Notification is what enables journalists (or any other customer) to fight back against overbroad, unwarranted, or illegal demands for their data. That’s exactly what the Times did when Google notified the newspaper of demands for its journalists’ email records in connection with the same leak investigation in which investigators sought phone records from Times journalists.

The Times’ contract with Google required the company to notify the news outlet of government demands. But even contractual agreements might not be enough to compel phone companies to inform their customers when they’re being spied on. Wyden’s letter reveals that “three major phone carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — failed to establish systems to notify (Senate) offices about surveillance requests, as required by their Senate contracts.”

In addition, even if large news outlets could negotiate contracts with their phone carriers that require notification of surveillance requests when legally allowed, that wouldn’t help their journalists who speak to sources using personal phones that aren’t covered by their employers’ contracts. Freelance journalists are also unlikely to have the power to negotiate notification into their phone contracts.

Rather than one-off contractual agreements then, it would be better for all phone companies to follow the lead of tech companies, like Google, that have a blanket policy of notifying customers of government demands for their data, assuming they’re not gagged. These policies are now widespread in the tech world, thanks to activism by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long monitored tech companies’ notification policies and encouraged them to do better.

Phone companies must do better, too. It’s a shame that some of the largest wireless carriers can’t be bothered to tell their customers when they’re being surveilled. Journalists — and all of us — who care about privacy have a choice to make when selecting their wireless provider: Do they want to know when they’re being spied on, or are they OK with being left in the dark?

freedom.press/issues/phone-com…