So to Speak Podcast Transcript: Minecraft, censorship, and threats to press freedom with Clayton Weimers

Note: This is an unedited rush transcript. Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

Nico Perrino: Hey, everyone. It’s Nico here. A quick note before we get started with today’s show. The conversation you’re about to hear was recorded on Friday, April 24th. It’s a conversation about press freedom. So, as you’re listening, you might wonder, “Why don’t Nico and Clayton address what happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend?” Well, that’s because the dinner happened the day after our recording. We pre-recorded the conversation to be released to coincide with the publication of the new World Press Freedom Index.

Now, as some of you might know, especially if you are in DC, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an annual tradition meant to celebrate the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. Its protections for free speech and a free press are meant to ensure we solve our differences with words, not violence. What the gunman intended to accomplish last Saturday at the Washington Hilton was the antithesis of the First Amendment. Free speech is what we do instead of violence.

Now, I should also note, I was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I was seated at the back of the ballroom, two tables from the doors that led to the stairway. The gunman was apprehended at the top of those stairs. My tablemates and I knew right away that the loud noises we heard were gunshots. We all got low, then we smelled the gunpowder.

Much of what happened next is well documented, so I won’t go into all of that here. Suffice it to say, I was struck by the professionalism of the journalists at my table and throughout the room. Many of them moved quickly to document what happened and to coordinate coverage, despite the spotty cell reception in the basement ballroom. I saw many reporters in their evening finest, reporting on camera in the minutes after the shooting. Later, rush into the White House to cover President Trump’s press conference.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Clayton discusses the challenges facing a free press today. Including the physical threats they face in doing their jobs. He talks about how his organization, Reporters Without Borders, has started providing reporters with protective equipment, including bulletproof vests. I don’t think any reporters at the Washington Hilton thought they might need those vests to attend a dinner celebrating the First Amendment.

President Trump said he would like the dinner to be rescheduled. We’ll see if that happens. But regardless, what happened over the weekend further highlights not only the importance of press freedom, but also the very real threats and challenges reporters can face every day in the course of doing their job. Now, on to today’s show.

Clayton Weimers: There’s a lot of places where the problem isn’t overt state censorship. It is subtle pressure from the government. It is a lack of access. It is a lack of opportunity. It is a culture of fear. What country best illustrates that in democracies right now? It’s the United States.

[Video Begins]

Male Speaker: Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.

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Nico Perrino: You’re listening to So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, brought to you by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Welcome back to So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law of philosophy and stories that define your right to free speech. I’m your host, Nico Perrino. Back in 2020, the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders opened the doors to a virtual library inside the popular computer game called Minecraft.

Known as the Uncensored Library, this Minecraft world preserves the work of journalists who have been censored, jailed, exiled, or in some cases even killed for practicing their craft. While some of the works featured in the library are censored in certain countries, say Iran or Saudi Arabia, Minecraft as a game is usually not censored. So, the creation of the library is a creative hack to circumvent state censorship and make the works accessible to millions around the world. Most recently, the library opened a new room focused on growing obstacles to press freedom in the United States.

The new wing reminds Americans that subtler, less direct threats to a free press happen everywhere, even at home. Reporters Without Borders tracks these threats closely in their annual Press Freedom Index, with the latest report being released today, when you are hearing this podcast. Given the release of the report and World Press Freedom Day approaching on May 3rd, we thought it an appropriate time to unpack the state of press freedom across the globe. Joining us to do so is Clayton Weimers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders USA. Clayton, welcome onto the show.

Clayton Weimers: Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Nico Perrino: The World Press Freedom Index came out today, and America, if I’m reading this correctly, is what, 64th on the list. That’s down from somewhere in the 50’s last year.

Clayton Weimers: It is indeed. We’ve dropped seven places this year on the index. I think for anyone who’s been paying attention for the past year, it’s probably not shocking that the United States is doing worse on press freedom than it was 12/18 months ago. But what I do think surprises a lot of people is finding out how low we were in the first place.

Nico Perrino: How low were we in the first place? Have we always been in the 50’s/60’s range, or were we ever up here with these mostly Scandinavian countries, plus Ireland, in the green zone?

Clayton Weimers: We’ve never quite reached the heights of Northern Europe. But when the index first started recording these things, we were consistently in the high 20’s, which is still – there are a lot of countries where the press is free. So, being No. 1 isn’t the end-all, be-all…Norway.

Nico Perrino: Norway’s No. 1.

Clayton Weimers: Norway is always No. 1. This is their 10th straight year with the top spot. But the United States of the past decade has seen a pretty sustained decline year over year. We’ve seen that decline measured on every subscore that we do.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: So, tell us a little bit about those subscores.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: We look at five different indicators: Economic, political, legislative, socio-cultural, and safety. Safety is weighted a little bit heavier, so if you are a country with journalists who are being killed, or attacked in the streets, or jailed, that’s going to have a significant impact on your score. But across all five indicators, we’ve seen a steady deterioration of the conditions in the United States. That’s been going on for the better part of a decade.

What that tells us it’s not the fault of one particular politician, one particular political party. It has spanned multiple presidential administrations. Congress changing hands several times. It’s really tempting to lay this at the feet of Donald Trump, and don’t worry, I can get into my criticisms of the Trump administration. But it’s not just a Trump problem. The long-term backsliding really betrays that there are structural deficiencies that are holding back press freedom in this country.

Nico Perrino: Are there legal deficiencies?

Clayton Weimers: Yeah.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: When you think of the legal regime in the United States, the First Amendment, it’s protection for a free press, it’s there, right there in the First Amendment, you think it’s the strongest protection for freedom of speech in the world. But yet, America is still 64th.

Clayton Weimers: Well, I think you probably know this as well as I do. How could it be any clearer than “Congress shall make no laws?”

Nico Perrino: Yeah, right.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Yet, we have problems all the time with free expression, not just press freedom.

Nico Perrino: So, you’re measuring the issue culturally as well, in a certain respect?

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. We try to take a holistic approach to the whole thing. On the legal front, you look at that decade of backsliding, we haven’t seen any significant legislative reforms to respond to some of the threats that have emerged to press freedom at all at the federal level. Meanwhile, at the local level, municipal and state governments have been chipping away at press rights left and right. One of the big trends in the past few years was during COVID. A lot of state capitols shooed the press away. Wouldn’t let them onto the floor. Wouldn’t even let them into the gallery in certain states.

Nico Perrino: Well, you’re seeing that at the federal level, too, where the Trump administration is pushing the Associated Press out of the White House, as well as reporters who are not going to sign on to the Pentagon’s press rules, which was most of the pool in that case.

Clayton Weimers: Absolutely. So many of these tactics have been developed at the local levels first. The pandemic’s over, and some states still didn’t let the press back in. Other municipalities are passing laws – this is especially true in California – to restrict press access to homeless encampments because they don’t want shots of the police clearing homeless people out of public parks because it’s a really bad look. People react very badly to it. But that is a public interest story. The journalists should be able to document. We’ve had journalists arrested just because they were hanging around homeless encampments interviewing people who live there.

Then, the police came in and did a sweep and arrested the journalists, too. We’re also seeing a rash of laws that are being attempted in various states to limit how close a journalist or, really, anyone with a camera, can get to a police officer in the conduct of their official duties, whatever that means. Anytime a police officer’s out on the street, you could argue that they’re working and that they’re officially on the clock. But what they’re really trying to do is stop people from taking pictures of law enforcement officers while they’re doing things that they don’t want people to see them doing.

Nico Perrino: What is this economic category mean?

Clayton Weimers: The economic category means a few different things. If you look at the state of the news media ecosystem right now in the United States, you can’t ignore the fact that there’s massive layoffs year after year. Media outlets are shutting down. It’s especially happening at the local level. We talk a lot about news deserts and a crisis of local news. On average, two local newspapers close in this country every week.

There’s great research being done at Northwestern University with the local news initiative. They keep track of this thing. They have a really good interactive map that I would encourage people to take a look at, after they’ve looked at our interactive map at rsf.org, which shows exactly where the news desert crisis is at its worst. There are tens of millions of Americans living in a county where there’s no local news at all.

Nico Perrino: So, you kind of have to have news in order to have a free press. I mean, presumably you could have a free press without any reporters, but that wouldn’t mean much in practice.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. It wouldn’t mean anything. We always harp on the three facets that we think are important for press freedom, which is safety, independence, and plurality. You need a safe press to be able to it’s job. You need an independent press that isn’t under pressure from either economic interests, like the ownership, and the advertisers, or politicians. Then you need pluralism. You need a lot of different voices in that marketplace of ideas. Otherwise, you’re not really getting the full picture, right?

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Let’s talk about the Trump administration a little bit. What are the biggest threats that you see coming from that administration that would play into these rankings?

Clayton Weimers: Oh, I mean that could be the whole topic of our conversation today. I’ve been categorizing the Trump administration as waging a war on press freedom. It seems almost every day they’re taking a new action to somehow restrict, or harm, insult, weaken the press in some way or another. It started on day one of the presidential administration.

The president signed a flurry of executive orders. One of which was supposedly to shore up free expression. But has led to all of these different steps taken to say, eliminate funding for public media, or to justify other restrictions on access. He’s blocked the Associated Press from being able to attend White House events or board Air Force One because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which is as clear-cut a case of viewpoint discrimination as I think you can ever find. Sometimes these are gray areas, that one’s not.

Nico Perrino: Although the courts have been on the other side of that one.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: The courts have not –

Nico Perrino: At least the circuit court, the district court.

Clayton Weimers: There have been a mixed bag, I would say, from the courts. Though I will say, on the whole, the courts have been very strong on press freedom. So, we’re suing the Trump administration – “we” being RSF – to save “Voice of America.” For those who aren’t familiar. “Voice of America” is a public broadcaster. But it’s very unique in its mission. It is set up to bring reliable information to people in other countries. Primarily living under authoritarianism. At its peak, it had an audience of over 300 million weekly. These are primarily people living under authoritarian conditions and censorship conditions.

In many cases, VOA was alongside its peers at Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which have also been affected by this. One of the, if not the only, reliable source of information for these countries. The Trump administration, in the first go-around, way back when in Trump 1.0, tried to turn these into propaganda outlets for the White House. They failed to do so because, by legal statute, these are editorially independent media organizations that just happen to get federal funding. So, they failed to do that. In Trump 2.0, they decided, “We’re just going to shut it down.” So, they zeroed it out.

Nico Perrino: Did they zero it out through Congress, or was it an executive order that zeroed it out? Because Congress is the only institution that can appropriate funds, or presumably not spend them.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Exactly. This is a fight we’re having in a lot of different contexts. But this was just an executive order the president signed, saying that we’re going to get rid of these broadcasters. So, we’ve taken the administration to court, and we won on summary judgment. They’re of course appealing.

But essentially, we have established that this was an unconstitutional executive order to shut down VOA. The judge has ordered all the journalists back to work. We can have a debate about whether we want taxpayer dollars funding the media like this. We can have a debate about whether this is a good way to use soft power. We can even have a debate about whether soft power matters, and if that’s what we want to base our foreign policy decisions on.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: But that’s not the debate we’re having. The debate we’re having is a runaway executive that just has it out for the media and doesn’t care what the law actually says.

Nico Perrino: Well, the most recent event that I assume you see as an attack on press freedom is Kash Patel suing The Atlantic and one of its reporters for reporting on his alleged drinking while FBI director. Do you see that as emblematic of what you see from the broader Trump administration, and do you see that action in particular as a threat to press freedom?

Clayton Weimers: Yes. I can’t emphasize enough, though, that this is actually one of the areas where the law is extremely clear. You can’t just sue a media outlet because you don’t like their coverage. This has been reinforced by court decision after court decision, going way back to the Civil Rights era, when we got the Sullivan decision, that essentially inoculated The New York Times from lawsuits from Mississippi politicians who were mad that The New York Times called them segregationists, essentially.

Nico Perrino: For our listeners, some of the history here is interesting. You had northern publications or national publications that were sending their reporters to the south, in many cases, to report on the Civil Rights Movement. They were being sued for defamation and put in front of Southern juries. I read an article, I think it was in a collection of essays called First Amendment Stories, that said something like there was $2 billion of outstanding judgments against these various publications. Because a northern or national news publication could not win a defamation case in front of a southern jury.

What happened with The New York Times here is, they ran an ad that was meant to raise money for Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists in the south. There were some inaccuracies in that ad. They were sued by Mr. Sullivan in this case. Not because Mr. Sullivan was mentioned in particular in the ad – he was a sheriff or something like that – but because his office was mentioned and he assumed that that cast dispersions on his reputation or whatnot.

The court ended up saying, in its ruling, that in order for a public official, that is a government official, to win a defamation claim, the plaintiff in that case, in this case Sullivan, would have to prove actual malice, which is knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth. Now, President Trump and others in the conservative ecosystem have had it out for the Sullivan standard for many years. There have been some Supreme Court Justices who have also looked at askance the Sullivan standard. In particular, its application beyond public officials, also to public figures, for example.

I believe Alan Dershowitz has a lawsuit against CNN that he’s petitioned the Supreme Court to hear right now that would either take a look at Sullivan again, or take a look at its application to public figures like him. There’s been a concerted movement of sorts to undermine Sullivan, and journalists have been concerned about this because they have seen what a lower standard for defamation means for their reporting, given their experience during the Civil Rights Movement. Now, I should say, in The Atlantic case – and Clayton, correct me if I’m wrong – this was a reporter who had dozens of sources and spent months reporting this story. It’s hard to see how you prove actual malice in that case.

Clayton Weimers: Actual malice is an incredibly high standard. It’s one of the strongest legal protections that we have in this country that has prevented the floodgates from opening against what we call strategic lawsuits against participation, SLAPPs.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: SLAPPs.

Clayton Weimers: If lawsuits like this were allowed to proceed, it would paralyze the media. They would never be able to publish anything that they thought might open them up to a lawsuit. In a case like this, I think it’s a pretty slam dunk case for The Atlantic. I also think that if you’re trying to convince people that you’re not actually drunk on the job, it doesn’t really look good to file a lawsuit rife with spelling errors throughout.

Nico Perrino: Yeah, or that comes on the heels of you being filmed chugging beers with the USA men’s hockey team after they won the gold medal in the Olympics.

Clayton Weimers: But look, thin-skinned public officials have been trying to look for weaknesses in the Sullivan standard for years. Sarah Palin sued The New York Times a couple years ago.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: In what was a pretty transparent effort to just get this to the Supreme Court and overturn it. That’s why she chose The New York Times to sue, because it’s symbolic.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: But the Sullivan standard has held, and I trust that it will continue to hold. There have been some Supreme Court Justices who have suggested that they would look at it. One Supreme Court Justice has outright said he thinks it should be completely –

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Clarence Thomas, yes.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Yeah.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Neil Gorsuch has also suggested as much as well.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. But two is a long way from five.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Yeah. It might be hard to get to five. The reason that – who was it? Justice Brennan said in the Sullivan decision that you need an actual malice standard is because you want public debate on public issues. Including public debate and public reporting on government officials to be, in his words, “uninhibited, robust, and wide open.” You have seen the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, use these defamation lawsuits to go after their critics.

It’s just a coincidence that before I came into the studio to record this with you, our research team put together a list of the number of defamation and other SLAPPs, strategic lawsuit against public participation-style lawsuits that the Trump administration has filed since 2023, including during his campaign. They tallied 25 total, as well as six threat lawsuits that have not yet been filed. So, this is definitely a tactic. FIRE, of course, is in court defending the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for her poll that she conducted before the 2024 election that showed Kamala Harris winning in that election.

President Trump has a history of going on the record and say, even if he doesn’t win these lawsuits, it enacts a price on those who have to defend against them. He said something to the effect of, “I spent a couple of bucks. But he” – the reporter that he sued – “spent a lot more in time and money. Even if you have a slam dunk defense, it still takes a while to get to that motion dismissed. That’s why you have anti-SLAPP statutes that help defendants in these cases be able to dismiss the lawsuits fairly early on in the process. But there is still a process. As you mentioned earlier, there hasn’t been any movement at the federal level to enact protections for the press in the form of, for example, a federal anti-SLAPP statute.

Clayton Weimers: I mean, you’re making my point for me here. That would be one of the key things that Congress could do if it were serious about shoring up press freedom, is pass federal anti-SLAPP. Another thing they could do is pass the Press Act, which came very close to being passed under President Biden. It cleared the House unanimously. What clears the House unanimously these days?

But for one reason or another, the Senate simply never brought it to a vote, and it expired. That’s a bill that would codify protections for journalistic sources. There’s essentially a big loophole in the law right now that allows federal law enforcement to pry into the communications between journalists and their sources under basically a vague national security umbrella.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: It’s always national security, man.

Clayton Weimers: Well, in fact, that’s a big theme in this year’s index. This is a great transition. Globally speaking, the indicator of those five indicators that has fallen the sharpest this year is the legal indicator. That’s not just in the United States. What we’re seeing is, on the one hand, you have a weakening of legal infrastructures that are meant to protect journalism and access to information to the public. You also have increased weaponization of legal infrastructure against journalism.

Especially when it comes to national security and secrecy laws. This is something that really kicked off in the wake of 9/11 and has just continued unabated, and not just in the United States. So, you see a lot of lawfare against media outlets and individual journalists by states, using laws that are ostensibly there to protect national security. But in practice being used to stifle expression.

Nico Perrino: To look at this from the other side, if you look at the polling around journalism and journalists, it seems like the media industry as a whole is kind of in the tank. Public support for reporters and journalism seems to have been sliding over recent years. To the extent there are attacks on press freedom in the United States. Does the news industry bear any responsibility for those attacks?

Clayton Weimers: I think that’s a great question. I think the answer is, “yes.” But it’s more complicated than that.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: This is April 30th, so two weeks ago I was at Ole Miss for a symposium on trust in journalism. A gathering of mostly journalists. Then a few people like me who just kind of work on the outskirts of journalism, to discuss: How do we come up with a better understanding as an industry of how we can build trust?

We produced something called the Oxford Declaration, which was a series of value statements about what it means to be a trustworthy journalist and how to produce trustworthy journalism. We spent a good part of the day doing a lot of self-flagellation about how the media needs to do better about being transparent. About not necessarily blending the line between editorial and journalistic content, which is something that I think we need to see more of.

Nico Perrino: Well, The New York Times didn’t use to have an op-ed page, right?

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. I think it’s kind of this unique feature of American journalism that you have this extremely partisan opinion section side by side with hard news. I think in the newsroom, it’s very clear to them what the difference is between those two things. But for a lot of people, it’s just content, and it’s hard to make that distinction. Maybe when everyone was reading a physical newspaper, and there were different sections, and you could say this is the news section, and this is the editorial. By the way, these little comics, this isn’t journalism either. Maybe that was an easier case to make.

But in this day and age, where everything is delivered via algorithm to our phones, you’re just scrolling through a stream of content, and it’s all just flattened content. That’s not even just within the confines of a particular media outlet. Now, you have this situation where journalism is competing side by side with other forms of content in a way that it never has had to before. That has all kinds of implications for the trust as well. Because if in the public consciousness, everyone is just consuming content and they’re going from New York Times article, to cat video, to my ex’s vacation photos, to state-sponsored propaganda, to hate speech.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Just back and forth between these different types of content. In your mind, it’s all kind of equal. So, yes, back to your question, the news media needs to look to themselves to find ways to earn the trust of the public. But they’re not the only ones to blame. I think big tech also has a lot of the blame here. Let’s look at the record. They have taken away the ad revenue that the new media relied on. Now, they’re moving to a model that takes away the clicks to redirect traffic to news media sites by keeping –

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Yeah, these platforms want you to stay on the platform.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. They give you AI-generated answers on your Google search, so you don’t actually have to click on that media link. Facebook doesn’t want anything to do with the news. They do everything in their power to avoid having to have news on their platforms, even when they launch threads. The Twitter competitor, Adam Mosseri, who headed up the project, outright said, “We’re going to deemphasize news in the feeds on threads because we don’t want this to be that kind of platform.” These are the [crosstalk - inaudible] [00:26:51].

Nico Perrino: Did that come in the wake of the 2016 election, where they were – Facebook, in this case, or Meta, the parent company, were brought in for a lot of criticism for how they seemed to have supercharged the Trump campaign through Cambridge Analytica and whatnot.

Clayton Weimers: I think these are companies that are extremely fine-tuned to public opinion and seem to just blow with the wind one way or the other. Because you’re right, after 2016, they made all these mea culpas about how they’re going to do better and be more trustworthy and incorporate these processes into the algorithms. At RSF, we had a lot of conversations with these companies.

Because we have a lot of ideas on how you can make an algorithm deliver more trustworthy information, and actually give journalism a little bit of a competitive advantage that it doesn’t enjoy these days. But we all know now they’ve all kind of swung in the opposite direction because the politics have gone the other way. There’s a different presidential administration that has a very different view on what is and isn’t censorship or what is and isn’t the rule of these companies in our media ecosystem.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Mark Zuckerberg said they weren’t going to throttle political content, for example, on these platforms.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: And yet…and yet…

Nico Perrino: But let me ask you if viewpoint diversity is a problem within the industry. Because I think there’s this perception among much of the general public that these news outlets are predominately left wing institutions, unless they are outright branded as a conservative media outlet. For example, like Fox News or The Daily Signal for example. Do you think one of the ways to build trust is to create more viewpoint diversity within the newsroom? Is that something that a good editor should even look at?

I think one of the emblematic examples that really got a lot of people angry was the self-flagellation at The New York Times after Tom Cotton wrote his op-ed, I believe, in the summer of 2020, arguing that President Trump should bring in the troops to tamp down on Black Lives Matter protests. The editor ended up resigning. There was this whole uproar within the newsroom for even publishing the op-ed in the first place.

But then, when he looked at the public opinion polling, Senator Tom Cotton’s argument was widely popular by something like 70% of the public agreeing with the argument he was making. But if you were looking just inside The New York Times newsroom, it was wildly unpopular, and indeed, people lost their jobs for even publishing that argument.

Clayton Weimers: There’s a lot to unpack there. I would say just to that very last point, I don’t think it’s the job of the news media to tell the public what it already thinks. Just because 70% of people might think a certain way, I don’t think that is an indication that the media should pander to them. I think that’s a much worse outcome, and what we want –

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: I don’t think that’s what the editor in this case was doing. He was just publishing an argument from a United States Senator that happened to reflect a broader public opinion in this case.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. Absolutely. I think this comes back to: What is the difference between hard news and an editorial section? If you are a newspaper with an editorial section, you’re well within your rights to define the confines of what your overall viewpoint is. You should be transparent about what that is. There is a lot of blowback at The Washington Post because they redefined the kinds of editorial pieces they would run as being strictly about free markets, etc., and that got some criticism. I will say, the good thing about that is that they’re at least transparent about it. They’re not pretending to be something that they’re not.

If you are going to be an editorial section that publishes a wide variety of viewpoints, you got to be consistent about that as well, and be transparent about that. At the end of the day, it’s all about transparency. Are you being honest with your readers? That’s what you’ve got to do. Then you have another section of the editorial section, which is the editorial board itself. That is the view of the newspaper.

I think there’s a debate to be had about whether it’s appropriate for newspapers to have that kind of viewpoint. Personally, I think yes, as long as again, we’re being very clear about what we’re talking about here. But I think all of this just kind of gets mushed together, and the losers in all of this are the journalists, who are not at all part of those discussions. They’re not in those meetings. But they’re the ones being thrown under the bus when everyone gets their pitchforks, because The New York Times published a bad op-ed.

Nico Perrino: To put The New York Times to the side, one interesting case study is The Wall Street Journal, which is regarded as a conservative newspaper, I believe owned by News Corp, which is the Rupert Murdoch company, has a conservative editorial board. Although not afraid to be critical of the Trump administration, but from a more conservative/libertarian leaning perspective. But on the news side, you have some of the most critical and investigatory reporting of the Trump administration happening. Even in one case, a report about Trump’s ties to Epstein and that image of the woman that he is alleged to have drawn in something like Jefferey Epstein’s birthday books. In any case, Trump sued them for that.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: It earned them a lawsuit. A case that’s been thrown out. Another example of our courts really standing strong for press freedom right now, by the way.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. I ask these questions because I am a big fan of the news media. I went to college at Indiana University and majored in journalism.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Great journalism school.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. Well, the journalism school is gone now.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Well, we can talk about what’s going on at Indiana later in student press freedom. That’s a whole other interesting topic.

Nico Perrino: They were the last-ranked public university in FIRE’s college free speech rankings, in no small part to the ways that it has attacked journalism, reporting. The student newspaper even came under fire for reporting on Indiana University’s last-place public university ranking in FIRE’s college free speech rankings.

Clayton Weimers: That’s okay, FIRE hates my alma mater, too.

Nico Perrino: What’s your alma mater?

Clayton Weimers: Pitzer College, Claremont, California. Go Sagehens.

Nico Perrino: Yes. Yeah. So, I guess solidarity in the fact that you and I have colleges and universities that are in FIRE’s crosshairs. I went to the Ernie Pyle School. Ernie Pyle, a famed World War II war correspondent. That was all collapsed into a broader media school at the university, which I love the legacy of the Ernie Pyle School and the journalism program there. I happen to be of the opinion that you don’t need to go to journalism school to be a journalist. I think you can actually learn a lot from studying in another discipline and just working at the student newspaper, which you can do if you’re a physics major, for example.

But I was frustrated when I was at Indiana University that I couldn’t take classes in the – I forgot what it was called – but the telecommunications school, because I wanted to do some video journalism, for example. The offerings in the journalism school were thin. But now, The Indiana Daily Student, I think, has run into problems. It’s not publishing every day like it used to. I used to get off my bike and go to the newsstand and get a printed copy of The Indiana Daily Student every morning before I started my class, and read it throughout the day. Now, it’s just not there. I think it publishes six or seven times a semester now.

Clayton Weimers: Well, the university effectively tried to shut it down. They fired the faculty advisor.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: The advisor.

Clayton Weimers: What appears to be over the coverage that was critical of the administration. The newspaper was going to put out an issue sharply criticizing the administration, timed to homecoming weekend, which it’s a big time for any university when they’re welcoming back the alumni and the boosters. They got ahead of that by saying, “Oh, actually, you’re not going to print anything ever again. Starting with this issue, and we’re firing the faculty advisor. We’re going to be looking at the editorial independence of this newspaper.”

But it was also a great moment of student journalism solidarity. Because over at Baylor University, they said, “Hey, we still have our printing presses. We’ll print your newspaper for you and drive it over to your campus and drop it off in time for alumni weekend.” These are two schools that are rivals.

Nico Perrino: I didn’t know that story. Wow.

Clayton Weimers: But that issue got out.

Nico Perrino: Was that Baylor or Butler? I think both –

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: You know what, I misspoke, it was Butler.

Nico Perrino: Baylor’s in Texas, I believe. Butler is there in Indianapolis.

Clayton Weimers: I make this mistake most March Madnesses as well. Forgetting which one is which. Thank you for that fact check.

Nico Perrino: There are a lot of people that get Indiana University wrong. Call it the University of Indiana. I’ll never forget, I read a popular book about Washington, DC called This Town, and the author of that book referred to my alma mater as University of Indiana. I shook my fist at him. But I was saying, I’m a big fan of the news media, in part also just because of the media ecosystem that we live in right now, where you have a fast-moving news cycle.

You have social media. You have artificial intelligence. It can be hard to tell what someone is claiming is true is actually true. So, my go-to media habit or media consumption habit is, if I see a big claim about a fast-developing story, is to go check with the Associated Press or Reuters in particular have said about it. If they haven’t reported because they have these wire services, I just take a beat before I chime in.

Clayton Weimers: It’s another reason pluralism is so important. Because if you have this really bizarre, hard-to-believe story, and only one sort of random outlet is reporting it. I’m not saying that that means it’s not true, but it starts to be a lot more credible once it shows up in other media outlets. Usually, when there’s this big, leaked story, reporters are racing against each other at different outlets to get that story published first as soon as they have all their ducks in a row. So, once one of them publishes, all the others are like, “Well, all right, it’s out there, so we better just go.”

Nico Perrino: Even if we can’t source it.

Clayton Weimers: Exactly. But now, they have another source because it’s been published elsewhere.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: That’s when pluralism acts as a trustworthiness indicator in a sense because the media keep each other honest. If you only have a few sources, that’s bad. If we get to a place – this is what really worries me about the state of the news media ecosystem. I’m not worried about The New York Times. I’m not worried about The Wall Street Journal. They’re profitable. They’re growing. They’re doing well. Everyone loves Wordle.

But that is not the whole picture. We’re losing all those local newspapers. The New York Times does great work, but isn’t going to cover your local school board hearing. It isn’t going to be on the scene of an accident that’s right off the highway that runs past your house. They’re not going to be investigating the local factory that might be polluting – well, they might be. But you need local reporters to do that. You’re not going to get that if we end up in a place where the media’s so concentrated in New York, and maybe L.A. and DC.

That’s what we’re really losing. That drives more distrust, by the way, because the media suddenly reflects the communities a little bit less. If you don’t have journalists who live among you, who you know, who are reporting stories close to you, close to your home, and all you’re getting from the news is national stories that occasionally parachute in when something bad happens in your hometown. That makes you distrust the media because it’s not for you.

Nico Perrino: The people writing the stories don’t have the sort of life experiences that could help inform those stories. For example, if you’re living in New York or L.A., you’re probably on the left on the political spectrum. You might have never owned a gun or shot a gun. You might have never worked on a farm, for example. You may have never attended a 4H fair. These are all things that I think, to the extent that the people writing these stories have experience, that can be similar to the subjects that they’re writing about.

Might as well help earn the trust of the subjects that they’re writing about. What do you think of this new non-profit newsroom model? You have some philanthropists now that are spending a lot of money, or donating, I should say, a lot of money to start up these independent newsrooms in places that have news deserts. Historically, the news media ecosystem has largely been a for-profit enterprise.

Clayton Weimers: I think in the modern era, we are realizing the limits of the for-profit model in the news media. I think there’s plenty of room for different business models. I think the success of a lot of non-profit newsrooms is showing that this is a very viable path for a certain type of outlet. What concerns me is sustainability. Philanthropy can be capricious.

Today, funding local news is kind of sexy for a lot of the big foundations, and that’s great. I hope it stays that way forever. But what if it changes? What if we shift away to caring a lot more about something else as a philanthropic community? Then are those non-profit newsrooms going to have the rug pulled out from under them and not be able to continue? I know that these foundations are thinking through that problem as well.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: They know that this is not the way to fund the news forever. So, they make sustainability a big –

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: They could help them set up an endowment, for example.

Clayton Weimers: Exactly. I’ve seen a lot of examples of that, where, say, a foundation buys a building for the local newspaper that can be their headquarters, and they can rent out the extra space.

Nico Perrino: [Crosstalk - inaudible] [00:40:28].

Clayton Weimers: That’s an asset, and if they ever have problems and they want to just downsize a little bit, they can sell the building. There’s a lot more of a safety net for them.

Nico Perrino: You’ve referred to your organization, Reporters Without Borders, in the short hand as RSF. That’s not the acronym that I would use for Reporters Without Borders. What does RSF stand for? And explain to our listeners a little bit about what Reporters Without Borders is. Is it related to Doctors Without Borders, for example?

Clayton Weimers: Sort of, actually. Reporters Without Borders is actually called Reporters Sans Frontières in French. We were founded in France 41 years ago. Headquarters today remains in Paris. I run our North America office here in Washington, DC, where we are actually a completely separate 501(c)(3). Incorporated by the way, affiliated with the international organization.

So, for any donation-minded listeners out there, you can get a tax-refundable donation to RSF that way. But yes, we’re headquartered in Paris. There is a little bit of French identity embedded in this organization to this day. Even though we’re now very much an international organization. We have offices in 15 countries. We have a network of correspondents covering 150 countries. Essentially, anywhere it is safe for us to be present, we are there.

Nico Perrino: When you say “cover,” you mean reporting on press freedom in that countries?

Clayton Weimers: Exactly. Our correspondents are our eyes and ears in the countries where we’re not able to maintain an actual office.

Nico Perrino: Okay.

Clayton Weimers: They feed us on the ground information. They help liaise with local officials and local media. So, let’s say, we hear word that a journalist has been arrested in a country. We’ll probably hear the word from our correspondent first, but if we don’t, we can ping our correspondent and say, “Can you go down to the jail and find out if this is true? Can you find out how to reach his family? How to contact their lawyer?” All that stuff.

Nico Perrino: So, you investigate, you also help these journalists that are under pressure or being censored?

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Absolutely. We say we’re the world’s largest organization devoted to the safety, independence, and pluralism of media. If we’re known for something, it’s that map we had in front of you, the World Press Freedom Index that came out today, where we rank every country. But as an organization, and this is really key to our identity, we are not content to be monitors. We’re not just here to name and shame. We’re here to take action. That action can be at the individual level on the ground.

So, helping journalists who have been wrongfully arrested or detained. Investigating the cases of murdered journalists when the authorities are unwilling or unable to do so. We provide protective equipment in conflict zones. By the way, just two weeks ago, we launched a new protective program in the United States for the first time. It’s pretty startling that we’re importing the programs that we run in Ukraine, and Lebanon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo into the United States.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Why do it now? I think some of our listeners would be a little shocked to hear that, and maybe think it’s hyperbolic or an overreaction.

Clayton Weimers: It is something that came directly from the feedback we were getting from reporters. Last summer, you might remember, there was this series of No Kings protests, and they were especially violent in Los Angeles. What we kept seeing day after day is journalists coming under literal fire from masked law enforcement agents, from God knows what agency, because they were covering up their badges. We counted dozens, I think, in a two-week period, 62 incidents where a member of the media was violently attacked just by law enforcement.

Nico Perrino: Because they were members of the media or because they were with the protesters, or is it hard to tell?

Clayton Weimers: Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Sometimes it’s not hard to tell. There’s this great video that we have – well, I shouldn’t say great.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Sad, but it’s great in that so far it’s indicative.

Clayton Weimers: It’s great in the sense that we so seldom get clear-cut evidence like this. It is a video of an Australian foreign correspondent in Los Angeles reporting, holding the microphone, talking straight to the camera about the protests that are going on in the background behind her. You can see in the background a tactical geared up agent, turns around, looks at her, picks up his weapon, points it directly at her, shoots her in the leg with a rubber bullet. She wasn’t in the protest. She was literally live on the air in Australia, and wasn’t posing a threat to anyone, and just became a target like that.

There have been a number of incidents like that. There are other incidents that don’t get captured on camera. So, we investigate them and talk to the journalist in question. But one of the things we kept hearing from journalists, and not just in Los Angeles, by the way. In Minneapolis, in Chicago, in New York, is that they show up to cover these protests in their communities.

Something they’ve been doing for a long time, and suddenly it’s a little bit different. It’s a lot more hostile. It’s a lot more aggressive. It’s getting a lot more violent. We have journalists going to the hospital with concussions. One lost a finger. They’re getting seriously injured, which threatens their ability to go back out the next day and keep covering the story.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: A lot of these are freelancers, and they need to get out there and earn that paycheck. They kept telling us, “We didn’t know. We didn’t know what gear we needed. We didn’t know how to get the gear. It’s expensive, and we don’t make a lot of money. No one was training us on this.”

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: The gear is what, bulletproof vests, helmets?

Clayton Weimers: For the most part, I don’t think most journalists need bulletproof vests. We are lucky that we’re not dealing with live ammunition as the problem in this country. That is what we do in Ukraine or in Gaza, for instance.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

Clayton Weimers: In the United States, we are recommending a – we’re going to get technical here – a Level IIA vest, which can be resistant to small caliber munitions. But mostly we want to make sure you’re being protected if you’re being struck with what’s called less-than-lethal munitions.

Nico Perrino: Rubber bullets.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, that sort of thing. That can still kill you if you’re not protected and if you get hit in the wrong place. But the most likely scenario it’s a debilitating injury. So, we want to protect against that. It’s also gas masks. It’s first-aid kits. Because we want to make sure that if there are injuries in the field, you have what you need to treat the injury and know how to use it.

We’re also in addition to providing this PPE, partnering with some of our trusted peer organizations who are doing safety training. Because gear alone does not keep you safe. We know that from experience. You need to have situational awareness. You need to have what’s called HEFAT training for safety. Nothing is a silver bullet. It’s not going to solve all the problems. But we can at least help journalists do their jobs a little bit more safely this way.

Nico Perrino: You mentioned freelancers. We’re seeing a lot more freelancers in the journalism space with the advent of Substack and beehiiv, for example. What do you think generally of these platforms that allow individual journalists to build their own following, so to speak, separate from an institution that they might have been, or in many cases were affiliated with before? CNN, Don Lemon is on Substack, for example. You have reporters leaving The Washington Post or The New York Times, and starting their own Substack to monetize their following and their writing.

Clayton Weimers: It’s definitely a reflection of where the news media economy has gone. Because there are fewer jobs in journalism. But there’s no less need for journalism. So, a lot of journalists have found it’s just easier and more profitable to set out on their own, and do their own thing that way. I think that’s great.

I think it comes back to what I’m saying about pluralism. We need a lot of different sources of information. We need a lot of different ways to reach people. But let’s also be real about the limitations of that approach. If you are a solo independent journalist running a Substack, you can do great work, but you’re not going to have the backing of a major media organization that can provide you with a lot of staff to do in-depth investigations.

Nico Perrino: Or the time.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Or the time.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: The time to spend months reporting out that Kash Patel story at The Atlantic, for example.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. Seriously. If you want to do really, really in-depth investigative pieces, you can’t live on Substack but publishing every three months. There’s no economic model that makes that worth it. I know everyone gets into journalism wanting to be a New Yorker columnist that writes 5000-word think pieces. To an extent, that’s not a realistic path in the journalism field.

Nico Perrino: Sure.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: Except for a very lucky few. But at the same time, there’s all kinds of journalism that you can’t just do by yourself. You need a team.

Nico Perrino: I know we know, and are close with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, who founded Substack. So, if you guys are listening, that might be a place where you can invest some money and provide some Substack reporters for journalists who want to come to Substack, but maybe publish three or four pieces of deeply investigated reporting a year. I don’t know. So, what’s your background? Do you have a history as a journalist?

Clayton Weimers: I was the editor and chief of the high school newspaper, after which I promptly retired from journalism. No. I am not a journalist. I’m a little bit of an interloper in this world. I joined RSF as our Advocacy Director in DC. I have a background in political campaigns, actually.

Nico Perrino: Okay.

Clayton Weimers: So, that transition made sense. I’ve just since become the North America director. But I would say, globally, RSF staff are half and half journalists and something else. So, we have lawyers, and fundraisers, and other investigators. People who may have some journalism in their background, but not entirely. It’s an interesting place to work because we have sort of a newsroom identity in how we approach things.

It’s very important to us also to follow journalistic ethics in everything we publish. Lead by example in that way. But we’re not really a news organization, even though we publish investigations and reports and that sort of thing. We are kind of at the same time a media organization, but at the same time not a media organization. If that makes any sense.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. You sound a little bit like FIRE. FIRE has a research department. We put out reports. But we also do advocacy work. Litigation and non-litigation advocacy. We also have an educational component to what we do. We put on some conferences. So, you guys aren’t just a think tank.

Clayton Weimers: No.

Nico Perrino: You’re a do tank as well.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: In fact, I would say we’re definitely not a think tank. That conjures up images that I think are very antithetical to the RSF identity, to be honest. We’re doers. We’re out there doing things. I talked about PPE, but we’ve got this thing on Minecraft called the Uncensored Library that you alluded to before.

We’ve got a satellite package that beams Russian-language journalism into occupied Ukraine and western Russia so that Russian speakers can still get access to the news. We’ve got technology that mirrors newspapers’ websites in countries where they’re censored so that they can get around the censors and continue to deliver the news to their audiences while they’re operating in exile. We’re always looking for ways to actually combat the enemies of press freedom.

Nico Perrino: Let’s talk about that Minecraft world now. It’s called the Uncensored Library. This is actually what prompted Emily, our producer, and I to decide that we wanted to reach out to you to come onto the podcast. Because this is just an incredibly creative piece of advocacy. Incredibly creative way to advance the mission. The New York Times, on March 11th of this year, published an article about the Uncensored Library, titled Where Censored Worlds Find a Safe Haven Inside Minecraft.

Now, I have to be honest, I was not familiar with Minecraft before I read this article. I guess I was familiar with the name and had this vague idea that it was a game. But I wasn’t familiar with what the game was about and why or how someone might be able to build a world that housed censored works inside that world, and how individuals in countries where those works are censored would be able to access this world through the game and access that content. For our listeners who aren’t familiar, what is Minecraft? It’s like Legos on the computer?

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. Minecraft is the worlds be selling video game. It’s an open-world game that’s made up of these blocks of material, and anyone can go in and build things and make their own little world. It’s a great platform for this. It’s extraordinarily popular with young people. So, if you’re not of a certain age or have children of a certain age, it’s unlikely that you ever encountered Minecraft. A lot of RSF staff had to ask their kids how to even find this thing. So, you’re definitely not alone in that.

But this all started seven years ago, and it’s really the brainchild of my German colleagues over in RSF Berlin. In true German fashion, it came about while they were sitting around having beers and discussing, “Isn’t it interesting that video games still aren’t censored in most of the countries where censorship is such a problem?” Someone said, “Could we just put news in video games and get around the censors that way?” They’re like, “Maybe.”

They started exploring a bunch of different games, and they realized that Minecraft is perfect. Because it’s so popular. Because it doesn’t really have that many restrictions. The only restrictions are basically, you can’t swear because it’s for kids. I shouldn’t even say this, but one of the ironies in the Minecraft library is that we have to censor some of it because there are instances of foul language that we had to turn into characters.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Not your fault. Blame it on Minecraft.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: So, yeah, there is a little bit of censorship in the Uncensored Library. But remember, there’s eight year olds going in there, so I think that’s okay. But we unveiled it six years ago on the World Day to End Cyber Censorship, which always trips me up to say.

Nico Perrino: There’s a day for everything.

Clayton Weimers: There truly is. We introduced it, and the thought was, “Cool. We’ll publish some content from around the world.” We built different rooms dedicated to different countries, like Russia, Saudi Arabia, China. It’s in this great neoclassical architectural style library in the game. We just pulled a bunch of our favorite greatest hits of journalists we know who have been censored and who agreed to put their content in there. We’re like, “Yeah. This will be a good stunt for the Day Against Cyber Censorship, and then we’ll move on.” It crashed on the first day because the interest level was so high.

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: Wow.

Clayton Weimers: Made them realize, “Oh, this might be a recurring thing that we’re going to have to now work on forever.” I don’t think they anticipated that six years later, their colleague in Washington, DC would be coming in to do an interview on a podcast about it. So, what we know now is that the library’s been visited by over a million different people in those six years. The books that are in it have been downloaded over 10 million times.

We know it’s hugely popular. It’s kind of got this dual purpose now, which is: On the one hand, we can put the things that are censored and make them accessible to people in those countries. Also, because the game is so popular, young people from other countries are learning about press freedom and learning about censorship. Understanding what’s at stake in these fights. That’s amazing because we can put out press releases and do podcast interviews. But how do you reach a 12-year-old about press freedom?

Nico Perrino: Sure.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: That’s tough. This is a way to do it, which I think is amazing. This year, for the sixth anniversary, we decided, “Let’s grow the concept a little bit.” We have established that this is a good way to publish censored material. But there’s a lot of places where the problem isn’t overt state censorship. It’s subtle pressure from the government. It is a lack of access. It is a lack of opportunity. It is a culture of fear. What country best illustrates that problem in democracies right now? It’s the United States.

So, the United States room, instead of publishing a bunch of content that’s outright censored, we’ve made it more like a museum exhibit. It contains a lot of content, sort of explaining the situation. As well as some artifacts. There’s a political cartoon in there from Ann Telnaes. She was The Washington Post political cartoonist who resigned after she had a cartoon rejected that depicted Jeff Bezos offering a bribe to Donald Trump. She said to me, “That is the first time in 35 years that I ever had a cartoon rejected because of its content.”

Nico Perrino: Wow.

Clayton Weimers: She knew right then, and there, that was the end of her time at The Washington Post. She graciously let us use that cartoon in there.

Nico Perrino: There’s a FIRE report in there, too.

Clayton Weimers: There absolutely is.

Nico Perrino: That was actually when our producer, Emily, was perusing the library.

[Crosstalk]

Clayton Weimers: I probably should have led with that in hindsight.

Nico Perrino: Yeah. When she was perusing the libraries, the first book that she opened, it just so happened to be a FIRE report, which is crazy.

Clayton Weimers: There’s also stuff like deleted government data that used to be publicly available on federal websites. Like climate data, or a timeline of the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. That became politically inconvenient for the current administration, so they took it down. But that’s the kind of public resource that is good for the public. But also good for journalists who are trying to get their facts straight. So, all of this is meant to illustrate that it’s not just overt censorship. There are lots of ways that authorities try to control, cajole, weaken, or somehow restrict the press, and we needed to be constantly on guard against those. Especially in democracies, not just in authoritarian countries.

Nico Perrino: Well, let’s take a stroll through the Uncensored Library now. Our producer, Emily, did a screen recording of her travels through the Uncensored Library. She had to cut it up a little bit because it’s a big world.

Clayton Weimers: It’s huge.

Nico Perrino: It takes a while to travel through. So, if you will do us the kindness as we play this clip here for our video audience of narrating what you’re seeing for our audio audience, as well as the video audience. Kind of tell us a little bit about the world. Emily, do you want to queue it up? All right. So, here we are at the start of the world?

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. So, you sort of teleport into the world from a central hub in Minecraft, as I understand it. Again, I’m old, I don’t –

[Crosstalk]

Nico Perrino: The instructions are on your website, right?

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. I take it for granted that they’re true. I also don’t know how to play Minecraft. I’ve been walked through this many times, though. There’s this introductory text here that explains what this is. Why we’re here. What the problems we’re trying to identify are. Really setting the stage for us.

Nico Perrino: Got you. There’s this big, it almost looks like a kind of cloud icon that says “truth,” that’s above what looks to be an ocean of some sort. This book that introduces the world is on a pedestal. Now, we’re looking at the Uncensored Library from afar.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. To me, I’m always amazed looking at that. It’s really a feat of design that a couple of designers who are passionate about both Minecraft and freedom of expression agreed to do for us on this. They did just a tremendous job.

Nico Perrino: It’s crazy good architecture. Now, we’re hovering above the central atrium.

Clayton Weimers: This is the centerpiece of the whole thing, which is the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom map, where every country is color-coded according to its relative press freedom level.

Nico Perrino: At the center of it is the index that is available as well.

Clayton Weimers: Yup. This is the legend that tells you what each color says.

Nico Perrino: You color-code based on the restrictions.

Clayton Weimers: And I was afraid of this. Because we are recording technically before the day this comes out, those rankings are not up to date. We’ll get this up to date, and folks can go look for themselves.

Nico Perrino: You can walk or teleport to each wing of the library, and we just teleported to the United States wing. We’re standing in the center, and I believe there’s the Statue of Liberty, that’s what, crying?

Clayton Weimers: It’s crying, and actually, that pool will continuously fill with water.

Nico Perrino: Oh, wow.

Clayton Weimers: So, if you stick around long enough, it will just get higher and higher.

Nico Perrino: There is the FIRE report: The Executive Watch on Actions Taken by the Trump Administration to Censor Speech. Emily here is walking and looking at the various reports and books. There’s transcripts from the Stephen Colbert and James Talarico interview. Now, I believe we’re in Saudi Arabia.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah, this is Saudi Arabia. The centerpiece here is a cage to symbolize all of the jailed journalists in Saudi Arabia.

Nico Perrino: Or the dismembered one in the case of Jamal Khashoggi. It looks like some of his works are featured as well. Now, we’re in the Iran wing, which hasn’t had internet as of this recording for something like, what, 45 days? More than a month.

Clayton Weimers: Actually, if it’s April 30th, I actually think it’s going to be 60 days.

Nico Perrino: Sixty days. We’re back in the atrium, looking up at the flags of the various countries of the world. There’s an icon here of, what, a fist with a pen?

Clayton Weimers: Mm-hmm.

Nico Perrino: Symbolizing the power of the press. Well, that is the Uncensored Library. Very cool.

Clayton Weimers: Yeah. Very brief tour. I really encourage those of you who know how to use Minecraft or have children who know how to, to check it out, because it really is impressive. This is one of those things that makes me so proud to work at RSF. I just get to take credit for the excellent work that other people are doing, that I get the pleasure to work with.

Nico Perrino: Well, thank you. This has been a pleasure as well, Clayton. The organization again is Reporters Without Borders USA. His organization’s latest World Press Freedom Index is available now. We’ll be sure to link it into the show notes. As well as link how to get access to this beautiful world called the Uncensored Library.

I am Nico Perino, and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my FIRE colleagues, including: Bruce Jones, Ronald Baez, Jackson Fleagle, and Scott Rogers. The podcast is produced by Emily Beaman. To learn more about So to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or Substack page, both of which feature video versions of this conversation, including the tour through the Uncensored Library.

You can also follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk. You can send us feedback at sotospeak@fire.org. Again, that is, sotospeak@fire.org, and you can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Reviews help us attract new listeners to the show. And until next time, thanks again for listening. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, and the flame logo are registered trademarks of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.