About
Hi! My name is Liam Scott, and I’m an award-winning journalist who covers media, democracy and politics.
From 2021 to 2025, I reported on press freedom and disinformation at Voice of America. I covered global threats to media freedom, often with a focus on China, Russia and the United States. At VOA, I was one of just a handful of reporters in the world who exclusively covered press freedom.
I traveled to Kansas to report on the aftermath of the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record newspaper. For that coverage, the National Press Club awarded me the 2024 Arthur Rowse Award for Examining the News Media. From Berlin and Prague, I reported on the daily impact of transnational repression facing exiled Chinese and Russian journalists.
I also reported extensively on the Russian government’s bogus jailings of American journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, starting with their arrests, culminating in their release, and every development in between. I was the lead reporter on the mini-documentary The Empty Chair, which traced the fight to secure Kurmasheva's release. It won the audience award at the 2024 Press Play Prague film festival.
My reporting and writing have also been published in Foreign Policy, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, Poynter, New Lines magazine, Coda Story, DCist, The Diplomat and The Contrarian. I've also appeared on MSNBC, CBS and ABC. My reporting is regularly cited in various news outlets, and has also been cited in reports by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the Congressional Research Service and Freedom House.
I previously worked at the mass atrocity prevention group the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, where I led the group’s work on Myanmar, Xinjiang and North Korea. I received my bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where I studied international politics and mass atrocity studies and served as executive editor of the student newspaper The Hoya. I'm a member of the National Press Club and the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists. I speak French and Mandarin Chinese, and I’m based in Washington.
