NYT, CNN, WaPo Must Cover Trump's Data Purge as an Attack

The Trump administration has deleted at least 28 federal datasets and modified another 338 across more than 60 agencies — including a database of federal law enforcement misconduct records, a survey measuring violence against children and youth, and real-time pollution readings from U.S. embassies around the world. In total, the administration has removed or modified over 8,000 web pages and approximately 3,000 datasets since taking office. A University of Connecticut public health professor put it plainly: "Taking down, even temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have is like we're erasing our institutional memory for public health." What ties the deleted datasets together is not bureaucratic redundancy — it is that every one of them produced findings that contradicted the administration's political priorities. 

This is not data management. It is evidence destruction on a national scale. When a government systematically deletes records of police misconduct, child abuse, environmental contamination, and public health trends, it is not cutting red tape — it is ensuring that the public, researchers, journalists, and future administrations cannot know what actually happened on its watch. Data experts have described it as a "denial by erasure" strategy designed to make accountability functionally impossible. 

We call on The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, and other mainstream outlets to cover the Trump administration's systematic deletion and alteration of federal data not as a policy story, but as what it is: a deliberate campaign to destroy the public record and make the truth harder to find. The public deserves reporting that treats the erasure of facts as the authoritarian act it is.