The state of the free press in the US is… not good

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. I’m going to tell you something that won’t be shocking to you, but it has dire consequences for all of us. In the United States of America here in the year of our Lord 2025. The state of the free press is not good from an openly fascistic and vindictive federal government and repressive university administrations to the explosion of artificial intelligence and the closure and consolidation of news orgs around the country. Truth itself is under direct, relentless attack, and so are the journalists who have committed our lives to reporting the truth about what’s happening in and to our world. But we will not go quietly into the night and we will not be silenced without a fight.

Listen, things are dark right now. I know, but we all have a role to play in bringing the light. Am I scared? Yeah, of course. But I’m also energized and honored to be in this struggle with friends and comrades like Mickey Huff, Eleanor Goldfield and Misha Ulus from Project Censored and all of our Movement Media Alliance family who were on the side of the doers, not the complainers. And recently on November 22nd, I had the honor of participating in a live event about the state of the Free Press in 2025 at the Great Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe here in Baltimore. And I was on a panel alongside these amazing journalists and media makers. Mickey Huff is the third director of Project Censored and is the president of the Nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. Huff joined Ithaca College in New York during the fall of 2024, where he now also serves as the distinguished director of the Park Center for Independent Media and Professor of Journalism.

He’s executive producer and co-host of the Project Censored Show, a weekly syndicated public affairs program that he founded with former Project Censored director Peter Phillips in 2010. Eleanor Goldfield is a queer, creative, radical journalist and award-winning filmmaker. She’s a board member of the Media Freedom Foundation, host of Radical Nuance, co-host of the nationally syndicated project, censored Show, along with Mickey Huff and co-host of Common Censored along with Lee Camp. And Mischa Geracoulis is the outreach and Engagement officer at Project Censored and Production lead at the Project’s Publishing in Print the Censored Press. She’s a contributor to Project Censored state of the Free Press yearbook series, a project judge, and she’s the author of the book Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. Now, our live event with me, Mickey, Eleanor, and Mischa took place to celebrate the publication of Project Censor’s annual State of the Free Press book, an invaluable volume that highlights the year’s most significant independent journalism including original investigative reports on ice surveillance, meta censorship and police violence.

And it illuminates issues that the establishment press have obscured and it lifts up the vital voices that corporate media have throttled. But we were also there to commemorate the 50 year anniversary of Project Censored itself. And frankly, I cannot say enough good things about Project Censored and I’ll let our conversation in this podcast speak for itself, but I have to just say it plainly that we all owe a huge debt to Project Censored for holding it down for half a century and for always fighting for truth and transparency. Please support them, support their work, listen to the Project Censored Show by the state of the Free Press book, and keep supporting us here at the Real News Network because if you like us, believe that a free society cannot exist without a free press, then we need you on our team. We are here for you, but we cannot keep going without you. Go to the real news.com/donate and donate today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. And now without further ado, here’s my panel conversation about the state of the Free press today with Mickey Huff, Eleanor Goldfield and Mischa Geracoulis.

Eleanor Goldfield:

This is not like a sexy issue on its face critical media literacy and independent media. People are like, yeah, well, what the hell does that have to do with the price of rice? And so I wanted to dive into that immediately because I feel like that question is the gateway into all of the other questions. So starting with you, Mickey, because you’ve had to answer this question for the past, oh, I don’t know, like 20 years, why the hell does it matter?

Mickey Huff:

Thanks so much, Eleanor, and thanks to everybody at Red Emma’s, it’s an honor to be here with you all in Baltimore, and it’s great to be in this amazing community space. Well, yes, critical media literacy is for everyone. So that’s how we basically start this. And there’s reasons that our educational system is set up the way that it is and that it conveniently excludes certain things. And among those things include civics, history, historiography. We can keep going down the line, but one of the things that’s conspicuously absent, particularly in such a media saturated culture like the United States, is teaching people critical thinking skills around media, how media is produced, who produces it, why, which voices are heard, which are not. And of course, this goes back into the history of Project Censored, and I’ve certainly been, as Eleanor said, I’ve certainly been talking about this issue for probably almost three decades now.

Definitely two and a half. But Project Censored was founded around this question about why do we only know certain things from the establishment and corporate media? And you’ll notice we don’t use the word mainstream because there’s nothing mainstream about six corporations that control 90% of our media. What we hear and see, there’s nothing mainstream about five big tech companies that are curating and algorithmically either feeding our confirmation biases or shadow banning or advertising block lists and so forth. So none of these corporations have the public interest at heart. And so what Project Censored has been doing now for next year will be our 50th anniversary. Our 50th anniversary book is just out. And so partly what we’re going to be talking about tonight of course, is the state of the free press and the importance of CRI media education. But also I wanted to take a couple minutes and Brevity’s not a strong suit, but Eleanor will kick me, so I’ll shut up.

But I wanted to actually do something that I don’t normally do. And because we’re at a bookstore, I wanted to actually read something very briefly out of our new book, and I wanted to share the origin story, why Project Censored? Why did Project Censored get started when it did in 1976 and very quickly, 50 years of covering the news that didn’t make the news? Let’s see if you can guess what year we’re in. Our country finds itself at a precipice, the United States Teeters Perilously due to rising economic inequality and domestic division on a host of issues from foreign wars and immigration to civil rights and free expression with an escalating crisis and confidence regarding the role of government, all resulting in cratering public trust and elected officials and institutions. We are perched at the verge of possible nuclear apocalypse while our leaders avert their gaze from genocide, fossil fuel, pollution, proliferates, and an ensuing climate crisis rages creating environmental devastation.

The intelligence agencies and police apparatus have been exposed as the weaponized militarized servants of the powerful who surveil and suppress we the people, even as we face numerous existential threats, government corruption and lack of trustworthy information sources are or ought to be paramount concerns. It would of course be reasonable to conclude that the preceding passage describes our present circumstances. However, this characterization of the United States could just as easily refer to the nation a half a century ago in the mid 1970s, just after its withdrawal from Vietnam. And in the wake of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of a president when institutions were in crisis, the public had grown, confused, restless, and agitated in the face of adversity. We went from a state of crisis to a state of civic malaise. Through it all though Americans held on to slivers of hope, however ephemeral, for example, press reporting on Nixon’s scandals boosted the Fourth Estate’s reputation.

Though that esteem has since flagged Senate hearings on CIA and FBI corruption gave some pause to overreaching agencies and career civil servants, even if Congressional inquiries stopped short of mass exposure and overhaul. Like is it the Nixon years? Is it the Trump administration and the Epstein files? Is it you tell me we can play that game, right? And the point of this is to say that Project Censored was born in a period that’s not much unlike the one we’re in now. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily celebratory, but in one way it shows us that we’ve been in these places before. Where we are now feels very fever pitch and much more egregious in many ways. And I know we’re going to talk about those things. However, the reason to bring this up is because while past might be prologue, we are not necessarily combined to those narratives of the past.

And we are agents in the present and we can change the direction of things, particularly if we are able to let people know, as George Sdy said in the mid 20th century, if we could tell people what’s really going on. And that’s the role of the fourth estate. And as the corporate media has co-opted any of the principles of informing the public about what’s going on, that’s why we need the independent press. We need an independent alternative press at Project Censor has been celebrating for 50 years. And so the inception of the project, which I’m just going to tell you very briefly because I think it’s very poignant, it was started by somebody that actually came from the media itself. Carl Jensen founded Project Censored in Northern California, Sonoma State University in 1976, but before that he was a journalist. He came from a family of people that really cared about what was going on in the world and particularly cared about journalism.

And he went into journalism only to be well defeated. He came out the other side feeling like he wasn’t able to tell the stories that mattered. He wasn’t really able to tell people what was going on. And so he chose what he called a more honest profession, haha, PR and marketing because at least he wasn’t a hypocrite. Of course, he did that for some time and later decided that he couldn’t really continue to do that, and that’s when he came out on the other side and went back to school and got his advanced degrees. And he founded the communications program at Sonoma State University in Northern California. But that came out of the ashes of Nixon and Watergate and the church committee hearings. And so I wanted to share this snippet with you because I think it really matters and might inform some of the rest of our conversation.

In 1976, Carl looked back and he was like, how in the world did Richard Nixon become president in 1972 when the Watergate scandal was happening months prior and the alternative media and some of the independent press would cover it, but he was saying that most people weren’t covering it. And in fact, this was actually called one of the largest political scandals of the 20th century. And we all remember that it uncovered the National Committee’s offices at Watergate, the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Watergate, in Washington dc. There was a break in by the Republican Committee to reelect the President called Creep Nixon. I am not a crook, but he certainly is a creep. He was a crook too. But this scandal was so huge that Carl looked back and said, how did this happen? How did no one cover this when it mattered? And of course, we know that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward eventually covered it and so forth.

But out of 2000 full-time reporters in Washington, only 14 people were assigned to the Watergate story. Walter Cronkite at CBS actually was doing a two-part series on Watergate before the election. And a call from the Nixon White House to Bill Paley, the chair of CBS came in, and that resulted in the censorship and a scaled down version of Cronkite’s program. Thus, it was not surprising that no one was talking about Watergate in 1972. And the reason we’re saying that is because Walter Cronkite was considered one of the icons of the American media. Walter Cronkite was a fan of Project Censored and a supporter of Carl Jensen because he was censored himself and he knew that these powers existed. And that is an actual direct example of prior restraint of direct violation of the First Amendment a crime. But Jensen said, well, if we’d only had more reporters on the beat and we would only listen to the independent press that we’re trying to make it more available, he wondered, maybe optimistically if the people are informed and if they know the things that are happening, maybe they can be more civically engaged.

And I realize that in now our day and age where we are steeped in such cynicism, maybe that sounds farfetched, but I won’t go there. And as someone that’s been an educator, a professor for 25 years, and now at the Park Center for Independent Media at the college where we give out the Izzy Award after the great if F Stone, the Great Muckraker of the 20th century, we’ve been giving out awards named after if F Stone, and we have an Izzy Award winner with us right here in Max Alvarez from the Real News Network. We believe that the Free press matters, and we believe that that kind of reporting is significant. And so Carl created a class that would have students investigate the independent media to find the stories that the establishment press weren’t covering, and he created a whole class and then a list.

What were the 10 lists of the biggest stories the media missed? He did it because he thought the media when governed by the Society Professional journalist, code of Ethics and Public Interest principles really could make a difference. And it still does, which is why Project Censored still has our list of stories. And of course now at the Park Center going on at 17 18th year, we still want to acknowledge the intrepid reporting and the truth tellers that really tell us what’s going on. That’s how Project Censored got started as a media literacy organization for young people to have a say in their future. And so 50 years later, we are still doing that with radio documentaries. So many other things. It’s wonderful to be sitting next to the co-host of the Project Censored Show. We only see each other via screens, but we really think that this matters and can make a difference.

And so I at least wanted to start long answer to your question of course, but I wanted to at least start with that context. So for people here that didn’t know that story or didn’t understand what Project Censored was, it’s not just about telling people sitting around talking about shit you didn’t hear about. It’s about people teaching people how to think critically and independently about the media and introducing them to different sources of information that they have a hard time finding, and it might even encourage them to be part of the solution themselves. And so it’s an honor to be here with everybody tonight. They have a lot to say and share. So I’m going to shut up, believe it or not, but I really hope that you think about that story a little bit and you think about why the press is so important and why the failures of the fourth estate now are so detrimental and have so contributed to the state that we’re currently in, but we don’t have to accept it. And that’s what I want people to remember is that we don’t have to accept it and we can do something different.

Eleanor Goldfield:

And speaking of not accepting it, I want to volley it to Max real quick. I keep saying real quick, that’s a thing, it’ll be less than an hour. So to talk about this, I am reminded of the quote from Network where Matt, as Helen, we’re not going to take it anymore, but this how idea that you didn’t go into this as a Walter Cronkite as somebody who went to journalism school and you basically just saw that there was a dearth of coverage and you felt connected to that dearth of coverage because it represented stories that needed telling that were also your stories. So I want to also highlight this idea that this fourth estate, we tend to think of it like we’re raised with this idea that it’s this lofty shit that you have to go to journalism school and you have to know a guy or whatever. You can just honestly pick up one of these devices these days. And citizen journalism is on a different level than it ever was before, and I think Max is a great example of this. So I wanted to know if you can you dig into that a little bit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you. Thank you Eleanor, and thank you everyone. I mean, it’s a real honor to be on this panel with you guys. And you guys know I love Red, and so please continue to support Red Emma’s please support Project Censored because we desperately need this work now more than ever. And I’ll, yeah, go a little bit into what Eleanor was saying. I never thought that I would be a journalist and I didn’t set out to be one, but I also never forgot what it felt like to come home from a 13, 14 hour shift as a temp worker in an exploitative warehouse where I worked with undocumented folks and returning citizens from prison just in the midst of a massive recession sitting on the couch in our home, a home that we would lose just a couple years later, sitting there bone weary, depressed, tired with my family watching the news and watching the people on the news talk about how the economy was bouncing back and how the country was back and how everything the current president at the time was doing was helping working families.

And I never forgot what it felt like to sit on that couch and feel like that did not apply to us. So there must be something wrong with us. People’s feelings and politics flow downstream from the reality that they believe they’re living in. And media are how the powerful warp our perceptions of the reality that we believe that we’re living in. And that is first and foremost, I think why media are so important to the powerful because they know that the truth does have power, but power can determine what truth is and use it to its own ends, and we see that everywhere. So why does critical media literacy matter? Because the powerful lie and they lie to get what they want and to run the rest of us over. They are like cities across America right now, Charlotte, North Carolina, Chicago, la next up New Orleans are being occupied by fascist federal police forces on a lie that the people, they are hunting people who look like me and my family are the worst of the worst criminals, while the worst of the worst criminals are in the highest offices of government using their fucking power to oppress the rest of us and get away with the worst, most heinous crimes we could imagine.

We’ve gone to war with other countries. We’ve sent our own poor and working people to die and kill poor and working people abroad on lies, whether that be in Iraq or Vietnam or now looking like Venezuela. The powerful lie Starbucks right now is lying its ass off about what its own workers are demanding when what they’re demanding is safe working conditions, better, staffing a livable wage, and Starbucks is using its power and using its leverage with the media to lie its ass off to escape accountability from the truth. I could go on for days, but first and foremost, critical media literacy is important because media are a tool of the powerful to rip all of us off and we need to be literate in the mechanisms they’re using to rip us off, screw us over, kill us and our planet. That’s first and foremost why we should all care.

Secondly, why should we care? Because we don’t talk enough about how the media in this 21st century environment are actually weapons to disempower us to fight back. We always look at media as users like What can I use this media for? But media use us too. They shape us, right? I mean, Marshall McCluen said it best. The medium is the message, right? There’s no passive static exchange here. The world changes based on how we use media and we change based on how media use us. And so it is a critical imperative. It is an existential necessity that we be as critical and media literate as possible because right now I think we’re all sort of, for a long time we’ve been asleep to the fact that while we thought we were just using social media consuming corporate media, we were in fact being, having our limbs cut off.

This is one of the things that I’ve seen time and time again as a career journalist now and now as the editor in chief of a grassroots news network is I’m trying to get coverage for stories and I’m trying to get people to about those stories and get invested enough to do something about the stories and be part of changing the outcome of those stories. Go to a picket line, write your congressman, run for office, do something. Don’t just consume this news and move on. But that is exactly the direction that we’ve been pushed in the media that use us while we think we are using them, have over time eroded our capacity for long-term memory sustained engagement. It’s even changing our social relations, not only our cognitive abilities to stay aware and to know what is truth and what is false, but to stay woke and to stay attentive to what’s happening instead of all having the memories of goldfish who forget about the important story that we just read about 12 hours ago.

That is not by accident, right? And it is not neutral. What I see right now is one of the greatest threats facing us working people, I mean, is that we have had our abilities to fight back against the gross injustices and the monsters who are destroying our country, destroying our society, destroying our planet for us and our children and our children’s children. They’re doing so with so much confidence because they believe they have turned us into a warped enough, atomized enough, forgetful enough, careless enough population that if and when we ever do realize that things are so bad, we got to do something, we will no longer have the capacity to do anything about it. That’s why we should care about being critical media literate.

Eleanor Goldfield:

And with that, I think that segues very well. So thank you Max for that transition to Mischa’s Media Democracy in Action because there’s a portion of your introduction to that Media Democracy in Action chapter that talks about the correlation between press freedom and public trust in the media and actual quantifiable political progress and wellbeing. And I was wondering if you could talk about it because I feel like that’s a very opaque aspect that people don’t connect those things.

Mischa Geracoulis:

Thank you, all of you, and let’s give it up for the Real News Network. Thank you for that. Everybody has made such poignant points, and thank you for this question, Eleanor. I’m going to try to address that by also addressing some of the things that Mickey and Max have just said. Critical media literacy is tied into every aspect of everything you’ve just mentioned, including societal trust and trust in media and trust in institutions. One thing that I think is problematic about the media in the United States is that too frequently it’s viewed as and spoken about as a monolithic institution, not there are so many different aspects of the media, which means it’s a system. And systems do not have hierarchical structures like an institution does. An institution has a CEO at the top or a president or a priest, whereas a system is all these different moving parts.

And that’s what our media is. So we have this corporate legacy mainstream press that has the loudest voice, the most concentrated voice and the most power, and yet we have the independent presses, the press, the kind of media that Max has just spoken about, the kind of journalism that Mickey was explaining, the journalism that actually prioritizes truth and compassion and justice and constitutional rights and human rights. And all of those things feed into a society that not only trusts their institutions, but trusts one another. And I think that with the critical media literacy skills, that the ability to look at a system for what it is and be able to make deep inquiries into how it’s working, who has power, who is being centered, who is being marginalized, who has a voice, who doesn’t, that allows us to really see the system for what it is, and then it has less power. We know that media democracy in action works because this administration, for example, I mean this is Nixon on steroids, right? Because it’s married with big tech.

So it’s disappearing data, it’s rewriting history, it’s trying to, and then we have journalists like Max in the Real News Network who are centering truth, centering facts, bringing the history forward and keeping important issues in the public consciousness. So going back to your question, thank you. I was reading some studies that we talked about in the book that were correlating, or actually we drew some correlations between media freedom or press freedom in a country and then also their happiness quotient. And it turns out that the Scandinavian countries that have the freest presses also report being the happiest, and I’m jumping, but I’m thinking about a specific case that I read where a woman from the uk, a journalist, she decided to move with her husband to Denmark because her husband got a job transfer, and she learned when she started doing her reporting in Denmark that people were really open and trusting one another and actually had relationships with one another and felt that their government was doing right by their citizens and felt like they could believe what was in their press. And she just kept comparing that to life in the UK and how it was certainly not that open and trusting and definitely the opposite of what’s here in the United States. So circling back to critical media literacy, I just can’t agree more with everything that everybody has said, that having that ability to think critically, to ask critical questions, to look at who has power, it can inform all of our decisions, especially when we’re making decisions at the ballot box.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just want to add to that too, because I really want to also underscore the stakes of this, right? Like I was saying, all governments lie as he stone famously said, powerful people and institutions lie so that they can do what they want. We have borne witness to the logical endpoint of the powerful being able to do whatever they want based on lies and no accountability to the truth. We have watched an entire population be obliterated based on lies that have been told for generations about who they are, what they want, and our government and our media have fed us those lies about Palestine and Israel for our entire lives. And they felt so confident about their ability to create that reality and act on that false reality that they committed genocide and we did not stop them. Those are the goddamn stakes. Like how many lives here in Baltimore have been destroyed because of the lies told about black and brown populations, poor populations, giving the police, giving city hall, giving Donald Trump the ability to say whatever the hell they want and do whatever the hell they want to our people and our city.

So this is not just about rule of threes. I’ll give one more. We are literally watching the unfolding and exposing of one of the vastest conspiracies that we’ve ever seen in this country. A conspiracy of rich and powerful people across the political spectrum, across the globe, with no accountability to the people and the ability to operate outside the law. The worst stuff you can imagine is what these people do when they feel that the truth can’t hurt them. And those are the stakes for everything that we do because if you give the powerful the confidence to believe they can do whatever they want, they can say whatever they want, they can justify what they do based on claiming reality is whatever they claim it to be, then the most monstrous sides of humanity can run wild. And we’ve seen that happen right in front of our eyes.

Mickey Huff:

And the way that we stop them is not by being complacent, right? We have to speak out and speak up. And what the independent press does so well is it really amplifies that kind of perspective and that kind of resistance that we should at rare occasions, we get some of that in the corporate press. It’s usually tepid. It’s usually both sides. It’s not that there’s a complete and utter failure in all the corporate media outlets because they have to maintain some pretense that they’re reporting things that people can connect to reality. But structurally, and I can say this confidently because Project Censored has measured it and monitored it for 50 years, is that their primary purpose is to manufacture consent propagandize and distract the public in such a way that they pit people against each other or they make them so completely disinterested or frustrated that they do not resist and they do not speak up and speak out.

And that is by design, right? It’s not just the independent press, but it’s art artists, musicians, creatives, and others that speak out against these things in ways. And they’re the first targets of any of these authoritarian regimes, as are academics and others, the people that speak out. So as you well know, George Orwell’s, 1984 was a warning of a dystopian future. It wasn’t supposed to be a user’s manual, but how far along are we to this quote? The party or the media told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final most essential command. And we’re sitting here right now in the last couple of weeks, well, the last year, but the last couple of weeks, a former Obama speech writer was pretending that maybe some of the students of the Holocaust were learning maybe the wrong lessons that were actually maybe the right lessons.

And they’re literally, as we heard here earlier, we’re literally seeing the rewriting of history right before our eyes. And the main reason going back a year or more, the main reason that we saw politicians of both parties saying the quiet part out loud around Gaza and social media was because it was on these different outlets. As problematic as they are, as propagandistic as they are, as data harvesting surveillance machines that they are, they still have been used as tools of resistance in particular cultures around particular issues. And when it came for people learning about the things that were going on in Gaza, because Israel wouldn’t let people in to see what was happening, it was happening on places like TikTok where they were learning about what was happening. It was the students that were listening, not because they were indoctrinated by their professors, but because they were taught to think critically and independently on their own, that they saw things happening.

And they asked why in the world is no one saying anything? What is happening? And then what our establishment did is it punished them, it punished them, it deports them, it silences them and scares them by stealing their futures, which is by the way, less than what’s happening in these places around the world where the futures of these people have been completely disappeared and erased. And now these same media outlets in establishment erase the entire history. And this is exactly what the memory hole was about, is to dump it down, rewrite. This is happening right now. It is not a warning. It is not a hypothetical. It is not. If we’re not really careful, Lao Sue, if we’re not careful, we’ll end up where we’re heading. Are we there yet? Yeah. Are we there yet? And do we want to be where there is? I’m telling you, critical media literacy is an antidote to this because it gives people the tools individually to talk about these stories, to deconstruct media propaganda and share stories with each other, to build confidence in these alternative media sources that allow them to understand that they need to then take that, amplify it, build it, and make some kind of a solidarity movement and have community around people that care about the power of the press, which is about storytelling.

One of the things that sets us apart as human beings from other sentient creatures and species as we know, is that we tell stories. Some of the stories are bullshit, but not all of them are. And what we’ve done at the project for 50 years is we’ve really tried to seek out and find not the smart professor people stereotype, but in a classroom, encourage students to go and look on their own and find those stories in the independent press and speak to them. And then they factually check them and they look at them and verify them, and they come back and they ask, why in the hell weren’t we told this before? Why weren’t we told this? And there’s a great betrayal that leads to the declining confidence in our institutions since by design, so that those institutions can only be used as oppression instead of liberation.

And that is a crime against humanity. And this is what we try to do with the project by showing people these stories and showing how the junk food news distractions dominate us. And that even important stories that the media covers spin into distraction and propaganda, the chapter that Misha was talking about, I media democracy in action highlights organizations and people that are doing the good work to try to rectify the challenges we face. And we can’t do it by ourselves. We’re not going to do it by selling some books even though we are at a bookstore. And one of the best things you can do for an independent community bookstore in a space like this to support them any way you can, whether it’s by coming here, showing up, being a part, and if you have mammon and if you have the ability to buy some of the things that they’re trying to offer here, then it’s very important that you’re able to buy those things to keep these places open and running.

Because we don’t always understand the importance of the things that are in our communities until they’re gone. And that is exactly what the establishment press wants, that they don’t want the challenges, they don’t want the people challenging them, they don’t want the competition. That’s exactly what the trumpet administration is doing. It’s trying to drain everybody’s attention. It’s trying to drain everybody’s energy by one ridiculous goddamn a author scandal after another. And at some point, we got to quit giving oxygen to those people in the room. Nolan Higdon and I wrote a book a number of years ago because United States was distraction that talks about this isn’t about Trump, it’s about authoritarianism. It’s about any demagogue that will seize the reins of power to quell any democratic movements that want any semblance of justice and the right to live a good life. And that’s what press freedom is really about.

And I really hope that people might look into some, you can find a lot of our stuff online for free project sensor.org, the park Indian Media, the work we do at the Park Center, we do so much with so little because we want people to spread it around, steal this book not from here. But you get what I’m saying. You get what I mean. And I think that this is, again, back to the core of what it means to be critically media literate. It’s to question the powerful. It’s to own your narrative, and it’s to share it mercilessly and relentlessly with other people that want to work with you.

Eleanor Goldfield:

Fuck yeah. So we’re going to wrap up here in a minute. No, you’re fine. Don’t apologize. You yelled that shit from the pulpit. So we’re to wrap up in a minute here, but I do want to just try to bring everything together and point out that I think we’ve all had those moments in the past where we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And this is the whole point of critical media literacy. And there’s a lot of precedence for this. One of the most censored stories of this year that actually went viral on Instagram for whatever the fuck that’s worth since October seven, the 2023, the multinational tech company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram has acted on 94% of the Israeli government’s requests to take down posts on Facebook and Instagram that are critical of Israel or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians. Holy fuck.

So you know what you don’t know, and that’s the whole point of Haah, Israeli propaganda. That’s the whole point of us propaganda. We are the most propagandized people on the planet. And I say that as somebody who grew up between North Carolina and Stockholm, Sweden, and I think that there’s a very important precedence here. For instance, Kashmir, a lot of people don’t know about that, but the Indian government has done a really good job of scrubbing the internet of evidence of its war crimes in Kashmir. So there’s a reason you don’t know about it because our first port of call is the digital sphere, which is also part of the problem. And I come from journalism, from an organizing background from face to face, even though I’m a fucking introvert, and I feel uncomfortable around other human beings a lot of the time. But I think that also speaks to the where is the left in actual space, right?

In actual physical space, where are we allowing people to fall into when they realize this whole thing is a house of cards and there’s nobody there for them, there’s nobody there to support them. Are they falling into the hands of the MAGA crowd? Are they falling into spaces like this? And I think that this is a very important time to uplift that and point out that there are stories out there that are being purposely censored, and it is the work of the project, and it is the work of places like the Real News Network and Mondo Weiss and these alternative, independent, truly independent outlets to bring that shit up and to shine a spotlight on it. And we all need to do a better job of highlighting that because that to me is community organizing because that is recognizing the stories that have to be told, that aren’t being told, that are being censored sometimes in the most extreme way, in the way that Israel is sniping and murdering journalists so that the stories cannot be told. Censorship is a spectrum and we are on it, and we are moving in the wrong direction. Thank you everybody for showing up tonight. Thank you so much to Red Emmas

For being the host of this amazing evening. We can take some questions

Mickey Huff:

Or one thing, we are at Red, Emma’s and I had to say in the words of the great Emma Goldman, my sister from another mister, right? The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought, right? The most unpardonable sin is independence of thought. And what we need right now are more sinners. So come sin with us.

Ken “Analysis” Brown:

Amen. Absolutely. Absolutely. Fantastic. And well said. So much that you’ve offered us, I mean, we’ve done had radical critical thought church up in this piece temple. I was back here getting ready to shout.

Mickey Huff:

We practice what we teach.

Ken “Analysis” Brown:

That’s right. Exactly. And we have some time for some questions and comments. We want to get a few in. There’s so much that could be unpacked. We always remind ourselves to keep our questions or thoughts relatively brief or truncated, but we do have some time to get a few things in. So if there’s something that you want to ask of our panelists or comment to make, I’ll be looking for hands. One of the things among all the brilliance that you’ve laid on this, and this is just a brief comment. So the independent media hits above its weight class financially. Alright? So as you look at independent media going forward in the current economic times and what this administration is doing and knowing the ever present 24 7 challenge of funding independent media outlets to do the amazing work that you do compared to the corporate media, but I’m throwing that out. You can take that any way you want, but I’m thinking about funding and the fact that the indie media, whether it be down to the local level of a Baltimore beat all the way up to perhaps the most famous of them in the country, democracy now, and anything in between, and of course project and real news funding, how does that play into what’s going to happen?

Mickey Huff:

It plays big because we live in a capitalist society whether we like it or not. And it’s the fact that the Neoliberals like to pretend that it’s the normalization of the air that we breathe back to goldfish. It’s the water and they don’t know it’s there. And of course, as Ani DeFranco said, when the goldfish swim around the little plastic castle is a surprise Every time We don’t have these memories. We don’t know, we don’t question, and that’s encouraged. But I want to say that there are groups now that are doing great work. The Movement Media Alliance of course is one of the major developments in recent, the last couple of years coming up on the heels of the media consortium that’s been guised to really collate and create community media and solidarity between people. Eleanor happens to be a representative working with the Movement Media Alliance, the front project sensor that works with them.

We have the great Maya Shenir from Truth Out and Laura Whit of Prism in the book this year in the Media Democracy and Action chapter that Misha put together. And I really encourage people to look at that. And Max, you just held a summit with them not too long ago. We had them Atka College for the Park Center last spring. That’s one example, but it’s a very powerful example of how we can pool our resources. This is not about competition, it’s about cooperation. This is not about, and again, to your point from the Democracy now is on down, and this is not as slight against Amy Goodman in any way, but those systems are still subject to the same capitalistic hierarchies and the foundations and the limited resources. This is why we need to share. We need to platform. We need to, instead of scooping each other, we need to build up those stories.

We need to retell those stories and we need to, as you said about punching above the weight class of the money. We need to make those resources go as far as they can by not fighting with each other. And then the left is terrible at this Nolan Higgin and I wrote a whole book about it on let’s Agree to Disagree, is that the left will find, will agree about nine out of 10 things, and we’ll focus all day long on the one thing around which we disagree, and we’ll tear each other up about it and we’ll throw each other under the bus for our own egos and our own missions. But that’s the sign of people that aren’t really truly there yet. They’re not really into the public media sphere in a way that they want to help their colleagues tell the stories. It’s not about who said it, it’s about how many people heard it.

And that’s what matters. And by the way, there are some funders and places in this country that do want this. They do want these things to happen. Those people are also under attack and assault. And now under the latest national security directives in memoranda and under HR 9, 4, 9, 5, the Trump administration is going after nonprofits because that is the space in which people could raise money to tell stories that aren’t for profit. And they’re going after it because they refuse to play that game and they’re going after those organizations because they want to tell the stories that the community wants to hear. So please do what you can to support these nonprofits. Please try to figure out ways to make those monies go farther and farther. And as far as I’m concerned, movement Media Alliance is one of the best examples of really putting that money where their mouths are of any kind of organizations that I’ve seen in some time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay, I had a few thoughts on this that I’m going to throw in really quick. I want hear if we got any more questions, but we got to talk about funding because break the fourth wall here, none of us are doing great in the media ecosphere, in case anyone’s thinking that we’re all just kind of coasting along. We’re fine. We ain’t, I mean, newsrooms are closing left and right. Great journalists have been losing their jobs for years and decades. I mean, the internet age has really been continuously eroding the foundations for journalism in this country. And that is only quickening like with each passing year. But there’s, in that I think something really important to understand is that yes, we in independent media, we do this for a job. We have the Real News network studio downtown where we produce the work that we do for a living.

And if the real news goes away, either because people stop funding it or because the government is going after our funders and forcing us to close down, or they’re declaring the truthful real coverage that we’ve done on topics like Gaza and Israel’s genocide there, they categorize that as supporting terrorism and they nuke us that way. You may look at that and think, oh man, that’s sad. Another outlet’s gone. But you need to understand they are going after us to disempower you. They don’t want you seeing what we are forcing into public vision because you don’t know what you don’t know. Right? And the less people know, the more ignorant you can keep ’em, the more algorithmically locked into their little false realities and echo chambers you can manage, the easier we are to manipulate and control that has been the bosses and the masters. Number one tool for time immemorial, divide and conquer.

And this is something that the media in the United States has been deeply complicit in because in a capitalist society, in a capitalist industry, since the journalism industry was born in this country, you’ve had different outlets competing with each other for different readerships, right? And you’ve had the constant process of dividing the public into these different camps of supporters of that publication, supporters of this type of news if it’s more bent towards what I want to hear and yada, yada yada. So even before the internet age, we were very much moving in this direction on radio, in television, in newspapers. And that’s mainly because these outlets needed to make money and they wanted to compete with each other, but they were using the master’s tools. And the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And we are only going farther into the divide and conquer realm in the digital ecosystem where again, the incentive structure is to divide us.

It’s to segment us. It’s to prioritize the individual voices and accounts and brands over the necessity for people to have a shared terrain of truth upon which we can basically just say, this is happening and we can talk about what to do about it. But we have lost any semblance of a shared terrain of truth. And half of us have just sleep walked into that because we were just feeding into the incentive structures that push us farther away from each other. And so if we are going to find a way out of this, we’ve been trying to do at the Movement Media Alliance, of which the real news is among the founding members is because we’ve recognized that actually if we keep competing with each other, like we are not only going to die as individual outlets, we will contribute to the death of our society, of our public, of our population, the continued disempowerment of the very people we are trying to reach.

And so we do need to collaborate not only because we are stronger together and because we have way less resources than the main corporate media outlets out there that have billionaires backing them. They’re merging and consolidating. We’re going up against Goliath. So to compete with that, we need to be working together. But more elementally, when I go out there and I’m reporting on the ground in places like small towns like East Palestine, Ohio, or I’m reporting in here in South Baltimore, I’m reporting in places in the south neighborhoods in Los Angeles. What I see is a poison that has infected our entire population, that has made us all so much, it’s made us more atomized. It has made our social world smaller. It has made us rely more heavily on screens to connect with each other into the world outside of our own physical sphere.

That is why they are so the powerful or so goddamn gung-ho on buying up the media and controlling the media because they know that this is the effect that it’s having. And what I also see in those places is that the more stuck people are on their phones, the less able they are to fight back. But what I also see is the people who are fighting against that are people like neighbors in Pasadena, California who said, I was tired of seeing ice on my phone. I started talking to my neighbors, and now they’ve formed a union of neighbors to patrol their streets to keep themselves safe. And in the process they’ve learned about each other, they’ve built bonds of solidarity that you can never build online. I’m saying that as someone who’s made my goddamn living online for the past 10 years, I’m a terrible executive director of a media organization because my message is media will not save us.

In fact, right now, it’s destroying us. And so whatever we do moving forward, we have to support the independent media organizations that are doing the truth telling work that can give people a fighting chance to save this world before it’s gone. But also, we need to have a strategy of unplugging people, of getting people to see each other face to face again, to again meet one another on a basic shared terrain of truth where we, as the working masses of the world, can at least agree, this is happening. It’s fucking us over. We got to do something about it. But right now, we are going in the opposite direction. We are receding further and further into our own houses, our own fiefdoms of followers, like our own social media consumption routines, all while the world is burning in front of us. So we all have to be part of that solution. Sorry, that was a long ran.

Mickey Huff:

So you had folks out here that want to have a say, so we’d love to hear from them. That was funny.

Audience Member 1:

Thank you for being here tonight and giving us discussion, hopefully. A quick question, could you distill what critical media literacy entails? Just brief bullet points, and is that something that applies necessarily as well in our modern media sphere where everyone is constantly receiving their news through scrolling feeds, the editor is the algorithm and it’s everywhere.

Mickey Huff:

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve written several books directly about this. The Media and Me is a critical media literacy guide for young people that several us that project Censored put together. And it’s one of the few critical media literacy books for K 12 education, and it distills it down to questioning power, who’s producing the message, what message you’re seeing, what is the platform? Who has access to the platform, who’s curating the platform, what perspectives are on the platform, which ones are not? How do you find out about the ones that are not? The whole essence of critical media literacy is based on critical pedagogy. It’s based on questioning. It’s based on asking questions. It’s not based on knowing what the answers are. It’s based on the centrality of being able to ask the question in any situation at any time. That leads to the root of what’s creating, what’s coming at us.

Because a lot of the media system we have has been one way street, social media or anti-social media gives us the illusion that we’re getting our voice out there. We heard the word atomized moments ago, but that’s just peanuts, like tiny, tiny, tiny dots in a huge, huge ocean of all kinds of information from misinformation and disinformation and malformation. And so the core of critical media literacy is to ask questions. It’s to be skeptical, not cynical. It’s to be critical, not negative. It’s to find points of agreement and understand the empathetic and active listening, but also to create an environment where we can draw out of others their own introspection about, well, what has led them to say this and where did they learn this information? And material critical media literacy isn’t just directed at the entities that are disseminating the information. It’s for all of us to be able to ask and ask, what is our role in carrying on that information or spreading that information?

And as Jonathan Swift said in 1710, that falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after. And in the current age, that’s nanoseconds and stuff around the world. And so really the core of the bullet point is ask questions. A lot of it comes out of project censored, but asking about what are me missing? What is the media not telling us and why? And then of course, later, 10, 12 years later, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote the manufacturing consent book outline in the propaganda model that says who owns it? How are the advertising shaping and bending in fear, in favor in the newsroom? Who are the sources and who are not the sources who are worthy and unworthy victims? How does flack and boycotting and social movements affect the way movement spread messaging and what ideological biases or extent, particularly the most important ones, based on implicit biases, the ones that we can’t see?

A true critical pedagogy goes to the core and goes to me first and says, what do I not know and what are my biases and why do I not know these things? But it doesn’t internalize it, the degree to which that we say to ourselves, oh, it’s not nihilistic, it’s not, oh, we’ll never know. We live in an epistemic crisis because the post-truth conundrum is designed to level reality to the degree to which it can be disputed in such hegemonically, only the establishment press and the loudest voices and the ones with the most supported, the ones that we will only repeat and the ones that we will only think about and they will crowd out our own dreams and our own private thoughts. Critical media literacy pushes against that. And it reminds us of our own individual agency, and it reminds us that I can determine what’s true and what’s real in my life.

I read the party quote from George Orwell earlier, and I think that’s again, part of critical media literacy is to say, don’t believe everything you think, first of all. But then beyond that, I don’t get to quote Ronald Reagan very often, but sometimes I do trust but verify. It’s a really important component, and that’s really a big part of critical media literacy, and that’s why I say often the critical media literacy is literally for everyone. And the fact that our schools don’t teach it, and only a handful of states have mandated it and not even bothered to tell us how to do it shows you how important it is because they’re not even teaching it. I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Want to just throw a couple thoughts in because then we got to wrap up. Okay, then. So on critical media literacy, I’m going to say two good things and then a bad thing, because critical media literacy, we’re all saying here it is essential. I think it’s better to look at critical media literacy as a survival skill.

We need it to survive in this ecosystem and in any ecosystem. Sure, you need to be able to tell what the fuck is real and what’s not in ecosystem when our lives are more thoroughly mediated than ever before, and the powerful people are controlling the means of communication more than they ever have before and are manipulating it so they can manipulate us to a greater degree than ever before. We need to have that basic skill. We need to teach it to every one of our loved ones and our neighbors so that they’re not contributing to spreading false myths or malformation on social media the way that we all are at risk of doing, because it’s everywhere and it can be very hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. So for that basic self-defense side alone, critical media literacy is something that we all need just to survive.

I will say a second good thing, which is that it can also be a weapon. I saw that it was actually one of the few bright spots to come out of the very dark two years that we’ve been in bearing witness to a genocide in real time, and it comes back to the organic knowledge of people, working people, poor people, young people in places like here in Baltimore who have been the victims of so many years of police propaganda and tactics that criminalize us and make it seem like the police are out there just saving the world and exposing crime and villainy. That’s around us at all times. The IDF Israel’s military who train with our military and vice versa, by the way, so the connections are actually very direct and indirect. They were using the exact same tactics. Does anyone remember seeing pictures of IDF soldiers standing in front of a table with one gun and maybe a case of bullets and being like, oh, we uncovered this Hamas stronghold just like they do when they say, oh, we busted this gang of black kids and we got a dime bag of weed and a handgun.

They were using the exact same tactics there to criminalize Palestinians as police have used here to criminalize black and brown people in this country, and it was young, black and brown people here calling their bullshit out online and making fun of it, exposing it. They actually stopped doing it as much as they did in the first few months of the war because they were getting ridiculed so much about it. So that’s another way that, again, just the learned literacy of how the powerful and manipulating the media and what we can do to counteract that in greater numbers. That’s also a positive. Now, here’s the negative that I’ll say. Critical media literacy, as much of an evangelist as I am for it will not save us. We cannot, like I said, it’s a survival skill, but if we actually want to do more than just survive the onslaught, we need to really talk about media ownership. We need to talk about the fact that six companies own 90% of the goddamn media in this country. We need to talk about the fact that a massive corporation like Meta could delete this many posts at the behest of a foreign government, right? I mean, critical media literacy is not going to stop that, right? It’s only going to allow us to navigate it while it continues. So we need to protect ourselves and each other, but we also have a much bigger battle to wage.

Ken “Analysis” Brown:

Another question or comment or are we running? I think we’re going to go ahead. I mean, that’s a powerful way to bring it to a close.

Mickey Huff:

I have one positive thing that I would like to end on an uplifting add that

Ken “Analysis” Brown:

Yes,

Mickey Huff:

I would like to leave on a high note. I want to leave on a high note.

Ken “Analysis” Brown:

Good, good. Do that.

Mickey Huff:

The founder of Project Censored, Carl Jensen and my great personal mentor, Peter Phillips, who was the second director of the project, were really proponents of the following idea, and Carl Jensen actually wrote this 30 years ago, and I just wanted to share it with you because I just think it’s one of those things that could be written almost anytime, and it’s truer now than ever. Carl wrote, since we will all benefit from a more responsible media, we all really should help bring it about be the media to do this. The corporate media owners should start to earn their unique First Amendment privileges, not assume them editors rethink their news judgment, right? That’s what we always hear. They’re like, well, that was news judgment. We just decide. There’s never any real explanation that’s given, right? It’s just news judgment. Editors should rethink their news judgment. Journalists should persevere in going after the hard stories, even when they’re told not to, or it’s not going to sell or that won’t do it.

Real journalists operating ethically in the public interest don’t stop pursuing a story because of those reasons. Journalism, here’s my favorite part. Journalism professors should emphasize ethics and critical analysis and turn out more muck breakers and fewer buck breakers. That’s the line people. It’s a bumper sticker. The judicial system should defend the freedom of the press provision of the First Amendment with far more vigor, and the public should show the media. It is more concerned with the high crimes and misdemeanors of its political and corporate leaders than it is with the crimes and gossip of celebrities. The effort will be well worth it. I strongly believe in the face of all the adversity that the effort of critical media literacy and supporting independent media and supporting independent community centers that are dedicated to telling the stories and amplifying the things that are happening around us, it’s not just well worth it. It’s the path forward to a better way. And I’m honored to be here with you all this evening in pursuit of that principle.