Saving America’s Fourth Estate from Billionaires, Broligarchy and Trump

We must radically recommit to public media before every newsroom, every voice, is up for sale to the highest bidder or the ruling party’s favorite mogul. The time is now.

The environment for press freedom in the United States is entering a perilous new phase. The attacks have been unprecedented, widespread and continue to escalate.

'Since AFP was founded in August 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks, but none of us can recall seeing a colleague die of hunger. We refuse to see them die,' the French news agency's journalists union said.

Mass media are dead: corrupted, complicit, malign, worthless

In recent months, we’ve seen one media conglomerate after another offer what amounted to multimillion-dollar bribes to Trump by settling frivolous Trump lawsuits that these companies could not possibly have lost in court.

PBS chief says cuts package ‘goes against the will of the American people’ as smaller outlets could face total closure

What does it mean when the most-watched media outlet in America is more interested in appeasing a politician than informing its audience?

This exchange of ideas, tactics, and rhetorical techniques to attack the press has created an apparent authoritarian feedback loop.

The mainstream media are overall failing to raise the alarm, failing to connect the dots, failing to show how all the injuries add up to profound danger to the nation's people, its institutions, and its environment.

Journalists covering recent demonstrations in California have been assaulted, detained, shot with crowd-control munitions, and had their equipment searched — simply for doing their jobs.

CounterSpin interview with Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon on Mamdani and the Democrats

The report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack finds that more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.

While noncitizen journalists are the easiest targets for now, it’s abundantly clear that the government would like to criminalize journalists it doesn’t like, regardless of the journalists’ residency status.

Paramount agreed to pay $16m to Trump’s future library or other cause, but not to him, made no apology