Highlights

Truthout Wins
Izzy Award!

The 2020 Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media was shared by Truthout and reporters Liliana Segura at The Intercept and Tim Schwab writing for The Nation. The judges commented: "Through the year of social distancing, Truthout proved that journalists need not be distant from the people hardest hit by the pandemic, including prisoners and ICE detainees."

Struggle and Solidarity

We launched our series, "Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation," because we can’t look away from settler-colonial violence against Palestinians — or the growing movement for a free Palestine.

The Policing of Pain: Inside the Deadly War on Opioids

This new series follows the drug war into the pharmacy and the doctor’s office.

Climate Front Lines

In this new monthly podcast, host Mike Ludwig explores the front lines of the climate crisis with news and perspectives from experts and activists on the ground.

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Audiobook

Our book, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, about police violence and the people's resistance in the United States is now available on Audible!

Editorial Highlights

Although our work was already focused on exposing injustice and inspiring action, we refocused a lot of our original coverage on how the pandemic impacted (and continues to impact) people’s lives, particularly the ways in which working-class and otherwise marginalized people were disproportionately impacted.

We delved into what the situation might portend for our future amid deepening climate catastrophe. And we documented the ways in which the spread of the coronavirus accelerated in prisons, jails and immigrant detention. Through analyses and podcasts, we spotlighted the ways in which the Trump administration leveraged this crisis to promote both overt racism and fascist policy measures — and we highlighted ways in which we could mobilize to oppose that push.

Yes, mobilization has been possible, and it’s been happening! We called on reporters and movement leaders to write about the community-based mutual aid projects, policy advocacy, electoral reforms and new organizing strategies that offered some hope in the most grim moments. We aimed to amplify those efforts amid the torrent of bad news, because we knew the air was ripe for transformation.

Economy & Labor

In the premiere episode of the second season of "Movement Memos," Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March, host Kelly Hayes in conversation with Sarah Jaffe offered insights on the nature of neoliberalism and broke down the nature of our relationship to work under capitalism — and how the use of surveillance to control workers will evolve in increasingly dystopian ways if these dynamics are not upended.
Robert R. Raymond interviewed ecological economist and author of Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, Tim Jackson, about why the ideology of growth is so pernicious, why it is holding us back from truly flourishing as a species, and what a post-growth world might look like. As Jackson said, "There’s a huge potential lying there waiting for us to lead more satisfying lives, lives of action and creativity and engagement and social concern."
Meanwhile, organizers were hopeful that the withdrawal of a Trump-era rule would rejuvenate unionization efforts among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.
As the pandemic wore on and countless Americans struggled, mutual aid efforts worked to fill the gaps of the Biden administration's COVID response. Robert Raymond highlighted some of the grassroots responses taking place in communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, from stimulus check redistribution campaigns to COVID vaccine appointment assistance; purchasing and delivering food, personal protective equipment, and other supplies to those who couldn’t safely leave their homes during lockdown; delivering supplies to folks experiencing homelessness; and much more. among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.
Sheila Bapat asked the question, "Who cares for care workers during the pandemic?" While the exclusion of domestic workers from basic standards and protections runs deep throughout U.S. history, the COVID-19 pandemic threw this disparity into sharp relief. "It calls for a major transformation of the way we think about domestic work and domestic employment, so that everyone gets the support they need and can live with dignity and safety." And domestic worker advocates are organizing toward change, securing a domestic workers' bill of rights in nine states and urging participation in the election to achieve the broader goal of making domestic labor visible in the economy and society. among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.
Lindsay Koshgarian covered national budgets and priorities, helping readers understand how the U.S. spent $21 trillion on war and militarization since 9/11 and writing that the Green New Deal is the key to ending forever wars (on which the U.S. is still spending $70 billion each year) -- because, "from the Pentagon’s fossil fuel emissions to militarized responses to climate refugees, the U.S. military endeavor and our dependence on fossil fuels are intricately tied" and the Deal's commitment to human life and self-determination is incompatible with U.S. militarism. among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.
Truthout staff reporter and editor Candice Bernd broke the story about Amazon workers starting a union drive at the JFK8 Staten Island warehouse, which was subsequently picked up at Business Insider. among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.

Education & Youth

Eleanor J. Bader reported on the public and private U.S. colleges using COVID-19 as a pretext to eviscerate departments, a move that fits into a larger right-wing playbook that has long pressed for the restructuring of higher education. She also reported on the millions of dollars of untraceable “dark money” that is being funneled to conservative and libertarian student groups, including one called "Campus Reform" that trains conservative students to monitor, surveil and report on the speech and actions of left-leaning professors, students and campus activist groups.
Even before the pandemic, family poverty forced over 22 million children to rely on free or reduced-fee school meals, but the resulting school closures and a slew of bureaucratic roadblocks have caused a measurable uptick in hunger, and schools are struggling to feed hungry students.

Culture & Media

Our new collaborative series, "Religion's Role in the Struggle for Justice," included stories, interviews and op-eds on challenging white ontology from the vantage point of religion; the call for faith communities to resist the carceral state; and the fascistic movement masquerading as apocalyptic Christianity and driving Trump's mob, among other things., host Kelly Hayes in conversation with Sarah Jaffe offered insights on the nature of neoliberalism and broke down the nature of our relationship to work under capitalism — and how the use of surveillance to control workers will evolve in increasingly dystopian ways if these dynamics are not upended.

Environment & Health

Staff reporter Mike Ludwig continued Truthout's long legacy of fracking coverage, keeping our readers up to date on the fights against fossil fuel pipelines such as the embattled Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would carry massive amounts of fracked gas across the Appalachian mountains; and the latest science about the dangers of fracking, such as the new study that found evidence of harmful chemicals accumulating in the bodies of people, especially children, living near fracking wells in communities inundated by fossil fuel development.
Frances Madeson followed activism in the Gulf South, reporting on the men in the solitary confinement wards at the Louisiana State Penitentiary whose hunger strike was met with reprisals such as being “sprayed down” with mace within an enclosed cell block. She also spoke with and wrote about young Sunrise Movement activists during their 400-mile march to demand a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) bill, and a future in which their generation can survive and thrive.
Staff reporter and editor Candice Bernd kept the intersection between climate justice and racial justice front and center throughout 2020 and 2021. After she lost power and water during the statewide electric grid failure in Texas, Bernd exposed the disproportionate impact on communities of color in the state. She then traveled to Northern Minnesota in the spring to chronicle Indigenous Water Protectors' fight against Enbridge's Line 3 tar sands pipeline. Bernd was the first in the national media to report on the connection between the pipeline, the increased incidence of sexual assault, and the human rights crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigneous Women and Girls in those communities. Writing from the banks of Anishinaabe Water Protector Winona LaDuke's new resistance camp at Shell River, Bernd explored the treaty rights strategy of tribes in a deep narrative feature. She continued to cover the direct action campaign against the pipeline as standoffs escalated across multiple treaty encampments that summer.
Candice Bernd also investigated the ways in which right-wing and libertarian groups along with then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos exploited the pandemic to push a privatized model of "microschools," revealing the ways in which the model would widen an already dire racial gap in public education. She traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border to write another story for the series about how border activists were linking their struggle against Trump's border wall to the fight to defund police, calling for the federal funds being allocated for the wall to be used instead to address the COVID crisis in what was then one of the nation's most severe hot spots.
Daniel Ross wrote about the impact of wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon, providing insight into how the right-wing Bolsonaro government’s deregulation and commercial exploitation of the rainforest goes hand-in-hand with climate disaster.
As millions of Americans lost their health insurance during the pandemic, Margaret Flowers wrote about the urgent need for Medicare for All, and exposed Biden’s health plan as yet another extension of the medical-industrial complex. By exploring the ways that the Affordable Care Act serves to enrich private health insurers and derail meaningful health care reform, Flowers laid out how Biden’s health plan would only continue to shift more public dollars into private hands -- and how a for-profit health care system will always be a detriment to the public good.

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

We are immensely proud of all the journalism we put out in FY 2020, but we're perhaps proudest of our coverage at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our series Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19 now contains more than 280 original articles (which have been read 1,266,120 times!) covering the political, economic, environmental and racial aspects of the pandemic in order to highlight the injustices baked into the pandemic’s impacts.

We knew that even if the trend of a dramatically decreased COVID presence continues, the pandemic’s socioeconomic impacts will linger, particularly in working-class, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, immigrant, disabled and aging communities. That's why Truthout will continue to track the grassroots movements that emerged out of the pandemic, such as mutual aid drives, labor struggles -- including among gig workers, teachers, medical workers, and domestic workers -- health care advocacy and, of course, the resurgence of the movement for Black lives.

Some of the stories in this series featured: reporting by incarcerated people (including Lacino Hamilton, Joseph Dole and Christopher Blackwell) and mothers of prisoners (including Rosemary Cade, Armanda Shackelford and Regina Russell) about the torture-like conditions in COVID-laden prisons; Mike Ludwig’s reporting on the surge in overdoses during the pandemic — and how the DEA contributed to it; Victoria Law’s investigations into COVID’s rapid spread in women’s prisons and Ella Fassler’s coverage of COVID-driven prisoner uprisings; Jen Deerinwater's report on how the historic oppression of Native people worsens the pandemic’s effects on their communities; Ella Fassler, Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani and Jacob Woocher’s coverage of the abandonment of unhoused people (and police disruption of aid to unhoused people) amid COVID; Jack Herrera's report on how close quarters have intensified the virus in ICE detention; Leanna First-Arai’s coverage of the persistence of pipeline construction against the protests of Indigenous communities, even during the economic shutdown; and Sharon Zhang’s reporting on the complicity of Trump’s EPA in worsening asthma-causing pollution that increases COVID vulnerability.

Human Rights

After Amy Coney Barrett was appointed by then-president Donald Trump as the most radical right-wing member of the Supreme Court, Truthout covered many of the decisions made by or facing the 6-3 conservative Court: from whether natural gas pipeline companies had the power to seize state land, to the gutting of Roe v. Wade, to the refusal to block the draconian Texas abortion ban, to upholding voter suppression laws that disproportionately burdened voters of color, to ending the eviction moratorium and weakening gun control. But, despite the very real threat posed by the conservative Supreme Court to human rights and freedoms, all is not lost.: Activists are pushing back and pushing forward on all fronts, and as Mukund Rathi wrote, social movements can still win even with a hostile Court, and activists and lawmakers are making moves to expand and reform the Supreme Court.
During the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Mike Ludwig provided insight into the defense's false implication that drugs killed Floyd, by observing that drugs have long been used to justify racist police-perpetrated violence.
Legal and political analyst Marjorie Cohn continued her thoughtful and necessary column "Human Rights and Global Wrongs," providing a critique of U.S. militarism, racist police violence, immigration policy, torture, the death penalty, surveillance, attacks on whistleblowers, executive branch lawbreaking, the Supreme Court, and violations of U.S. and international law.
As Israel besieged the Gaza Strip with massive air and ground strikes, murdering hundreds of Palestinians and displacing thousands from their homes, Truthout eschewed corporate media narratives that legitimize ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and instead amplified demands from Palestinian activists themselves. Nadine Naber chronicled the historical and political conditions that produced Palestinian resistance, contextualizing the movement within the international struggle against U.S imperialism. She also wrote about the intersection of settler-colonialism and patriarchy, further cementing the idea that Palestianian liberation is a feminist and reproductive justice issue.
Dima Khalidi wrote about the growing numbers of young Palestinians who are leading the movement to free Palestine -- both under occupation and in the diaspora. Meanwhile, after House Democrats approved billions in military aid to Israel, Souzan Naser and Hatem Abudayyeh condemned progressive lawmakers for their complicity in Israel’s horrifying abuse and torture of Palestinian children, urging them to support the Palestinian Children and Families Act. The bill, which is backed by Palestinian activists across the country, would prohibit Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars to imprison children, build illegal settlements or annex Palestinian land., securing a domestic workers' bill of rights in nine states and urging participation in the election to achieve the broader goal of making domestic labor visible in the economy and society. among graduate students. Michael Arria covered the Biden administration's changes to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as well as the continued efforts by campus organizers across the U.S. to unionize.

Immigration

Jack Herrera reported that the #FreeThemAll movement has won major victories, and immigrants jailed by ICE were actually winning court battles to be set free -- but even with hundreds of people freed, people in ICE detention say they still feel incredibly vulnerable.
Unspeakable violence and cruelty toward migrants at the border extends far beyond Trump; in fact, it has been a hallmark of U.S. policy under both Democrats and Republicans. As the Biden administration continued to expel record numbers of migrants seeking asylum, José Luis Granados Ceja amplified the demands of migrant justice activists who have called on the president to address the root causes of migration -- namely, decades of U.S. imperialism and exploitation that have impoverished countries in the Global South, destroying the environment and displacing millions of poor and working class people in the region. He also covered the introduction of the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 -- a pathway to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States and the most significant reform to the U.S. immigration system since 1986.
Bernd continued to closely track the border wall after President Joe Biden's election, revealing how the Biden administration failed to drop Trump-era eminent domain cases, leading to land seizures that South Texas landowners say are part of an effort to fill in unfinished gaps in the wall. She has likewise closely followed developments in Democrats' support for a “smart” wall powered by artificial intelligence, facial recognition and drones.

LGBTQ Rights

Police are leading perpetrators of violence against queer and trans people, not their protectors, and we are past the point where putting a rainbow flag on a cop car can be mistaken for victory or liberation. Dean Spade called for getting the police out of Pride, writing that queer and trans safety and liberation will not be delivered by courts or police departments -- it will come from widespread collective action for what we actually need to live: housing, health care, child care, food, clean air and water, and transportation.
Chase Strangio covered the Trump administration's intensifying attacks on transgender students in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pulling resources from underfunded districts to punish them for trans-inclusive policies.
After the election, Gabriel Arkles took a hard look at the situation facing the most vulnerable LGBTQ people, including Black trans people and LGBTQ immigrants and incarcerated people. While the Biden administration can — and has promised to — roll back most of the Trump administration’s political attacks on LGBTQ people, and trans people in particular, the federal courts remain exceptionally conservative and there are real limitations to what even the best possible administration can do now, given the damage Trump has done.

Politics & Elections

On the eve of the election, as many feared for their safety, Kelly Hayes offered an episode on safety planning that walked listeners and readers through the process of creating their own personal safety plan. In her episode, Reclaiming Possibility: A Rant Against Despair, Kelly offered a poetic contemplation on the nature of organizing and movement work, and how we can find hope in dark times.
C.J. Polychroniou conducted several exclusive interviews with Noam Chomsky, discussing everything from Trump's campaign to dismantle democratic forms and hold on to power, to the fragility of American democracy and the possibility of Trump roaring back into power, destroying the environment, taming the media even further, and instituting harsh authoritarian measures. Chomsky also discussed Trump’s continuing popularity and what the left needs to do in the years ahead, emphasizing that voting is never an end -- only a beginning.
Truthout's Sharon Zhang closely followed some of the largest threats to our democracy in Washington and beyond, tracking Republicans and Democrats alike. She documented voter suppression laws filed by Republicans across the country, analyzing Republicans’ self-serving motivations and Democrats’ attempts to combat them.
Zhang navigated the scandals and shady dealings of Republicans like Donald Trump and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, forever angling to profit from serving in public office. And, following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, she helped to chronicle Republicans, with their ties to far-right militants and white supremacists, forging a path to plunge the country into fascism.
While the right was sweeping the country with anti-democratic and bigoted bills, Zhang documented the sabotage of Democrats’ efforts to combat voter suppression and more by the likes of Sen. Joe Manchin, who, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, staunchly defended the filibuster, effectively blocking the Democratic agenda time and again. Manchin and Sinema stifled proposals like the $15 federal minimum wage, larger unemployment checks in the coronavirus stimulus and voting rights. Meanwhile, as Zhang documented, Manchin came under increased scrutiny after it was revealed that he maintains ties to right- wing groups and Wall Street bigs.
As she tracked the actions of important figures in both major parties, Zhang also kept tabs on progressive lawmakers and issues of importance to the public and the working class. Progressives have been gaining power over the past year, as is evidenced by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s close relationship with the White House. Progressive lawmakers have grown bolder in their demands, pushing for a Green New Deal and applying the framework to proposals to improve public housing and public schools.
Greg Palast continued to relentlessly follow the voter purges and voter suppression taking place in Georgia, as the state passed a voter suppression law that challenged the rights of hundreds of thousands of voters, allowed unlimited challenges against voters, and slashed county election boards’ ability to resist suppression.
Senior editor and staff reporter Candice Bernd covered everything from far right violence to the crises at the southern border to voter intimidation and the battle over voting rights.
William Rivers Pitt wrote extensively on the final months of a wild presidential election which concluded with a result contested by nonsense, followed by an attempted coup.
Renowned scholar Henry Giroux continued to provide vital insights into the inner workings of capitalism, neoliberalism and facism. After the police murder of George Floyd, Giroux reminded readers that capitalism and white supremacy are inherantly tied and laid out how neoliberal disinvestment in social programs further bolsters a racist police state marked by staggering inequalities in wealth and power. He also covered the rising tides of facism in the United States, condemning corporate media for peddling right-wing disinformation campaigns that deny history, erode democracy and fuel white supremacist violence.

Prisons & Policing

Despite his campaign promises to end mass incarceration, President Joe Biden upheld a Trump memo that would send 4,000 people, released during the pandemic to control the spread of COVID behind bars, back to prison. Victoria Law documented the stories of two women impacted by this decision, highlighting the struggles associated with court-ordered home confinement, and uplifting their advocacy against re-incarceration.
Amid this galvanizing moment of uprisings and calls to defund the police, Truthout has gathered together some of our most important work on the abolition of policing and prisons into the series, The Road to Abolition. For a decade, we’ve been documenting this work and the ideas behind it. In this feature, we gathered together pieces that can help us to envision abolition — both the imagination and the practice of it — and move together toward a more liberated future.
Ella Fassler wrote about prisons and policing, reporting that 10 of the U.S.’s largest cities will spend more on policing than public health this year, and, along with Jonathan Ben-Menachem, shone a spotlight on the 28 known law enforcement officers who had been identified as attendees of the so-called “Save America” rally in support of Donald Trump, that sparked the storming of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6.
Victoria Law followed the dire COVID situation in prisons, showing how states had failed incarcerated people -- keeping mothers and pregnant people behind bars, creating an environment where 1 in 5 prisoners has had COVID, and subjecting incarcerated people to harmful lockdowns even as their states began to open up. She also reported on the people and movements challenging the deadly pandemic conditions, and called for people to be freed if social distancing couldn't be adhered to in prisons.
James Kilgore looked at electronic monitoring during COVID, as well as how big tech used the pandemic to push dangerous new forms of surveillance, as authorities were prompted to find a way to release people while promising “public safety.”
Truthout editor-in-chief Maya Schenwar published a new book, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, co-authored by investigative journalist and Truthout contributing writer Victoria Law and featuring a foreword by Michelle Alexander. It's not only an exploration of the depths of injustice, it's a call to end the U.S.’s racial caste system and build structures of true accountability and justice. Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Piper Kerman, and many others have praised the book. James Kilgore interviewed Schenwar and Law, for a discussion on how they came to write the book, why “reform” movements can often co-opt the push for abolition, and why working toward abolition is not simply a distant vision but something we must practice every day.
In memory of Maya Schenwar’s sister Keeley Schenwar, who died of a drug overdose after years of incarceration, Truthout launched the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize in 2020. The contest awards $3,000 each to two incarcerated or formerly incarcerated writers who have authored essays about the effects of the criminal legal system on the lives of the incarcerated and their communities. The contest has received hundreds of submissions, and the winning essays can be read here.

Racial Justice

After police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for the brutal public lynching of George Floyd, Barbara Ransby wrote about the contradictions in the verdict while, calling for fundamental systemic change rather than hollow symbolism. She also connected the dots between the uprisings that made the conviction possible and the dozens of anti-protest laws introduced by the GOP in the months after Floyd’s murder.
We know that Trumpism can’t be voted away -- we need radical social transformation. Just after the 2020 election, Ransby wrote about the need to "strategize and self-organize on all levels … to hone, polish and sharpen a palpable set of alternatives to the systems, institutions and policy platforms that now exist." The Green New Deal, The Breathe Act, and The People's Charter are the cornerstones, but to enact these visionary, movement-generated, game-changing policies, we must offer people an entry point into a radically democratic process of social transformation grounded in process and principles.
Days after a mob of Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol, Nicholas Powers explored how Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of economic justice can guide organizers in the struggle against facism. Powers also covered the designation of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, writing that although Black freedom is not fully realized, the holiday “symbolizes an era in which the colonial myths of the United States are beginning to be upended, and a reckoning has begun.”

Reproductive Rights

The pandemic has made an overhaul of the child care system both more challenging and more necessary. In most regions of the country, child care is the largest household expense — more than housing, health care and food — and often costs more than a public university tuition. And though child care services are crucial for enabling parents to go back to work, many child care providers shut down permanently during the pandemic. Michelle Chen looked at what steps could be taken to improve the quality and availability of child care -- from the Biden administration’s American Families Plan to raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
As Americans prepare for an almost-certain challenge to Roe v. Wade within a newly conservative-majority Supreme Court, Truthout news writer Chris Walker covered Norma McCorvey -- the "Roe" of Roe v. Wade -- who switched sides after the landmark ruling in 1973 and went on to join an anti-choice crusade led by the Christian right, becoming an anti-abortion spokesperson while earning more than $450,000 in "benevolent gifts" from them. McCorvery ultimately made a deathbed confession that it was "all an act" and she didn't really change her views at all.
With abortion access facing an uncertain future due to the appointment of three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court, Amy Littlefield covered the fight to allow abortion pills by mail. This practice was sanctioned during the COVID-19 pandemic, then walked back by the Supreme Court, in its first abortion-related ruling with Amy Coney Barrett on the bench. Reproductive justice activists are now urging the Biden administration to back access to abortion pills despite the setback from the Supreme Court. Littlefield also looked at Biden's commitment to end the Hyde Amendment, and the activists who are calling for him to strike Hyde and related bans that force Native Americans, federal employees and Medicaid recipients in most states to raise hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for an abortion or carry through an unwanted pregnancy if they can’t afford an abortion.
Eisa Nefertari Ulen continued her thoughtful and meticulous coverage of the public health crisis trapping Black women and their babies in a system rooted in enslavement and perpetuated by systemic racism, as well as the people and organizations doing the work to reduce racial health disparities.

War & Peace

As President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty military into U.S. cities amid the national uprisings against police violence in the summer of 2020, Senior Editor and Staff Reporter Candice Bernd broke the story about how some National Guard and active-duty GIs were refusing to deploy to American streets. Continuing her focus on GI rights issues, Bernd later profiled the family of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén and their struggle for justice after Guillén's horrific murder in April, investigating the U.S. military's cover-up of the pervasive and structural rape culture at military bases.
As uprisings against police violence escalated throughout the summer, Candice Bernd broke a story in the national media about a Seattle-based labor council openly contradicting the AFL-CIO by approving a resolution to expel Seattle's police union from its ranks. As Americans' hunger for solutions and alternatives to policing peaked amid the uprisings, Bernd did a deep dive into one of the few city programs in the country that often dispatches mental health counselors as first responders instead of police. For the story, Bernd rode along with the city of Austin's Community Health Paramedic team to directly observe how it coordinates with mental health counselors.
As the Biden Administration rolled out its new North Korea policy -- drafted by top-level officials with ties to the military-industrial complex -- Simone Chun continued her coverage of the 70-year-old Korean war, denouncing foreign policy measures that seek only to maintain U.S. global hegemony at all costs. Chun called for an end to the brutal U.S. sanctions that have killed thousands of North Koreans, and condemned the U.S’s neocolonial occupation of South Korea, while stressing the urgent need for a peace treaty and an end to the U.S.’s containment policy.

Looking

Forward

The coming year offers us a chance to both recommit to our roots in investigative reporting and imagine exciting new possibilities for how to lift up the work of grassroots movements and visionary paths forward. With the midterms on the horizon, we’ll be doubling down on coverage of racist voter suppression, gerrymandering, and electoral injustice. We also aim to zero in on economic injustice, including the growing wealth gap, the influence of billionaires, and the intersections of racism and classism. We have big plans to chronicle the rising unionization efforts around the country, at large corporations and small organizations alike. And we will rededicate ourselves to illuminating new developments in the climate crisis and the movements to confront it. Meanwhile, we will continue our award-winning coverage of the pandemic’s disparate impacts and offer visions for a transformed future – visions that keep us going, even in the bleakest of times.

But we can’t do this work without your help. We are facing considerable challenges as Facebook and Google have altered their algorithms to reduce the amount of political content on their platforms. This is directly impacting the reach and visibility of thousands of activists, writers and thinkers at a time when honest, independent journalism is crucially needed.

20 Years of
Fearless,
Independent
News

Letter to Our Readers

Living Our Values

True Independence

Year In Review

Content

Community

Donors

Highlights

Truthout Wins
Izzy Award!

Struggle and Solidarity

The Policing of Pain: Inside the Deadly War on Opioids

Climate Front Lines

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Audiobook

Editorial Highlights

Economy & Labor

Education & Youth

Culture & Media

Environment & Health

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

Human Rights

Immigration

LGBTQ Rights

Politics & Elections

Prisons & Policing

Racial Justice

Reproductive Rights

War & Peace

2016-2020

Looking

Forward

20 Years ofFearless,IndependentNews

Truthout WinsIzzy Award!

Struggle and Solidarity

The Policing of Pain: Inside the Deadly War on Opioids

Climate Front Lines

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Audiobook

Editorial Highlights

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

20 Years of
Fearless,
Independent
News

Truthout Wins
Izzy Award!