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I love a good contest as much as the next guy, but this one is tremendously important, and if you choose to participate, you’ll be striking a blow against corporate-owned news and for independent media. It’s Support Your Media Day, a friendly competition between some of the top independent media organizations.
The reason why I have been such a staunch advocate of independent news media dates back to before George W. Bush unleashed his catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq. My book on the subject was making the rounds, and I was trying my best to argue against the course for war. One day, a producer for an MSNBC news program called and asked me to come on the show. Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors had been in Iraq for less than 100 hours at the time, and this producer told me I would be expected to come on the show and argue that Blix and the inspectors were doing a terrible job, and should be ignored by Mr. Bush. I spluttered a reply along the lines of, “I won’t say that, we need to let them do their jobs so we don’t get a lot of people killed.”
The producer laughed – a throaty, too-many-cigarettes laugh – and hung up on me.
That – that right there – is why the independent news media is so vitally important. The “mainstream” news media is owned bag and baggage by a small number of large corporations who bank unimaginable profits by lying to the American people day after day after day. In the ten years since that unbelievable phone call, the independent media has grown, flexed its muscles, and changed the way the American people are informed. Today, with the “Support Your Media” contest, you can help Truthout continue to grow, to flex our muscles, and to expose these “mainstream” frauds once and for all.
Make a tax-deductible donation and end our drive tonight by clicking the button below:
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We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.