We are delighted to announce that, as of next week, award-winning journalist Dahr Jamail will be joining the team here at Truthout as a full-time staff reporter.
From his courageous work as an unembedded reporter in Iraq to his groundbreaking, on-site investigation of the BP oil spill’s lasting effects, Dahr has remained a vital independent voice amid an overwhelmingly corporatized journalistic landscape.
“Truly independent journalism has become increasingly rare, yet has never been as important,” says Dahr. “Truthout remains one of the last platforms available to report clearly about the converging crises that define our times, and that is why I’ve decided to join them.”
Dahr’s highly respected work for Truthout, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and many other outlets has covered a wide range of crucial issues. Reporting for Truthout from Iraq in 2010, Jamail documented the war from the assaults on Fallujah throughout the occupation, to the experiences of American soldiers in the field and at home. In his extensive coverage of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, he followed BP response workers and documented the impact of the disaster on Gulf residents. Dahr’s recent work on the still-underestimated scale of climate change has already made a critical impact on conversations around this issue that will drastically shape our collective future.
He has also reported from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years, and has won awards including the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship and four Project Censored awards. Dahr has reported for Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera, and has appeared on the BBC, NPR, and numerous other stations around the globe. He is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009) and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007).
In the coming months, Dahr’s work will center around anthropogenic climate disruption and corporate environmental crimes. We’re thrilled to have him with us, and look forward to sharing his groundbreaking work with you!
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.