Here Are 5 Media-Related Actions We Can All Take Before Inauguration Day

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Communities Beyond Elections

In journalism circles, we often speak about our work in abstract ideals. Transparency. Accountability. Democracy. Truth. All of these ideals are urgently important. And yet, in this precipitous moment, as we watch an overt fascist prepare to ascend back into the White House, abstract concepts are not at the top of our minds as journalism leaders. Instead, we’re thinking about people: our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities — including our communities of fellow journalists and readers, many of whom are among the most vulnerable groups that Trump has stated an intent to target. Real human lives must be at the center of all our reflections on the current, cataclysmic moment.

Those lives include our own, and the lives of so many media-makers engaged in journalism that functions as a weapon against fascism. We know that sharing truthful information and ideas among our networks, including through media outlets like those we work with, is a key facet of any effective resistance movement. And yet Trump’s vindictiveness toward journalists — and threats to channel that vindictiveness into active attacks — may make that work much more difficult even as its necessity is heightened. Meanwhile, folks in the media world are entering a moment of growing intensity, when we’ll be grappling with an endless stream of new crises to cover, to the extent that our work may feel impossible.

Nevertheless, there are things we can do! Taking action on the media front is key, and anyone reading this piece can find a lane in which to participate. Here, we offer five steps that media makers, readers, viewers and listeners can take over the next couple of months to meet the moment, come January.

1. Educate ourselves on media literacy.

Our worlds are flooded with media but perilously short on practical tools for understanding, filtering and critically approaching that media. Donald Trump and other fascism enthusiasts have made excellent use of the U.S. public’s lack of media literacy. Trump sailed to power on a tide of conspiracy theories, which were disseminated across social media and right-wing outlets and sometimes filtered into the mainstream. And his supporters feed off a steady racist, misogynist, anti-trans conspiracy diet, from “great replacement” lies, to “voter fraud” hoaxes, to the persistence of QAnon, and much more. Meanwhile, many corporate mainstream media outlets have spent the last year manufacturing consent for genocide, conveying the Trumpist threat narrowly instead of recognizing its linkages with fascist movements worldwide, including the Zionist project. That lack of context, too, is a type of misinformation. In the face of rampant conspiracy theories and context-free soundbites, critical readership, viewership and media participation are ever more important.

There’s never been a better time for self-education and community education around media literacy, to arm ourselves with discernment before the second Trump administration.

We can start by reading up. Explore Project Censored’s critical media literacy tools and sign up for its newsletter. If you’re on a university campus, you can also become part of the Project’s Campus Affiliate Program to build critical media literacy among students. Watch the webinar Prism hosted, in which the two of us (Lara and Maya), Aysha Khan and Joshua Potash drilled down on how to distinguish propaganda from journalism; how traffic-driving strategies can skew the news; and the impact money and corporate influence have on our media. Check out the Citations Needed podcast for deep drilldowns on false narratives perpetuated by the corporate media. Explore the work of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for studies on how journalistic practices influence political conversations and policies. Make sure you are sharing trusted sources instead of panic-posting and panic-sharing.

Dig into the Kansas City Defender’s handbook for a look at the history of the radical Black press for a reminder that media can drive transformative change, and that it’s our responsibility as both media makers and readers to support it in serving the public good. And read a range of trusted, values-driven publications: There’s a wide variety even just among the Movement Media Alliance, the coalition we participated in co-founding.

Fascism thrives off of isolation, fear, disinformation and the silencing of voices of dissent and for liberation. In media, as in all realms, our power lies in connection.

For those of us who are part of media organizations, our newsrooms must interrogate the framing of each piece we publish. Our friends at Project Censored call this “frame checking.” Prism calls it “when they zig we zag,” meaning that we look at what is missing from existing reporting. We ask: Who is most impacted by the issue being reported and are they being centered in the piece? Who is absent from the conversation, and who benefits from certain narratives being excluded? When we don’t interrogate the framing of a piece, we risk creating a slant that reinforces a reductionist and simplistic narrative.

In between all of this, make sure to breathe, eat, sleep and pet your cat. Nobody is at their best, discernment-wise, when they’re running on empty.

2. Build awareness of threats to journalism under fascist regimes.

Last month, Truthout and Prism co-published an op-ed that describes the threat of HR 9495, a bill that could give the treasury secretary the ability to designate certain nonprofits “terrorist supporting organizations” and strip them of their tax-exempt status. Lara and Negin Owliaei describe how HR 9495 could have a chilling effect on organizations that advocate for Palestinians and nonprofit journalism: “When you widen out beyond this specific provision, in this specific bill, it’s clear that this is yet another piece of lawfare in the wider war to suffocate the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as any meaningful news coverage that could help sustain it.”

Thanks to concerted opposition from a broad coalition of U.S. civil liberties groups, a number of Democrats withdrew their prior support for the bill, and in a vote this week on November 12, it failed to receive the two-thirds backing it needed to pass under fast-track rules. However, over 200 Republicans and 52 Democrats backed it, signaling that there is still danger that it could pass with a simple majority if reintroduced without fast-track procedures.

This type of threat may be just the beginning of what a second Trump presidency is promising. Trump wields his power and his cult-like followers to target and harass journalists reporting on him and his administration. During Trump’s first term, journalists faced unprecedented levels of threats from the far right and white supremacists (which barely lessened these last few years). Emboldened by Trump’s position, far right groups and individuals targeted reporters from marginalized backgrounds with racist and misogynistic threats, harassment, doxxing and swatting.

Meanwhile, new policies and federal practices could directly block journalists’ ability to do their work. Writing at The Dissenter, Kevin Gosztola describes how journalists and whistleblowers could be affected by Trump’s fascist agenda, including heightened law enforcement efforts to curtail leaks, more prosecution of those who communicate with reporters, and bogus lawsuits that tie the hands of lower-budget organizations. NPR noted that Trump has blatantly “pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn’t like.” The latter could be made possible by bringing the Federal Communications Commission, currently an independent agency funded by Congress, under executive control — a step that Trump has promised to take.

In the leadup to Trump’s second presidency, it is crucial for readers to support journalists and small, nonprofit independent outlets. We’ll need all the resources we can get to rise to the moment journalistically, with timely and accountable information and analysis. Legal and safety threats also require our newsrooms to ensure that we can afford lawyers and digital security for our organizations.

3. Uplift narratives and strategies from movements and vulnerable communities.

Mainstream media fails poor, working-class communities. It fails immigrants, incarcerated people, Black, Indigenous and communities of color. It fails queer and trans people, disabled folks and women. It fails people displaced by climate chaos and poverty. It fails us all because the vast majority of corporate media produces journalism that maintains power structures for those who can live comfortably within them.

Movement journalism, or journalism “in the service of … social, political, and economic transformation,” as defined by Project South, sheds false notions of objectivity and reports from the ground up by holding power to account, no matter who is in office.

In the face of ascendant fascism, it is even more crucial for us as journalists to uplift the narratives of marginalized communities and movements. People facing the most direct impacts are best positioned to share their stories. By uplifting these voices, other communities can learn how to build solidarity, which can, in turn, inform strategies on how to keep each other safe from harm.

Moreover, telling movement stories inspires movement action. By focusing on workers fighting to build their unions, movement journalism can help inspire unionization efforts elsewhere; by investigating abuses in detention centers from the perspective of migrants who are raising alarms about those abuses, we can alter local, state and federal policy, or fuel efforts to shut down these prisons.

Additionally, this is a key moment to offer organizers space to share their organizing histories, providing critical lessons that people around the country can draw from, learn from and replicate. Left groups often lack institutional memory, and enabling our platforms to fill part of this gap can help forestall a surge of attempts to reinvent the wheel — even as we also foster space for creativity and innovation.

4. Make room for creative, transformative ideas.

In moments of crisis and panic, it’s easy to go on autopilot. We’ve often seen this happen in newsrooms: Journalists are people, and in the midst of political and social chaos, we are affected emotionally and tangibly. Sometimes, it’s easier to disassociate and simply try to get the job done in the ways we always have, rather than striving to think outside the box.

But unprecedented times call for unprecedented responses. As abolitionist organizer and author Mariame Kaba often says (paraphrasing Alice Walker), “Oppression puts a ceiling on our imagination.” One of our jobs as media-makers is to find ways to poke holes in that ceiling of oppression, injecting new ideas into rigid conversations, with the understanding that we’ll need a thousand new tactics to meet the onslaught to come.

In a piece in Waging Nonviolence, Daniel Hunter lays out a number of pathways for resistance that will be necessary in the coming years, from “Protecting People” to “Defending Civic Institutions” to “Disrupting and Disobeying” to “Building Alternatives.” In each of these crucial areas, fresh ideas will be necessary to act; we can draw lessons from history, but there is no easy blueprint. Instead, we can embrace the idea of “experimentation,” as laid out in Respair Media’s One Million Experiments podcast series, which centers on abolitionist movements. Co-host Damon Williams shares, “The truth is, we don’t need one new thing. We need a million experiments in which we will practice and learn to create the systems and the world that we want.”

Now is a time for media outlets to offer our platforms to organizers and thinkers who are willing to suggest experiments or document experiments that are already happening, venturing outside the boundaries of stale talking points. Some of those experiments may come from folks who’ve survived fascism themselves — incarcerated organizers, for example — and from those focused on confronting and defying active fascist regimes, such as Israel’s. Some may come from people who haven’t yet learned to clamp down their imaginations: In the forthcoming book that Maya Schenwar edited with Kim Wilson, they describe how the imaginations of young children can serve as fuel for our movements.

We also must not forget that the U.S. spent four years under Trump before — let’s not allow our media to lose our historical memory. We can take stock of what’s been tried and reach further, readying ourselves to be, as Alex Lalama once wrote in Convergence Magazine, “grounded in a new imagination that wins.”

5. Build collaboratively to defend journalism and amplify radical work.

In the face of a rapidly mounting repressive climate, media-makers can’t work alone. We need to collaborate, co-strategize, lean on each other, and bolster each other like never before to effectively meet this moment and get truthful information out to as many people as possible. Those of us involved in the Movement Media Alliance anticipated this potential necessity, and it’s why we started organizing movement media outlets into a coalition over a year ago.

Instead of competing with other publications in a capitalism-perpetuated rut, media organizations on the left need to make a practice of sharing and amplifying each other’s work. The priority should be getting accurate news, movement strategy and courageous ideas out to as big an audience as possible. Readers, viewers and listeners can fuel this collaborative fire by sharing stories and analyses via social media, email and text; telling friends about sources (publications, podcasts, shows) they trust; hosting discussion groups where articles from various independent publications are discussed; and following the work of collaborative projects (such as our own 21-organization-wide collaboration, Media Against Apartheid and Displacement, and our forthcoming Communities Beyond Elections project).

Concrete resources are also vital in uncertain times. The Movement Media Alliance is preparing to build an emergency fund for left journalism organizations, and will be securing connections for legal support and online safety-oriented services. We’ll be working to gather funds to better pay freelancers, offer more solid health insurance and retirement resources, and fortify our organizational structures against attacks on nonprofits.

Our collective responsibility is to provide audiences with accurate, rigorously fact-checked and frame-checked information. As we head into these next four years, the truth will not just be grounding for us as our government gaslights us and attacks us — all while mounting assaults on marginalized communities and continuing a genocide — it will be critical to keep each other safe.

Each of our movement media organizations will be even more at risk of closure during a Trump presidency, and we cannot risk that — not only for our staffs and everyone who makes our collective work possible, but also for the millions of people who rely on our outlets for accurate news, transformative political education and movement-building. You can support the coalition-building, infrastructure-fortifying work of the Movement Media Alliance here or sign up for our upcoming amplification newsletter here, where each of our organizations’ work will be uplifted.

Building a Shared Ecosystem to Weather the Blows

Fascism thrives off of isolation, fear, disinformation and the silencing of voices of dissent and for liberation. In media, as in all realms, our power lies in connection — particularly connection with other human beings. The Movement Media Alliance has already given us linkages that proved vital throughout this last year as we covered a genocide amid the chaos of election year. Digital media can often be an isolating endeavor, and so it is critical for us to be in coalition with each other, not just for material support, but emotional support and solidarity, too. We’re committed to consistently building more connections, deepening relationships and creating infrastructure for a shared movement media ecosystem that is more equipped to weather the fascist blows.

There’s no denying that our organizations are vulnerable, or that people who write publicly and speak out are at risk. We can’t pretend that community-building is a magical and impermeable shield. But it is an essential step if we are to have a fighting chance in the face of ever-intensifying repression. The best way forward is informed, creative and relentlessly together.