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How Stories Shape Our World

This issue of YES! looks at the ways new voices are being heard, and at how their stories are transforming our culture.

If you want to understand people, ask for their stories. Listen long enough, and you learn not only the events of their lives, but their sources of meaning, what they value, what they most want.

The late media scholar George Gerbner said, “We experience the world through stories. Whoever tells the stories of a culture defines the terms, the agenda, and the common issues we face.”

“It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community,” he said. “Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”

Just a half-dozen corporations control most of the media in the United States. Two giant Internet service providers, Comcast and Time Warner, recently announced plans to merge. And the FCC is signaling that it plans to abandon the principle of net neutrality, which has assured that all interests, large or small, have the same access to the Internet. The battle continues over how much of our media landscape will be accessible to we the people.

It’s impossible to keep good stories down, though. As has been the case throughout history, ordinary people find free spaces where they can tell their own stories.

This issue of YES! looks at the ways new voices are being heard, and at how their stories are transforming our culture.

“Whoever tells the stories of a culture defines the terms, the agenda, and the common issues we face.”

Personal stories are a key starting point, says Kristin Moe in her article Change Starts With Your Own Story. When we share life-changing moments and surface our deepest motivations, we touch other people more profoundly than if we repeat a list of talking points, even well-researched ones. Drawing on the work of Harvard professor and former United Farm Workers Union staffer Marshall Ganz, Moe shows how these personal stories can become the heart of powerful social movements.

Cities, towns, and communities of all sorts also need their own stories. With radio and television stations and newspapers shut down or owned by out-of-state monopolies, residents and civic leaders are scrambling to find a way to get high-quality, local reporting. A new cooperatively owned model for journalism may be the answer, says journalism professor Dan Kennedy.

These free spaces are especially needed now, when so much we’ve taken for granted about our world is up for grabs.

The internet is, of course, the biggest open space for story tellers. But with so many clamoring for our clicks and eyeballs, how does anyone get an audience?

The Meatrix,” a quirky, animated video short, went viral, introducing millions to the cruel realities of factory farming. The video succeeded not so much by playing off the popular Matrix films, producer Jonah Sachs says, but by casting you, the viewer, as the hero.

In a world saturated with violence, partisan bickering, and so many “isms,” where are the spaces to imagine alternatives—to open up to the possibilities for a future we want? YES! Contributing Editor Adrienne Maree Brown uses the speculative sci-fi of Octavia Butler to break out of a stuck mindset and look at the fictional roles played by young women of color, like herself.

The media spaces where the imaginative, contrarian, investigative, and visionary stories can be told are precious resources. They allow us to question the status quo, try out new ideas, and make change. These free spaces are especially needed now, when so much we’ve taken for granted about our world is up for grabs.

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy