When I tell people what I do for a living, the most common response is, “But isn’t it depressing??” My response: “Of course!”
Grappling with the news every day is an emotional sky-dive with a rickety parachute. But for each of us on Truthout’s staff, it’s a jump we must take.
When Truthout reporter Mike Ludwig told me he wanted to cover the brutal “gas rush” that has brought a fracking epidemic upon Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania, it was because he felt compelled to do so: he grew up in Ohio, and – watching his childhood stomping grounds fill up with fracking rigs – he couldn’t simply stand by. Truthout’s lead investigative reporter Jason Leopold has described his decade-long pull to report on the horrors of Guantanamo: “There’s something about the crimes committed by the Bush administration in our name that haunts me.” And at 9:30 p.m. a couple of weeks ago, when I flipped on a local Chicago news station and heard a gaggle of corporate apologists squawking about the greed of public schoolteachers, I couldn’t help staying up half the night to hammer out a column in defense of the teachers’ rights and those of their students.
Truthout’s content relations editor, Leslie Thatcher, once put it this way: “While our task will never be completed, neither may we ever desist.” We can’t not do this work. It’s not because we love to wallow in the murk of disaster and political frustration. It’s because we believe ardently that a more equitable, more humane world is possible, and we must expose the murk in order to climb toward that brighter future.
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Our most important fundraising appeal of the year
December is the most critical time of year for Truthout, because our nonprofit news is funded almost entirely by individual donations from readers like you. So before you navigate away, we ask that you take just a second to support Truthout with a tax-deductible donation.
This year is a little different. We are up against a far-reaching, wide-scale attack on press freedom coming from the Trump administration. 2025 was a year of frightening censorship, news industry corporate consolidation, and worsening financial conditions for progressive nonprofits across the board.
We can only resist Trump’s agenda by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.
We’ve set an ambitious target for our year-end campaign — a goal of $240,000 to keep up our fight against authoritarianism in 2026. Please take a meaningful action in this fight: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout before December 31. If you have the means, please dig deep.