The Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC continues to be hugely unpopular. A poll taken again this year showed Americans opposed unlimited campaign spending by corporations or unions by a margin of 2:1.
Still, our servile media don’t come close to expressing how deeply people feel about money in politics. Perhaps that’s because the profit-driven media who cover the race feed at the same corporate trough as the candidates.
To fill the gap, we’ve cut a series of short interviews with pro-democracy activists in which they talk not just about what’s wrong, but why Citizens United moves them to act. Here, the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel talks about what she learned from her father and how independent media can help build democracy. Check out the whole series and feel free to share, record your own, comment. These interviews were originally recorded in the spring of 2011 by GRITtv for Free Speech For People.
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.
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