How can politically-conscious people meaningfully engage with the onslaught of propaganda presented as factual news during an election year?
We’re in another election year — one that feels eerily similar to the exceptionally painful 2020 presidential election. The same two candidates, their campaigns, and by extension mainstream media, are forcing voters into an impossible moral battle of deciding between “the lesser of two evils.”
In the last four years, voters have seen little change. In fact things have gotten arguably more disastrous: genocide in Palestine, human rights violations against migrants, climate collapse, complete breakdown of public health and COVID-19 mitigation, an extreme regression in abortion and reproductive justice. All the bad news has coincided with mass layoffs across the media and other industries, and the shuttering of news outlets that uphold our democracy.
Prism Social Media Editor Kyubin Kim writes in Slow Readings: A Critical Media Syllabus for the Radical Mind, “The way people read must outsmart the ways that the press produces, frames, and circulates information.”
- What underlying biases in traffic-driving headlines manufacture the perspectives we adopt?
- How should we read the news in this media-saturated age so that we pause and disavow — rather than consent to — political structures that suppress and pacify us?
- How can we sync our learnings to the movements we become part of?
- Building on the questions posed in this Slow Reading series, join us for a conversation with movement journalists, radical media makers and political educators on how to critically read the news in an election year.
Meet your host & panelists:
Lara Witt is the editor-in-chief at Prism.
Maya Schenwar is the editor-at-large at Truthout and a writer, editor, journalist and organizer working to sculpt new ways for journalism to serve the public good and fuel social transformation.
Aysha Khan is the deputy managing editor at the nonprofit news organization Analyst News and managing editor at the nonprofit solutions journalism publication Next City.
Joshua Potash is a writer, and an aspirational organizer who believes a new world can be built right here and now.
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
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.
Last week, 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