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.
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.
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