"This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of."

An earlier version of this speech was delivered at the 2026 Izzy Awards ceremony at the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, NY, on April 21, 2026.

Friends, colleagues, fellow human beings,

You don’t need to read Project Censored’s latest State of the Free Press report to know that the state of the free press in America is not good (but, obviously, you should still read the report).

And it’s not just President Trump, his administration, and the MAGA faithful repeatedly, publicly expressing their hatred and verbalizing threats towards journalists and media organizations that don’t tow the Supreme Leader’s line. It’s not just Trump and his cabinet bullying and berating journalists at press briefings, restricting their access, and trying to make them sign loyalty pledges.

It’s also Trump’s absurd and gangsterish lawsuits targeted at ABC News, which is owned by Disney, and CBS News, which is owned by Paramount, and the morally spineless, financially self-serving capitulation of these corporate cowards to Trump by settling, rather than fighting, those lawsuits—setting the precedent for more shakedowns.

It’s the multi-pronged attempt by the Trump administration and the ruling-class-serving authors and executors of Project 2025 to destroy the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which they succeeded in doing, and to defund and destroy PBS and NPR, which they are still trying to do now.

It’s the federal harassment, capture, imprisonment, and even deportation of journalists like Estefany Rodríguez, Mario Guevara, Sami Hamdi, and Georgia Fort. Even Don Lemon. Even Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was snatched off the street last year by plainclothes federal thugs for co-authoring an op-ed in her campus newspaper.

It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools.

It’s the professional journalists, student journalists, and citizen journalists alike covering the federal invasions of our cities and the protests against them, from LA to Minneapolis, who are being targeted by law enforcement, shot in the head or body with rubber bullets, detained, menacingly scanned and tracked by masked agents with shadowy surveillance tools.

It’s the ongoing, longstanding, bipartisan effort to silence and punish whistleblowers who risk their jobs, their freedom, and even their lives to inform the public. And then, on top of that, it’s Trump and his administration seizing or deliberately dismantling the state infrastructure of recorded, verified, and publicly available information that is in the public’s necessary interest—from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Weather Service to the uncertain futures of FOIA and the Presidential Records Act, from the feds commandeering and hiding the “investigation” into the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis to the coverup of the Epstein Files.

It’s industry lapdog, fanatical ideologue, and literal Project 2025 co-author Brendan Carr using his post as Trump’s appointed head of the FCC to impose Trump’s will on the world of broadcast media and speedrun the corporate consolidation of control over it, from the major networks to all the local TV and radio stations we still have left.

All of this is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know.

It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it.

It’s the acceleration of yearslong trends of newspapers closing, news outlets merging and consolidating or getting bought out, followed inevitably by mass layoffs, ever-expanding the number of unemployed journalists and media workers and the size of America’s local news deserts, where there are no longer professionals being employed and paid to find and document and verify the truth of what’s actually happening. Medill’s 2025 State of Local News report listed over 130 newspaper closures in the US in 2025, bringing the total to nearly 3,500 newspapers and over 270,000 newspaper jobs lost over the past two decades.

And more, deeper cuts are coming, especially with the world- and industry-changing introduction of AI. Nearly one-half of the Washington Post staff was laid off in February; 30,000 more at Amazon in recent months because of an AI pivot, including many jobs in the media, gaming, and entertainment arm of the Bezos behemoth. Large layoffs announced last month at Disney. In 2026, like we saw in 2025, like we saw in 2024, the media industry job cuts keep coming, and they are deep, widespread, and significant: CNN, NBC, Vox Media, HuffPost, Politico, CNBC, Time, Univision, Nexstar Media Group, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Wall Street Journal, and so many more. To say nothing of all the big layoffs and AI-impacted restructuring in tech, from Meta to Microsoft to Google to X (aka Twitter) to Amazon. Now, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “Geez, Max Alvarez, I didn’t realize you cared so deeply for all these legacy media giants and Big Tech mega-corporations…” But it’s not about that. All I’m saying is that, if you start to look at all of this stuff happening together with the cold focus of an air-traffic controller or a general surveying the battlefield, you realize that something big is clearly happening in media, to media, and big moves are being made by the people who own the media that all of us, across the political and consumption spectrum, depend on.

It’s TV shows canceled, web verticals discontinued, people let go, newsrooms restructured, either in reaction to Trump and MAGA’s ire, in fear of it, or in self-serving pursuit of profit from it.

Also, as someone who interviews workers for a living, I have to stress one other point here: More often than not, these job cuts, even when they hit at networks and parent companies we rightly despise, are hitting the few people left who are still trying to do actual journalism or keep our media products and tech platforms from getting worse than they already are. For example, last year, I was honored to win the Izzy Award with the great Steve Mellon for reporting we had done on the aftermath of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. Steve did all that reporting, and so much more, all while he and his fellow union members were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. These incredible workers were on strike for over three years. And after they finally won that strike and returned to work at the end of last year, the paper’s rich, law-breaking owners, the Block family, announced at the beginning of this year that they would be closing the Post-Gazette—a paper whose roots go all the way back to 1786. Then, news broke in April that the Post-Gazette had been bought by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, the owners of the Baltimore Banner back home. Then, in the beginning of May, the union learned that the new leadership was cutting at least 40 percent of its staff, including 80 percent of the union workers who participated in the recently ended strike. This is a travesty. And this is the journalism industry, such as it is, today.

All of this, too, is part of the multi-frontal assault on and erosion of press freedom and the people’s right to know. (What does “press freedom” even mean when there are hardly any press left? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public.)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are collectively and individually losing our ability to discern what’s true and real as we continue to lose the organizations that exist and the people who are paid to find, document, expose, and communicate the truth responsibly, and to quality-control and fact-check the stories we’re presenting as true to the public.

And it’s also this horrifying, techno-feudal arrangement of billionaire oligarchs and their corporate empires gobbling up all legacy and social media and controlling the information chokepoints that connect us to the world beyond our immediate sight. From fourth richest person in the world Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong owning the LA Times, from fifth richest person in the world Mark Zuckerberg and Meta (aka Facebook) also controlling Instagram, Whatsapp, and Threads, to richest man in the world Elon Musk buying Twitter, to Paramount Skydance just winning the bid to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN and HBO, further expanding the vast media empire of Trump-loving tech moguls Larry Ellison (the sixth richest person in the world) and his son David Ellison—an empire that also includes CBS News and a significant chunk of the now “American owned” TikTok 2.0.

The buyouts and mergers and consolidations and corporate capitulations to Trump have been so swift and so massive, it’s honestly head-spinning. And the billionaire oligarchs are openly putting their hands on the scales to try to condition us, to influence our thoughts and control our sight; to normalize and invisibilize genocide, ecocide, and Epstein-level atrocities; to try to forcibly shift the Overton window in the realm of public discourse by publishing more viewpoints and content that align with Trump’s agenda, just like they did with all the so-called “woke” stuff when it was profitable for them. Because these oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help, from the Ellisons installing Bari fricken Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS and very visibly steering the network and the reputation it still had into the Trumpstream, to the fricken Washington Post editorial board publishing an endless litany of missives that read like they were written by Mr. Monopoly, including an opinion last month titled “America’s income tax is already progressive”; subtitle, “The rich already pay more than their fair share.” Jesus Christ, man…

[T]hese oligarchs have their own agendas, too: they want to bend and push and twist the world to serve them, to benefit their bank accounts, and to continuously, endlessly deliver more wealth and power and market dominance to them at the expense of us, our societies, and the planet we live on. And they are pursuing those agendas through Trump and with his help…

It’s hard to get your hands and mind around all this at once, and it’s going to keep getting harder. That’s the point.

To get an accurate picture of the media ecosystem we are operating in today, and the massive changes that have shaped it into what it is (and shaped us in the process), we have to remember something. For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time.

Since the end of the last Trump administration, and in comparison to the world we lived in during the last Trump administration:

  • COVID hits us in 2020, a lot of people die, everyone else goes kinda berserk (some people a lot more than others), and we all become more “socially distanced” than ever before and more dependent on media to connect us to the outside world—and, thus, more vulnerable to the whims and designs of the owners who control those points of connection.
  • In 2021, Twitter bans and Facebook suspends Donald Trump’s accounts after the failed January 6 insurrection—a move that, in retrospect, marked the last gasps of the limp-wristed and seemingly doomed-from-the-start era of social media content moderation.
  • Trump launches Truth Social in the beginning of 2022 (where he doesn’t post “tweets,” but posts “truths,” which you can “like” and “retruth”). Then, at the end of 2022, Elon Musk buys and acquires Twitter, which he subsequently destroys and turns into the bizarre cesspit called X—an event that, whatever you think or thought of Twitter, completely reorients the way our whole media ecosystem works and how people, governments, and corporations participate in it.
  • In 2023, Tucker Carlson is fired from Fox News. Carlson tries to launch his new show on Musk’s X, which fails spectacularly, so then he launches a new streaming service. By July of 2024, The Tucker Carlson Show, for the first time, hits the #1 spot on Spotify podcasts, briefly ousting Joe Rogan.
  • Conservative broadcast giant Nexstar Media Group—the largest owner of local TV stations in the US, right above Sinclair—announces its deal to acquire Tegna Inc. in August of 2025. Over time, like everything else in this post-competition capitalist hellhole of a country, local television stations have been gobbled up by conglomerates. “Despite a federal rule that restricts any one company from owning stations that reach 39 percent of all households,” David Dayen notes, “the Nexstar-Tegna merger would join together 265 stations in 44 states and raise that coverage to 80 percent.” 80 percent! Now, there is a glimmer of hope that the deal may be on the rocks after a federal judge halted it in court last month. But the halt is only temporary, and it could be overcome.
  • While all of this is happening, Substack is exploding as a major new player in the increasingly hyper-fragmented, post-COVID, post-content-moderation media ecosystem. Now, Substack was founded in 2017, and its largest outside shareholder is Andreessen Horowitz, led by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump donor and advisor Marc Andreessen. But in 2023, Substack really takes a warp-speed jump to becoming the player it is today by adding the Notes feature—effectively making it a new social media platform resembling the old Twitter—and by introducing new video creating and editing tools, enabling content creators to launch and host original shows on the platform. In January of this year, the company announced Substack TV, a standalone app for Apple TV and Google TV that will support videos and livestreams.
  • That same month, January 2026, a deal finally closes that was set in motion in 2024 when then-President Biden signs a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell the app or face a ban in the US. This is Biden’s and the Democrats’ answer to the reality that a majority of the population is seeing Israel’s genocide in Gaza for what it is and seeing how Biden and the US are facilitating it: blame and take control of the platforms where they’re seeing it. So, now, a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations is owned by a “US-led” investor group, which includes the Ellisons, who “will ‘retrain, test, and update’ TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm on US user data.’” 2024 was a big year for them, too. The Ellison-led merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media is announced in July 2024. Paramount Skydance installs Bari Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS in October of 2025. Just last month, Paramount Skydance and the Ellisons win the bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, after a failed buyout by Netflix.
  • And, of course, amid all of this, there’s the giant elephant in the room of AI:

For all the long-running historical dynamics and political, economic, and industry trends that are always also at play here—in media and journalism, in the United States, and in the world writ large—a lot has happened, or dramatically accelerated, in a really short amount of time.

This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it should be an illustrative one.

And, of course, you can’t really get an accurate picture of the changing media ecosystem over the last 5-6 years without factoring in three key historical ruptures that occurred in this time, and that changed people’s perceptions and media consumption habits, for better and for worse. And these were ruptures, in part, because they were also profound media events:

  • First there’s the war in Ukraine, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, but which erupted out of a history going back to the end of the Cold War.
  • Then there’s the genocide in Gaza, which began for much of the outside world as a media event with the Hamas-led attacks on Israeli settlements on Oct. 7, 2023, but which erupted out of a history going back to 1948.

Throughout this period, those of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether. The virally visible double standards and Orwellian editorial doublespeek that are on display in how these events are being covered in the media and talked about by political leaders; the naked elevation of certain voices and suppression of all others to sustain the empire-serving, reductive, and often nakedly racist narratives of the US, NATO, and Israel; the outright free-for-all of lies; the censorship and criminalization of pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist speech; so many blatant, top-down attempts—from the US, from Israel, from corporate media—to hide or bend or muddle the full truth of what’s happening and why. All while people are being bombarded by innocence-destroying images of death and suffering for weeks and months and years, and as they are simultaneously seeking in independent media the perspectives, voices, context, and analysis they noticeably haven’t been getting in corporate media (which includes all of this year’s incredible Izzy Award winners, it includes us at The Real News and all of our Movement Media Alliance partners—Project Censored, Mondoweiss, Prism, Truthout, The Progressive, In These Times, and so many more). And if we’re just focusing on the media side of things for now, the point is these profound historical events have had profound effects on us and our world through media, they’ve had profound effects on the whole media ecosystem, and on how people are using media to find the truth about the world beyond their immediate physical-visible sphere.

The other profound media event to account for is the 2024 presidential election, particularly when it comes to the impact of non-legacy media (and the Trump campaign’s deft use of it) on the election itself: podcasts, YouTube, Joe Rogan, the manosphere, the whole assemblage of contemporary rightwing media. To say nothing of all the other media-related events that shaped our very, very strange election—from Biden’s disastrous televised debate to the reality-splitting circus of lies and stipulations of no fact checking in subsequent debates, to the politics-as-spectacle era reaching dizzying new heights with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024. All of that has to be factored in.

[T]hose of us witnessing these events from afar are being overwhelmed by the pain and death and crimes against humanity we’re seeing on our phones daily, but it’s also becoming more apparent in the media ecosystem where we’re seeing those things, where we’re not, and who wants to obscure the truth or keep it from being seen altogether.

And then, well, we enter the era of the spectacular, deadly, brain-numbing, neverending media event of the second Trump presidency. And that’s when you really start to see all this shit coming to a head. An authoritarian political regime of sociopaths, thieves, liars, and conmen, half of whom are creatures of corporate and rightwing media themselves who crawled out of their screenworlds, like the girl from The Ring, into the halls of power. A chaotic reality in which the Trump administration’s war on press freedom and the people’s right to know is happening simultaneously with a “flood-the-zone” policy blitz that is overwhelming us and our screen-glued brains with a daily bombardment of horror and stupidity and (good/bad/fake) information. A reality where the difference between politics and media spectacle has completely collapsed; where Trump tries to rule the world through his social media posts and dictate reality from his phone; where a former Fox News host is the Secretary of War and quoting fake Bible quotes from Pulp Fiction to justify real war crimes in a real-life war with Iran; where incredibly consequential policy decisions—from illegally invading and kidnapping the President of Venezuela to sending federal troops into American cities—are made according to the “logic” of a shitty 1980s action movie, and where the reality of what’s actually happening on the ground anywhere is profoundly muddled by fake news, AI slop, bots, scrambled timelines and search engines, platform suppression, etc.; where virtually all of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who own the media and control the means of communication and reality-perception are fully collaborating with the regime, sitting at Trump’s inauguration, in the White House, providing horrifying surveillance tech to the government, securing massive contracts for their companies, taking a chainsaw to government agencies and exposing our government data.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will: This is a nightmare scenario, and the nightmare is here.

It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack.

Regarding the current state of press freedom in America and the people’s right to know, none of what I’ve discussed so far can be disentangled from the simultaneous authoritarian attacks on the free speech of students and professors on college campuses, as well as teachers and librarians at K-12 schools—attacks coming from the federal government, certain state governments, and from criminally complicit administrators who are throwing the very people and constitutional principles they’re supposed to protect into the woodchipper. None of this can be disentangled from the federal attacks on the labor movement—from charges filed against union leaders like David Huerta to bullets fired into union members like Alex Pretti, to Trump firing or stripping union bargaining rights from millions of federal workers and crippling the National Labor Relations Board. None of this can be disentangled from the firings and investigations into people for posting online after events like the assassination of Charlie Kirk; from the federal machinations to use Big Tech to surveil and police all of us, to centralize and expose all our sensitive data, to try to create a national registry of voter information, and try to criminalize our constitutionally protected speech, posts, and protests by redefining them as “terrorism”; from politically weaponized lawsuits, investigations, and threats to use the vicious might of the federal government and the prison-industrial complex against nonprofits and activists and more. It is not just press freedom: It’s the First Amendment itself—and all the basic freedoms that fall under that umbrella—that is under full-on attack.

And none of this has even yet touched on the greatest crime against press freedom and the people’s right to know, which we continue to bear witness to to this day. The crime of our journalist colleagues and comrades who are fulfilling their sacred duty to help us get the truth out of places like Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and who are being murdered in cold blood for it. We’ve never seen anything in our lifetimes like the mass slaughter and targeting of journalists that’s happened around the world over the past 4 years, with Israel being by far the worst offender, murdering hundreds of journalists and media workers with the full financial and political support of our country. I am sickened and shattered that humanity has allowed this to happen. Yet I am eternally, mournfully grateful for our brothers, sisters, and siblings who have made the ultimate sacrifice, in pursuit of the ultimate good, and with the ultimate hope that the horrifying realities they’ve documented would be seen and not forgotten. I am honored to be here with all of you keeping that fire burning and carrying on this noble and necessary mission for truth at all costs. I am fueled by it, and I am here, like you, to fight for it.

As I already said, you don’t need me telling you how bad things have gotten out there, and how much worse they’re getting month after month. All you need to do is open your eyes and see for yourself. But in the Year of Our Lord 2026, even that most basic of existential needs—to see and know the world we’re living in—is under direct assault, with disastrous individual and societal consequences. And that’s really what I came here to talk to you about today…

We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things.

Again, many of these great, terrible, and swift changes to our media ecosystem and our political reality have unfolded in a relatively short amount of time, in pretty rapid succession. We have experienced these changes as average people in the world, as media users and consumers, and we’re navigating them as best we can as professional journalists and media makers, all while life continues to get harder, scarier, more expensive, and the conditions for making a good living are increasingly precarious or nonexistent for most people. We are seeing and experiencing these changes at the same time that they are changing how we see and experience things, all while the world spins madly into chaos, war, fear, neo-feudal wealth inequality, and industrial-scale violence, and while our cyborg brains are being cooked from too much news, too much content, too much awfulness, too little IRL contact with other people, and a rapidly decreasing ability to individually and collectively discern what’s real.

But I am here to stress that this generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing. It is a war on our eyes, on our minds, and on our human faculties, developed over millenia, to understand the world we inhabit and to figure out what is true and what is not.

We are not just increasingly exhausted and discombobulated because more awful shit is happening in faster succession in our country, in the world, in the news cycle, and because we are seeing more of that awful shit on a daily basis across a media ecosystem that permeates more of our lives than ever before. That is part of the reason, for sure. Humans have undergone a compressed evolution in the digital age unlike anything in our species’ history, and for all the good it’s done, it has also, frankly, fried our brains, frayed our hearts, and immobilized the parts of us and the organs of our being that turn information into action, reducing them and us to pure consumers, scrollers, clickers, and red-eyed observers.

[T]his generalized existential state we’ve entered in the 2020s is not a byproduct of neutral technological advancements or big industry changes that have simply happened around us. They are effects of a war being fought against us—a war that we are currently losing.

But it is not an unrelated accident that this is all happening to us while we careen towards civilizational oblivion. We are cooking our planet at a blinding pace and life is dying off en masse all around us, war and genocide and imperialist plunder are ripping our world and our people apart, the maga-rich are speedrunning our society to collapse and pillaging everything they can like Earth is having a going-out-of-business sale. We have descended quickly into what sisters Astra Taylor and Noami Klein rightly call “end-times fascism.” The levers of power are controlled by a ghoulish death cult of sociopathic billionaire oligarchs, war hawks, bigoted misanthropes, religious fanatics, and monstrous pedophile cabals who have given up on this world and the very notion that we can have a society that works for everyone, opting instead for a future that only works for them. It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos, are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else.

This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of. As journalists and media makers, we are trained to focus on one side of this war. You could say that I and everyone at The Real News Network are class-war correspondents, reporting around the US and around the world from the front lines of the ruling-class assault on working people’s lives, our health, our communities, our freedom, our democracy, our planet, and on life itself. But you cannot do this work today and not also realize that the very people, governments, and capitalist entities whose crimes we’re trying to report on are waging an all-out effort to demolish the very cognitive and societal foundations of our human abilities to see and know and remember the truth, to speak the truth and be heard, to trust what our eyes are seeing as truth.

To be clear: “All governments lie,” as Izzy Stone famously said, and power lying to us is not new. Oligarchs controlling the media and bending and warping the truth for their own ends is not new. What is new about what we face today is the scope and scale of the ability of society’s powerbrokers and power-wielders to collaboratively seize the means of communication and reality-perception and to attack our minds to the point that we have no idea what is true.

It is not an unrelated accident that the richest, most powerful, and most sociopathic people in the world—from Trump to Musk to Bezos—are gobbling up and taking control of our media ecosystem while they’re gobbling up everything else.

I say this not to depress you, not to overwhelm you, but to motivate you. The fate of journalism itself has never been more precarious, but the need for truth, truth telling, and defenders of truth has never been more clear. This is real Lord of the Rings shit: it’s light versus darkness, truth versus lies, people versus profit and the profiteers; it’s a future in which we’ve collectively chosen to reclaim our reality, preserve the power of truth, and rebuild a better, truer democracy versus the future we’ll get if we don’t. There is no neutral territory here, no safe harbor, no sidelines to stand on. The class wars in reality and on reality are accelerating, the ruling class is winning, and the disastrous effects concern all of us, our future, and everything we hold dear. It’s time we start acting like this is the case, and stop operating under the daily delusion that we can keep doing our work like normal and all of this will go away like a bad dream, that we can somehow remain “objective” and evade getting sucked into a war that’s already changing us and everything around us.

In closing, my message to all of you—to my journalist colleagues, to our students and future journalists—is this: We are not just doing a job here, and you are not just preparing for a career; we are, all of us, soldiers on the front lines of a war that is already being fought against us, our profession, and our ability to see and discern what’s real. So let’s start acting like it! Don’t just see press freedom and the people’s right to know as things that are under attack and must be defended, but wear them as armor and hold them high like flags in an offensive charge to defeat these lying, reality-warping, planet-gobbling psychopaths and hold them accountable for their crimes.

This is a class war happening on two fronts: A war in reality, and a war on reality and our capacity to perceive it. And it’s high time we all start seeing and responding to all of this in the terms of a war that we are not just reporting on but on the frontlines of.

Our journalistic ability to find and tell the truth is only half the battle; the other half is fighting, adapting, and moving strategically to get people to see the truth and to make truth mean something in a world where the richest and most powerful are doing everything they can to dilute the power of truth and inoculate themselves from it. Don’t let them get away with it! Don’t let them win! Use media and journalism as weapons to fight back. Accept that, in 2026, to be a journalist is not simply to be a documenter and teller of truths, but to be an activist for truth as such. Be better at telling the truth than they are at selling lies. Be rigorous and ferociously committed to the truth, but be creative, too, and be cunning, be collaborative, be persistent. Use every tool at your disposal to make reality undeniable and make resistance to unreality irresistible. And recognize that media can only do so much to make that happen: We must use media to do the most good we can with media, but independent media can and must also play a role in catalyzing or facilitating immediate, in-person connection and grounding people in a shared, agreed-upon reality. No politics, no grassroots movements, can survive without that.

With all of our skills, tools, platforms, and networks, those of us in independent media must be a critical rebel force, fighting in a digital and analog battlefield not just for the truth, but for our very ability to see and know and remember and act. Really, when it comes down to it, the fact is that we’re fighting for the very mindful faculties that make us human against the inhumane designs and insatiable desires of those who would reduce us to mindless cattle—and who are reducing our world to rubble. They must be stopped, and we must beat them. Not just our profession, but our future depends on it. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and the battle lines couldn’t be clearer. I know which side I’m on. Do you?

From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.