Introduction

Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth

“I ca’n’t believe that!” said Alice.

“Ca’n’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone.

“Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one ca’n’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass¹

Welcome to the looking-glass world of contemporary politics and media in the United States. Every day, powerful entities—including Donald Trump, in the role of a mad-hatter president; the leaders of Facebook, Google, and other tech giants; not to mention the corporate press—challenge us to take a deep breath, close our eyes, and believe the impossible.

Trump would have the country imagine that the greatest threat it faces is immigration, which only a wall and tariffs can stop. Pundits insist that Russia poses a greater threat to election integrity than does the dark money of a corporate oligopoly.2 Facebook and Twitter seek expert advice on regulating free speech from the leader of a known hate group.³ A celebrity hosts a party based (loosely) on Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as women’s reproductive rights are under attack and the most popular TV programs regularly feature violence against women as entertainment.⁴ Nonviolent activists calling for action on catastrophic climate change and the sixth mass extinction are repressed and criminalized as “eco-terrorists.”⁵ And those seeking justice for police killings of African Americans are labeled “Black Identity Extremists.”6 The clocks run backward in this looking-glass realm—as evidenced by vicious resurgences of nationalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Social media accelerate and amplify the spread of hateful values, while Facebook, Twitter, and a ratings-hungry corporate media profit from sowing division and the public controversy it entails.⁷

As a result, many in the United States see only distorted or even inverted representations of reality through the magic mirrors of clickbait-driven reporting, pundits’ 24/7 “hot takes,” and social media feeds governed by secret algorithms. By contrast, much like Alice responding to the Queen’s wild claims, many of us recognize and oppose these distortions, defying calls to renounce a factually-grounded world in favor of a wonderland where narrow self-interest would serve as truth’s primary arbiter. For both groups, Censored 2020 challenges the corporate news media’s looking-glass logic and, as antidote, it presents some of the past year’s most exemplary independent news reporting and media analyses.

INDEPENDENT ALTERNATIVES TO “NEVER JAM TODAY”

“The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’” Alice objected.

“No, it ca’n’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass⁸

Perverse distortions and mystifying reversals do not capture the full scope of looking-glass logic. Substitute “real news” for “jam” and—in line with the Queen’s twisted temporal reasoning—you get a stark rendering of the corporate media’s shortcomings when it comes to reporting the full scope of what is newsworthy. (If this assessment strikes some as too harsh a judgment of the establishment press, we invite skeptical readers to jump ahead to Chapter 2, “‘Curiouser and Curiouser’: A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of Junk Food News,” and Chapter 3, “Comforting the Powerful, Ignoring the Afflicted: News Abuse in 2018–2019.”)

For example, in 2018–2019, the corporate news media failed to cover how unconscionable conditions in immigrant detention centers have been worsened by flawed investigations of sexual assaults on detained children, how the right to peaceful protest is threatened by the Department of Defense’s plan to systematically surveil citizens’ social media accounts, and how the oil and gas industry is set to unleash a devastating 120 billion tons of new carbon pollution by the year 2030. Each of these stories, and more like them, have in fact been reported as news—by independent news reporters and outlets, as documented in Chapter 1 of this book.

Although some may debate whether the marginalization of these stories by the corporate press is intentional, there is no doubting that, on a daily basis, the best independent journalists and news outlets make sure that this jam—fact-based news that serves the public interest, news that serves to “tell the truth and shame the devil”9 —is available to those with an appetite for it.

This includes, especially, constructive news stories that serve to empower and inspire, as highlighted by Kenn Burrows, Amber Yang, and Bethany Surface in Chapter 9. By covering not only abuses of power and their consequences but also community-based remedies and time-tested solutions, independent reporters and news outlets promote informed public understanding, discussion, and engagement.¹⁰

PUNISHMENT BEFORE TRIAL

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on [. . .], “there’s the King’s Messenger.

He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass¹¹

Those taking up the charge of a responsible fourth estate, which would hold the powerful to account, are on a hero’s journey, similar to Alice’s. But, as in Alice’s descent into Wonderland, too often logic and proportion are turned on their heads. Thus, for example, on Memorial Day in 2019, President Trump pushed to pardon US troops who had committed war crimes, while whistleblower Chelsea Manning was back in prison for her refusal to testify against WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange.12

Recall that in early 2010 Manning had provided Assange and WikiLeaks with gunsight video footage documenting a US strike on civilians in Baghdad, Iraq—only after establishment media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, failed to respond to Manning’s attempts to submit the material to them for publication.¹³ WikiLeaks published the video of the Baghdad airstrike, titled “Collateral Murder,” in April 2010. No US military personnel were held accountable for these clearly-documented war crimes, but the US government prosecuted Manning under the Espionage Act and sentenced her to 35 years in prison. If that is not looking-glass logic, what is?

Similarly, in 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed highly classified information regarding wanton National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance of the US public, the corporate media initially refused to assist Snowden. Instead, they attacked him viciously, even as major corporate media outlets subsequently accepted awards and accolades for reporting based on the very materials that Snowden had leaked. The director of national intelligence at the time, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress about the NSA’s mass surveillance program.¹⁴ Snowden subsequently cited Clapper’s congressional testimony as “the breaking point” in his decision to reveal the NSA documents.¹⁵ Snowden was publicly pilloried as a traitor, while Clapper’s perjury went unpunished. Yet more political Jabberwocky.

This history is especially important now, as Manning’s and Assange’s fates hang in the balance, along with the future of press freedoms, according to more than a few notable commentators.¹⁶ As Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, stated in April 2019,

While the Trump administration has so far not attempted to explicitly declare the act of publishing illegal, a core part of its argument would criminalize many common journalist–source interactions that reporters rely on all the time. Requesting more documents from a source, using an encrypted chat messenger, or trying to keep a source’s identity anonymous are not crimes; they are vital to the journalistic process. Whether or not you like Assange, the charge against him is a serious press freedom threat and should be vigorously protested by all those who care about the First Amendment.17

On the same day as Timm’s warning about threats to press freedoms, the British government forcibly removed Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had found asylum for seven years. In May 2019, the US Department of Justice indicted Assange for multiple violations of the Espionage Act—making him the first publisher to be charged under the World War I–era law. The US government seeks to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom for trial in the United States, while Manning is once again imprisoned, this time for refusing to testify before a grand jury about her association with Assange. Thus, both Assange and Manning—not to mention others like them—are punished for what Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame has called “civil courage.”18 They are the messengers of war crimes and financial malfeasance, who made available to the public cables, communications, and policies that expose the callous inhumanity of the so-called “war on terror” and the neoliberal austerity agenda. Their acts were selfless, driven by the desire to inform the public of the truth and to hold those responsible to account. As Timm noted, the ability of sources to share documents and other information with reporters is “vital” to journalism. In cases like Manning’s and Assange’s, the messengers of truth have committed no real crimes, but—by looking-glass logic—they have already been, and continue to be, punished.¹⁹

INSIDE CENSORED 2020

A primary goal of Project Censored is to improve media coverage of important social issues. Chapter 1 of Censored 2020 presents the 25 most important but underreported news stories of 2018–2019 as determined by Project Censored’s judges, faculty evaluators, and student researchers. The chapter simultaneously highlights exemplary reporting by independent reporters and news outlets and holds the corporate news media to account for failing to inform the public adequately of these significant news stories. This year’s list includes coverage of how survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking are frequently criminalized for acts of self-defense (story #6), the Department of Justice’s use of secret rules to evade First Amendment limitations on government surveillance of journalists (story #1), and grassroots efforts to make school lunch programs more equitable (story #23). Despite their remarkable newsworthiness, these stories, along with the rest of the reports that comprise this year’s list, have been either marginalized or ignored altogether by the establishment press. Chapter 1 aims to break the corporate blockade on coverage of these issues, by bringing the stories—and the independent journalists and news outlets that deserve credit for covering them—to wider public attention.

In Chapter 2, “Curiouser and Curiouser,” Izzy Snow, Susan Rahman, and students at the College of Marin present a Mad Hatter’s tea party of Junk Food News. Their chapter starkly contrasts the sensational, titillating, and often trivial stories promoted by corporate news outlets with important topics and issues that were overlooked and underreported. From the “discourse on diapers, crown-jeweled pacifiers, and royal bibs” in anticipation of the birth of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s baby, to the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire, and the flame war between Kim Kardashian and fashion retailer Fashion Nova, corporate media pushed a wonderland of escapism—while neglecting real news on “birth-striking” as a response to the climate crisis, the arson of African American churches in Louisiana, and the Yellow Vest movement in France. As Snow and Rahman write, “During the 2018–2019 news cycle, logic and proportion fell sloppy dead, torn apart by headlines that spread disinformation, propaganda, and utter nonsense.”

Chapter 3, by John Collins, Nicole Eigbrett, Jana Morgan, and Steve Peraza, takes stock of another form of corporate media propaganda, News Abuse. “News Abuse” is the term that Project Censored uses to describe genuinely newsworthy topics that the public is nevertheless unlikely to appreciate or understand due to slanted coverage provided by corporate news outlets. Examining establishment media’s hagiographic reports of Senator John McCain’s death, the debate surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, the migrant “caravan” traveling from Central America to the United States, and the election to Congress of a group of women of color dubbed “the Squad,” Collins, Eigbrett, Morgan, and Peraza critique the corporate press for its “heavy reliance on tropes, frames, and narratives that served to shield elite groups and the US empire itself from critical scrutiny while marginalizing or casting doubt on the voices of the relatively powerless.”

After reading the chapters on Junk Food News and News Abuse, readers might feel much like Alice in Wonderland did when she found herself “up to her chin in salt water,” only to realize that it was a pool of her own tears.20 Chapter 4, “Media Democracy in Action,” presents antidotes to the tear-inducing potions of Junk Food News and News Abuse. Compiled by Steve Macek, this year’s installment of Media Democracy in Action highlights engaged journalism at its best, including contributions by Kathryn Foxhall of the Society of Professional Journalists on how public information officers serve as censors; Russ Kick, the founder and manager of AltGov2, a website dedicated to increasing government transparency; Matthew Crain and Anthony Nadler, on Silicon Valley’s “digital influence machine”; Brendan DeMelle and Ashley Braun on DeSmogBlog’s work countering the fossil fuel industry’s PR and lies; Alexandra Bradbury on Labor Notes and grassroots union activism; and Aaron Delwiche and Mary Margaret Herring on Propaganda Critic, a website that engagingly educates members of the public about how to defend themselves from media manipulation and propaganda. The contributors to this year’s Media Democracy in Action chapter provide useful information and reality-based inspiration to activists and others who believe a better world is possible.

Adam Bessie and Marc Parenteau’s “What’s Burning?” (Chapter 5) examines the ubiquitous influence of smart devices and social media, through the lens of the Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, California, in November 2018. As smoke from the catastrophic fire darkened skies across the San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley, impacting the health of millions of people, filter mask selfies trended on social media. Bessie and Parenteau consider the packaging of crises as social media content, drawing on insights from E.M. Forster’s classic dystopian science fiction story, “The Machine Stops” (1909), which imagined instant messaging and video conferencing in a world where industrialization has made the terrestrial environment uninhabitable.

A world apart from San Francisco, Kashmir seldom makes global headlines. When it does, news coverage typically focuses on violence, depicted in terms of border disputes between India and Pakistan, while failing to mention pervasive human rights violations or the region’s long history of resistance to occupation. In “Kashmir Uncensored” (Chapter 6), Ifat Gazia and Tara Dorabji document how India, the world’s largest democracy, “attempts to use media to control the narrative, military to control the ground, and torture to control the psyche of the Kashmiri people, all in hopes of smashing the independence movement.” Based on interviews conducted in Kashmir in 2017 and 2018 with local journalists and members of the independence movement, Gazia and Dorabji show that, despite the prevalence of torture and other extreme forms of persecution, the resistance “continues to evolve and take on new forms.”

Since they took office, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have ushered in a new era of intolerance toward the LGBTQ community, rolling back many of the protections established or strengthened under the Obama administration. In Chapter 7, April Anderson and Andy Lee Roth report on the findings from their detailed content analysis of four major establishment newspapers and a variety of independent news publications between January 2016 and November 2018. Anderson and Roth find that both corporate and independent news outlets consistently treated spokespersons for the leading LGBTQ organizations as newsworthy sources of information and opinion, but that corporate outlets focused almost entirely on two controversial topics—so-called “bathroom bills” and Trump’s transgender military ban—whereas independent news organizations covered a wider range of issues affecting the LGBTQ community. Their chapter also addresses how news representations of opposing viewpoints can avoid overtly defamatory rhetoric but nonetheless indirectly promote prejudice and discrimination, as exemplified by corporate media’s consistent reliance on Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, as a favored news source.

In Chapter 8, Emil Marmol and Lee Mager show how big tech firms and social media companies are taking advantage of widespread calls to “fight fake news” by legitimizing censorship of online content, de-platforming critical voices on the Right and Left. This censorship effectively highjacks efforts to promote media literacy by making control of the online flow of news and information a matter of “artificial intelligence” (in the form of proprietary algorithms). When it comes to protecting the integrity of the news we receive, though, we need less “A” and more “I.” Marmol and Mager delve into the controversies and media distractions of Russiagate as well as the deep state and military–industrial complex involvement in social media companies’ fact-checking and content restriction policies, noting significant conflicts of interest. They conclude that we must speak out against the weaponization of “fake news” as a concept, while supporting a free press focused on the public good and promoting support for whistleblowers as vital sources of truth.

Censored 2020 concludes with Kenn Burrows, Amber Yang, and Bethany Surface’s chapter on constructive journalism. At its best, Burrows, Yang, and Surface write, journalism “catalyzes and informs conversations and helps us consider possibilities for a wiser, more creative world.” But, they note, the prevalence of negative news inadvertently contributes to cycles of personal cynicism and public disengagement. As a “creative antidote to an exclusive focus on problem-based news,” Burrows, Yang, and Surface call for constructive journalism, which highlights “community-generated news, solutions-based journalism, and the power of the arts to spark innovative thought and shared (positive) values.” Their chapter provides specific examples of how solutions-based and engaged journalism—founded on mindful inquiry, collective gathering, the power of art and play, and storytelling—provide crucial counterbalances to conventional journalism’s longstanding focus on negative news.

BEYOND THE MIRROR

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

—Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 198421

Lewis Carroll composed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in the late 19th century, but we imagine that Alice might have understood and appreciated the perspective of another classic fictional character, Winston Smith, the truth-seeking protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, first published in 1949. Alice and Winston hold firm to the truth despite the madness of looking-glass logic, propaganda, and historical revisionism.

We face similar challenges today. But—unlike Alice and Winston—we are not so isolated. Community networks, including face-to-face and digital connections, link us in ways that would have made Alice and Winston envious. We also benefit from the clear-sighted efforts of a robust independent press, as nearly every page of Censored 2020 shows.

Mirror metaphors frame the adventure in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The mirror has also been a popular, if flawed, metaphor for describing the role of journalism in democratic societies. According to this perspective, which is frequently articulated by journalists themselves, the news is a simple reflection of the real world. However, as critical media scholars have noted, no mirror can reflect the whole world; and, furthermore, the “objects” reflected in the mirror are hardly passive.22 This means that news—whether reported by corporate or independent outlets—is never the simple “truth.” Instead, news is the result of social processes through which reporters, editors, and other media personnel decide which events, people, and viewpoints they consider newsworthy.

This view of news is difficult and challenging—especially at a time when the country’s president displays a brazen disregard for the First Amendment and routinely demonizes the press as “the enemy of the people.”²³ But to acknowledge that news is a human product is not equivalent to accepting either Donald Trump’s dizzying contempt for the truth or the corporate media’s frequent complicity in misinforming the American public. Instead, recognition that definitions of newsworthiness depend not only on conventional practices and institutional pressures within journalism as a field but also on the distribution of power and status in the broader society should help to sharpen our judgment when it comes to evaluating news, or claims to truth more generally.

When we say that “truth is a set of agreements,” that it is a “social consensus,” these agreements and that consensus are, nonetheless, constrained by the conditions of reality—to be deemed true, these agreements must “correspond to what we know or think we know about an external world.”²⁴ When we assess a news story—whether it originated from the corporate press or an independent outlet—we have to consider how propaganda, profits, and prejudices may have shaped its reporting and interpretation.²⁵ This is a fundamental truth of critical media literacy education as championed by Project Censored and its allies. Like Alice, we must be ever vigilant when the powers that be, acting in accord with the looking-glass logic of Lewis Carroll’s Queen, encourage us to shut our eyes and accept the impossible.

Censored 2020: Through the Looking Glass is Project Censored’s effort to make a case, based on verifiable evidence, that we should employ some of Alice’s skepticism toward the Queen when we turn to social media or the establishment press as the sources of our news. Put more positively, a guiding theme in all the diverse contributions to Censored 2020 is that the public’s interests are best served by independent reporters and news outlets. We may still need to take a deep breath to ground ourselves, but the practice we advocate—contrary to the demands of Carroll’s looking-glass Queen—is to keep our eyes open while envisioning what is distinctly possible: a better world, based on inclusive communities and equitable values, safeguarded by reasoned deliberation and democratic institutions, including a robust and independent free press.

Notes

1. 1.

   Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll; with Illustrations by John Tenniel, Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000 [Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There was first published in London by Macmillan and Co. in 1871]), 199.

2. 2.

   See, e.g., Moira Feldman and Rob Williams, “Russiagate: Two-Headed Monster of Propaganda and Censorship,” in Censored 2019: Fighting the Fake News Invasion, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018), 54–56, https://www.projectcensored.org/6-russiagate-two-headed-monster-of-propaganda-and-censorship/.

3. 3.

   On Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council, see Kirsten Grind and John D. McKinnon, “Facebook, Twitter Turn to Right-Leaning Groups to Help Referee Political Speech,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-solicit-outside-groups-often-on-the-right-to-referee-political-speech-11546966779; Alex Bollinger, “Facebook & Twitter are Getting Advice on Free Speech from a Hate Group Leader,” LGBTQ Nation, January 10, 2019, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/01/facebook-twitter-getting-advice-free-speech-hate-group-leader/; and Chapter 7 in this volume, April Anderson and Andy Lee Roth’s “Stonewalled: Establishment Media’s Silence on the Trump Administration’s Crusade against LGBTQ People.”

4. 4.

   Arwa Mahdawi, “Kylie Jenner’s Handmaid’s Tale Party was Tasteless, but is the TV Show Any Better?” The Guardian, June 11, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/11/kylie-jenner-handmaids-tale-party-tasteless-arwa-mahdawi.

5. 5.

   Heather Alberro, “Radical Environmentalists are Fighting Climate Change—So Why are They Persecuted?” The Conversation, December 11, 2018, https://theconversation.com/radical-environmentalists-are-fighting-climate-change-so-why-are-they-persecuted-107211. See also story #14, “FBI Surveilled Peaceful Climate Change Protesters,” in Chapter 1 in this volume.

6. 6.

   See Hailey Schector and Jeff Simmons, “FBI Racially Profiling ‘Black Identity Extremists,’” in Censored 2019, 63–65, https://www.projectcensored.org/10-fbi-racially-profiling-black-identity-extremists/; see also Michael Harriot, “The FBI Admits Black Lives Matter Was Never a Threat. It’s White People You Should be Worried About,” The Root, June 11, 2019, https://www.the-root.com/the-fbi-admits-black-lives-matter-was-never-a-threat-i-1835417043.

7. 7.

   E.g., Chris Hedges, “The Mass Media is Poisoning Us with Hate,” Truthdig, May 27, 2019, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mass-media-is-poisoning-us-with-hate/.

8. 8.

   Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 196. As Martin Gardner notes, in this passage Lewis Carroll is playing on the Latin word iam, which means “now” in the past and future tenses, but not in the present tense.

9. 9.

   Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008 [first published in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Howe in 1920]), 7.

10. 10.

    In addition to Burrows, Yang, and Surface’s chapter, see Chapter 1 of this volume for five exemplars of constructive journalism, including story #3, “Indigenous Groups from Amazon Propose Creation of Largest Protected Area on Earth”; story #18, “Humanitarian Groups Promote Solutions to Extreme Violence in West Africa”; story #20, “Scientists Accelerate Coral Reef Regrowth with Electricity”; story #21, “Court Ruling Provides ‘Blueprint’ to Reform Excessive, Discriminatory Policing in Schools”; and story #23, “New Programs Make School Food Systems More Equitable.”

11. 11.

    Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 196–97.

12. 12.

    Alexander Rubinstein, “Trump Pardoning War Criminals, Prosecuting Whistleblowers,” Mint-Press News, May 29, 2019, https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-pardoning-war-criminals-prosecuting-whistleblowers/258845/.

13. 13.

    See Brian Covert, “Whistleblowers and Gag Laws,” in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013), 65–84.

14. 14.

    Carlo Muñoz, “GOP’s Amash: Clapper Should Resign,” The Hill, June 12, 2013, https://the-hill.com/policy/defense/305031-rep-amash-calls-for-dni-clapper-to-resign.

15. 15.

    Edward Snowden, interviewed by Hubert Siebel, “ARD Interview with Edward Snowden,” ARD (German TV), conducted January 23, 2014, broadcast January 26, 2014; transcript online at https://edwardsnowden.com/2014/01/27/video-ard-interview-with-edward-snowden/.

16. 16.

    See, e.g., Sharmini Peries, interview with Daniel Ellsberg, “Daniel Ellsberg on Assange Arrest: The Beginning of the End for Press Freedom,” The Real News Network, April 11, 2019, https://therealnews.com/stories/daniel-ellsberg-on-assange-arrest-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-press-freedom; and Chris Hedges, “The Martyrdom of Julian Assange,” Truthdig, April 11, 2019, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-martyrdom-of-julian-assange/.

17. 17.

    “The Trump Administration’s Indictment of Julian Assange Threatens Core Press Freedom Rights,” Freedom of the Press Foundation, April 11, 2019, https://freedom.press/news/trump-administrations-indictment-julian-assange-threatens-core-press-freedom-rights/.

18. 18.

    Daniel Ellsberg, “On Civil Courage and Its Punishments,” in Censored 2014, 208–213.

19. 19.

    See, for example, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “Say Goodbye to the First Amendment,” Truthdig, June 13, 2019, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-chilling-crusade-against-julian-assange-and-chelsea-manning/.

20. 20.

    Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 24–25.

21. 21.

    George Orwell, 1984: A Novel (New York: Signet Classics/New American Library, 1977 [first published in London by Secker and Warburg in 1949]), 179.

22. 22.

    See, e.g., David Croteau and William Hoynes, Media/Society: Technology, Industries, Content, and Users, 6th ed. (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2019), 172–73.

23. 23.

    Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, “The Free Press as ‘Enemy of the People,’” Project Censored, August 2, 2017, https://www.projectcensored.org/the-free-press-as-enemy-of-the-people/. See also “In 869 Days, President Trump Has Made 10,796 False or Misleading Claims,” Washington Post, June 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/.

24. 24.

    Michael Schudson, “Belgium Invades Germany: Reclaiming Non-Fake News—Imperfect, Professional, and Democratic,” in Why Journalism Still Matters (Medford, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2018), 81–95, 85.

25. 25.

    For more on this theme, see Chapter 8 in this volume, “‘Fake News’: The Trojan Horse for Silencing Alternative News and Reestablishing Corporate News Dominance,” by Emil Marmol and Lee Mager.