Laura Flanders, a British-born broadcast journalist, is the recipient of a 2019 Izzy Award (named for journalist I.F. Stone) and a 2019 Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.
Her books include Real Majority, Media Minority:The Costs of Sidelining Women in Reporting and the New York Times bestseller Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species. Her weekly television program, The Laura Flanders Show, airs on more than 270 public television stations and on YouTube. It can also be seen on her website at lauraflanders.org. She spoke with me by phone in early July from her studio in upstate New York.
"People all around this country aren’t just talking about the problems. They have been figuring out how to help each other and themselves."
Q: Let me start by asking about your background. How did you get into the media?
Laura Flanders: Well, I started as an activist, I guess you could say, or really just as a curious person, growing up in the United Kingdom. I was learning the history of the British relationship with Ireland, and it was very clear that the “trouble” wasn’t with the Irish, but with the British.
In 1983, I went to Northern Ireland and saw how important independent media is. While I was there, I saw a killing happen. The Royal Ulster Constabulary shot somebody right in front of me. I recorded the whole thing on this little Super 8 camera and was able to contribute that footage to a local inquiry.
The policeman responsible for firing a rubber bullet at a man exactly my age with three kids, who I watched die in front of me, was suspended for six months or something. But it would’ve been a completely different story if I’d been where the rest of the media were, which was with the police. So I really got it that we need to have media that has its ear to the ground, not to the elite. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Laura Flanders
Q: Your show is the antithesis, not just of rightwing media but I think of most commercial media, in a couple of ways. One is in this catchphrase you use at the beginning of each show . . .
Flanders: We start every show by saying that “this is the place where the people who say it can’t be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it,” which is a fond adaptation of something that Jim Hightower once said and has allowed me to borrow. People all around this country aren’t just talking about the problems. They have been figuring out how to help each other and themselves, from mutual aid and justice networks, to work with cooperatives, community- owned broadband, and local economic diversity investment funds.
What we have now, a year on into this crisis of COVID-19, is a frustration in people’s minds that the government isn’t looking as closely as we would like at the initiatives that are working. The expectations have been that the Biden Administration would be radically different not just from Trump but from Democratic administrations past. We are pushing hard to blow oxygen on the embers of a demand for radical change.
Q: It’s very much a show to inspire activism and the collaborations that you’ve created with other groups, to talk about media from communities of color, from activist communities.
Flanders: This year we launched “Meet the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] Press,” which we’re playing every month all across the country. And we teamed up with a new network of BIPOC-owned-and-led media organizations led by two women of color, Mitra Kalita of EpicenterNYC and Sara Lomax-Reese of WURD Radio in Philly, one of the few family-owned talk radio stations owned by a Black woman. They’re bringing you a very different take on the news.
Q: Let’s talk about a recent episode of your show, which premiered on July 4, addressing the topic of critical race theory.
Flanders: We wanted to take a step back from the debate around critical race theory as it’s being covered in the corporate press and to ask, “What is this really about?” Because much of what you’re seeing in the corporate media is actually a spreading of manufactured rightwing talking points.
Is critical race theory Marxism? Is critical race theory reverse racism? Those are all rightwing tropes that have been manufactured to focus on the parents of white children in schools and get a base riled up for Republicans.
So we brought on Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was there when critical race theory was born, from an experience she had in law school of the role of the law in creating racial tropes and racial categories. And we brought on Soledad O’Brien, who has gotten very fiery since she left CNN, talking about the role of corporate media in spreading the lies of the right.
And then we brought on Kyle Simcox, a 2018 graduate of the Tennessee high school from which [teacher] Matthew Hawn was recently dismissed as part of this whole rightwing push against critical race theory.
Kyle made the point that school board meetings have gotten very hot. But when I asked Kyle who was showing up to them, he said it was people showing up in support of the fired teacher. It’s a tiny minority using their power to get the school board to dismiss the guy.
Q: And all of this happened just three hours away from the famous July 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where another teacher was fired for teaching the theory of evolution, which was outlawed by state law. And now states across the country have either enacted or are considering enacting laws that ban the teaching of critical race theory.
Flanders: That’s why the work we’re doing is so important. I’ve been doing this for thirty years, more or less, and I’ve never felt that we were at more of a tipping point than I feel right now. As a progressive, I believe we have made progress as a society, but I don’t believe that’s inevitable. And in this moment, we really could go either way. We could move toward a more democratic, more just, more healthy society, or we simply could not.
This moment, at its worst, could lead to more racism, more misogynist violence, more poisoning of our food and water, greater concentration of wealth and power. But the other opportunity does lie in front of us. I think that we’re seeing uprisings for systemic change.
In Buffalo, New York, people were given a chance to vote for somebody who was really different: India Walton. They voted for her in the Democratic primary, and she’s now poised to become the next mayor. An out socialist, single mom of three, nurse, former head of a community land trust. Somebody I’ve had on my show.
This was a great validation of the theory of change being possible. But again, people have to know that it’s possible in order to fight for it, no matter what they want.
Q: Anything else you want to add?
Flanders: We live in an era with a lot of shiny-object new media initiatives, and some of them are great and some of them are flash in the pan. The importance of work like yours at The Progressive, maintaining core parts of our independent media ecosystem, can’t be overstated. At any one of a million moments in my career, I could have just found myself entirely alone, entirely under-resourced, and felt pretty despairing.
But I was part of this ecosystem of independent media that has people in it like you, who are lifers and who maintain the framework for so many of us to come up into this field and into this work. You keep the doors open, the lights on, a place for people to come, and a way for new up-and-coming aspiring journalists to find their way. I hope that we’re doing the same with The Laura Flanders Show, but I’m a huge admirer and a huge appreciator of your work.