I first came to know the work of Project Censored during my time in community radio. We would regularly invite speakers from this now forty-eight-year-old nonprofit media watchdog to address issues that were unreported or underreported by the mainstream media. I first met Mischa Geracoulis more recently when she contacted us at The Progressive in 2023 about another project. Later, when I learned that she had joined the team at Project Censored, and that they were putting new effort into the area of helping to develop critical media literacy, I knew this was a perfect match for coverage of what may be one of the most critical issues of this election year, and perhaps of our lifetimes.
Media literacy is not just about how you read the news—it is about how we form ideas, opinions, and alliances.
In the early years of our country, we had many newspapers with many opinions. The very names often indicated their particular slant: the Arkansas Democrat from Little Rock, the Jacksonville Republican of Northeast Alabama, and, of course, The Progressive of Madison, Wisconsin. But today the postal subsidies begun by Benjamin Franklin are long gone; advertising revenue has evaporated due to online marketplaces; and the power of Google, Facebook, and other Internet giants to control the ad sales universe. Social media has replaced daily news with echo chambers and disinformation. In the past two decades, a third of all newspapers have shuttered their doors, leaving more than 57 percent of all newspaper journalists searching for employment or landing at new digital platforms like Substack.
The model has to be changed, it can no longer be repaired, we cannot go back.
In addition to the news we’ve lost through mergers and closures, much of the information that remains is often untrue, or unrepresentative of the reality that most people are living. Infotainment, the (uncritiqued) lives of the wealthy and powerful, and faux-reality shows on television have become the rule rather than the exception. Now more than ever we need the skills and the tools to dissect and discern the flood of information that reaches us daily through our phones, tablets, and laptops.
My years in community radio taught me that a newsroom functions best when you have a bunch of different people, with different interests and different backgrounds, working together to produce news coverage. Many voices and a diversity of opinions creates a patchwork quilt where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Smaller newsrooms limit the range of inputs that enrich the news produced. And, as a recent study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has shown, there are huge sections of the country (more than half of all counties in the United States) that are now news deserts, having “either no local news source or only one remaining outlet, typically a weekly newspaper.”
When we conceived of this special issue on media literacy, it was apparent that Donald Trump, known for his disdain for independent media and critical voices, would be the likely Republican nominee for the presidency—underscoring the need for crucial action to address this important topic. Since we started planning and developing the content you see here, there have been more layoffs and closures at media outlets, artificial intelligence has begun to be used in campaign ads (by both parties), and revelations of how misinformed voters appear to be on the candidates they support have been surprising and frightening.
Calls for fostering a more informed electorate have come for years, but today they may well be more urgent.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his legendary study Democracy in America first published in 1835, notes, “The influence of the liberty of the press does not affect political opinions alone, but it extends to all the opinions of men, and it modifies customs as well as laws.” In November 1920, Robert M. La Follette wrote in his magazine, La Follette’s (today called The Progressive), “It is vital in a democracy that the voter should be able to form an intelligent opinion . . . The very life of democracy is committed to the voter. If he be ignorant or misinformed upon vital issues his ballot is a source of peril to the righteous decision of any issue.” But as La Follette pointed out, our media does not in reality serve that role.
What happened? And perhaps more importantly, what can we do to fix it?
Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman pointed out, in their classic book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, “[T]he democratic postulate is that the media are independent and committed to discovering and reporting the truth, and that they do not merely reflect the world as powerful groups wish it to be perceived . . . [However,] the standard view of how the system works is at serious odds with reality.”
Media scholar and activist Robert W, McChesney, in the 2000 introduction to the paperback edition of his book Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times writes,“I would go so far as to say that media reform is not an issue that is best cast along left-right lines. It is better thought of as elementary to democracy . . . . a democracy cannot exist without a press system that provides a rigorous accounting of people in power and the presentation of a wide range of informed opinions on the important issues of the day and age. Without such a media system, the promise of democracy becomes very hollow very quickly.”
This view is shared and amplified by Project Censored on their website: “An informed public is crucial to democracy in at least two basic ways. First, without access to relevant news and opinion, people cannot fully participate in government. Second, without media literacy, people cannot evaluate for themselves the quality or significance of the news they receive. Project Censored’s work highlights the important links among a free press, media literacy, and democratic self-government.”
In their 2017 guide to the most censored stories of the previous year, the staff writes, “Among the best ways the Project believes it is possible to promote democracy in action is through critical media literacy education, perhaps the strongest means for fighting against censorship and propaganda in their numerous guises while supporting a truly independent and free press.”
In this issue of The Progressive, created through a collaboration with our friends and colleagues at Project Censored, we hope we have provided you with some of the tools and some of the analysis to confront media illiteracy and help bring it to bay. These articles, stories, book reviews, and more are meant to be seen not as an end, but as a beginning as we all try to build a better, more informed democracy—especially in this most critical of election years.