The Project Censored Newsletter—January 2025

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Censored Press News

As we at Project Censored turned our calendars from 2024 to 2025 and hurtled into the new year, State of the Free Press 2025 has been receiving tremendous positive publicity.

The coeditors of State of the Free Press 2025 have been making the rounds for radio and podcast interviews featuring the new yearbook:

Meanwhile, independent newsweeklies across the country—from The Bohemian in California and The Inlander in Washington to The Cleveland Scene in Ohio, and The C-Ville Weekly in Virginia—have been featuring the Top Ten stories from State of the Free 2025. Thanks to Paul Rosenberg of Random Lengths News, who wrote the feature story these outlets and many additional independent newsweeklies are currently running.

Highbrow Magazine published How the U.S. Media Establishment Continues Its Biased Reporting of Israel’s Assault on Gaza, an excerpt from Robin Andersen’s yearbook chapter on News Abuse. Truthdig republished From ‘Satisfactory’ to ‘Problematic’: Press Freedom in the U.S. Hit an All-Time Low, an excerpt from the introduction to State of the Free Press 2025 by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff.

Also, check out the December 2024/January 2025 issue of The Progressive, which features an advertisement for the new yearbook, in addition to coverage of the historic win by striking Boeing workers and campus bans on pro-Palestine protests.

Historian Steve Paraza of Weave News wrote “Decoding The Media and Me (Book Review)” about our award-winning critical media literacy publication for young people (Censored Press/Triangle Square). Paraza examines the famous quote attributed to Philip Graham of the Washington Post, “News is the first rough draft of history,” using it to reflect on the importance of critical media literacy education for historians and journalists alike.

Project Censored in the Classroom

With the top “Censored” stories of 2023–2024 still smoking hot off the press, student researchers working on behalf of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program are already identifying the next batch of “news that didn’t make the news.” Check the Validated Independent News section on the Project Censored website for new reports on the chronic underfunding of tribal colleges despite a Congressional commitment to Indigenous higher education, how gun violence is driving enrollments in Philadelphia’s online charter schools, and a text messaging campaign targeting female law professors and students. These education-themed VINs were researched by students in Allison Butler’s upper-division Media and Education course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Attention college professors and instructors! Are you interested in promoting your students’ critical media literacy by engaging them in original research? Check out the Classroom section of the Project Censored website, where you can find our guides to frame-checking, fake news and the 2024 election, and the Project’s Validated Independent News exercise.

For faculty already planning to have students research VINs in your current courses, please remember that we have an online clearinghouse of independent news stories that we hope to have adopted and reviewed by students for Project Censored’s 2024–2025 news cycle. Check out the VINs Clearinghouse here.

Project Censored Spring Internship

Project Censored proudly announces our spring intern, Vivian Rose—a senior at Ithaca College, where she encountered the Project’s work in Mickey Huff’s Independent Media class last fall. For the past two years, Rose, who is passionate about environmental and women’s rights journalism, has worked for the college’s student-run, award-winning newspaper, The Ithacan, as a co-Life and Culture and Assistant News Editor. She will be researching Validated Independent News stories while studying abroad in London this spring. Rose was a Park Center for Independent Media intern last summer and has been selected to intern for Ms. Magazine this coming summer.

Project Censored in the World

North Central College will host a book release event for State of the Free Press 2025 from 3:30–4:30 PM on January 27. The event, hosted by the NCC Campus Store, will feature short presentations by Dr. Steve Macek, Dr. Amy Buxbaum, and several North Central College students and alumni who contributed to the yearbook.

Art as Independent Media and Community Organizing, by Eleanor Goldfield, highlights From Gaza to Gaza, a 16-piece gallery show and sale hosted by the worker co-op bookstore and cafe Red Emma’s in Baltimore, Maryland. Goldfield raised more than $3,000 for the five artists in Gaza who created the featured artworks. With a background in creative organizing events and inspired by her interview with Khalil Khalidy, an artist and orthopedic doctor in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, Goldfield worked on the art show to build awareness here at home while supporting Gazans in a small way. The show will now expand and go to Washington, DC, and hopefully elsewhere from there. If you’d be interested in having it in your area, please reach out to Eleanor, and don’t forget to tune into the Project Censored Show each week to hear the voices censored and silenced by corporate media.

Mischa Geracoulis was recently on Law and Disorder to discuss the legacy and implementation of Jimmy Carter’s human rights policies. Recorded on the national day of mourning for the 39th president, Geracoulis talked with the radio show’s hosts, attorneys Heidi Boghosian and Stephen Rohde, about Carter’s work and the Carter Center’s ongoing projects.

Dispatches on Media and Politics

Exposing Gaps in Corporate Control Over News, by Andy Lee Roth, draws on the insight of Gaye Tuchman, a pioneer in the sociology of news production, who observed, “The power to keep an occurrence out of the news is power over the news.” Roth’s Dispatch—which is adapted from his introduction to the top “Censored” stories for 2024–2025 as featured in State of the Free Press 2025—examines how the systematic omission of certain types of stories by corporate news media “distorts the public’s comprehension of the world and, by extension, undermines one of the fundamental conditions for democracy, a well-informed and engaged electorate.”

Mischa Geracoulis wrote 2025: Another ‘Unprecedented’ Year Calls for Staying the Course, kicking off the new year by pulling from the late Kurt Vonnegut, who nearly twenty years ago lamented that he was “a man without a country if not for books and an independent media that actually informed the public.” Geracoulis runs with that theme, highlighting the many censorship challenges we now face in the United States. She reminds us that the term “unprecedented” is inaccurate in many ways, as we’ve been here before, that we can learn lessons from our not too distant past, and “recommit to the freedom to speak, the freedom to know, and the free flow of information—those human rights that make all others possible.”

Twice per month, the Project’s Dispatches series offers cogent analysis of the latest media industry news, the state of the free press, and the intersection of media and politics. Find the complete Dispatches on Media and Politics series here.

The Project Censored Show

• December 16: Unplugging the News: The Fight for Local Journalism; and the State of the Free Press; Peter Byrne, interviewed by Mickey Huff; plus pre-recorded excerpts from Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2025 book release at Ithaca College, with Shealeigh Voitl, Steve Macek, and Robin Andersen.
• December 30: Digital Settler Colonialism, Gaza, and Struggle for Palestinian Liberation; with Nora Barrows-Friedman, interviewed by Eleanor Goldfield, and Omar Zahzah in conversation with Mickey Huff.
• January 6: Reporting Under Fire: Gaza, Genocide, and the Truth Behind the Headlines; Eleanor Goldfield welcomed Shrouq Aila and Matthew Hoh to the program to discuss the latest from Gaza.
• January 13: Pressing Issues for 2025: Trump 2.0, Media Failures, and the Fight for Press Freedom; with Nolan Higdon and Steve Macek, interviewed by Mickey Huff.

Follow the links for each episode to learn more about the Show’s featured guests and content. Find the comprehensive archive of Project Censored Show episodes here.