Saturday Media Event

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For Immediate Release                                                                                                                                                                                   Contact:  Spencer Graves  (408) 655-4567

PROTECTING OUR FREE-SPEECH RIGHTS

 Kansas City, 1/24/25 –  A townhall event to support defend free speech will be held at Simpson House, 4509 Walnut, KC MO, 6-8 pm (Central time), on Sat., Jan. 25.

The event is a response to the recent pronouncements of the Trump Administration concerning the media, censorship, and free speech.  It is both in-person and nationally available on a Zoom link from PeaceWorks at http://pwkc.org/dfs1.

The Saturday program features speakers which include: Professor Gerald Home, pre-eminent historian and host of Freedom Now! on KPFK FM; Elisa Mejia of Insurgencia Femenina; and the chair of the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru, Omali Yeshitela.

Cosponsors of this national and local gathering include Friends of Community Media, PeaceWorks KC, Pacifica Fightback, and the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru. A lead organizer of the gathering, Spencer Graves, is president of Friends of Community Media & secretary of PeaceWorks KC.

Friends of Community Media is a Kansas City group which promotes non-commercial, community-based media of all types; to educate citizens on the nature of the media; and to encourage all media to be responsive to the public in coverage.

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Ready to Eat the Press

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Article in Daily Kos by Alex Samuels, 1/23/25

Headline:  “New FCC chair eagerly carries out Trump’s war on the press”

“If President Donald Trump really “loves” the First Amendment as much as he claims to, he’s got an odd way of showing it.

“Trump and his cronies have been waging a war against the press for years now. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that members of his new administration want to help him destroy the Fourth Estate.

“On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the new chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said it would again consider three complaints levied toward ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News after a conservative group alleged the networks were biased against Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/23/2298677/-New-FCC-chair-eagerly-carries-out-Trump-s-war-on-the-press?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_2&pm_medium=web

 

Right Wing Media Questions

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Article in The Righting by Howard Polskin, 1/22/25

Headline:  “10 Questions About Right Wing Media in 2025”

“Right wing media backed the right pony in 2024. After many websites and pundits flirted with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2023, almost all outlets planted themselves behind Donald Trump and against the aging Joe Biden who became a right wing media punchline and punching bag. On the surface, all seems well in MAGA media world today. But there are questions large and small that could reshape the conservative landscape for years to come. Some questions may seem crazy, but in a world where Matt Gaetz was nominated as the country’s Attorney General, anything is possible.

https://therighting.com/original/10-questions-about-right-wing-media-in-2025/

News Needs Watering

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Article in Poynter by Mark Caro, 1/23/25

Headline:  “In America’s news deserts, Meta’s retreat from fact-checking severs a last link to fact-based news”

Subhead:  “Meta’s policy reversal and increase in political content could mean more misinformation for communities lacking local news”

“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook is eliminating fact-checking may amount to a double whammy for people living in this country’s ever-expanding news deserts.

“Having lost their primary local news sources, these communities often turn to social media and other alternatives to try to stay informed. Now one of those key sources is removing safeguards against the spread of misinformation.

“It’s absolutely correct that it’s in areas that are underserved by professional journalism that this move will have the harshest impact,” said Lucas Graves, author of the 2016 book ‘Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism.’ ”

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2025/effect-facebook-fact-checking-partnership-news-deserts/

Who Gets to Censor News?

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Article in The Contrarian by Nina Jankowicz, 1/23/25

Headline:  “Making Censorship Real Again”

Subhead:  “The Trump administration is capitalizing on a false conspiracy of censorship to usher in the real kind”

“On Inauguration Day, amidst a flurry of executive orders adorned with loopy Sharpie signatures, Donald Trump restored free speech in America. Or so he claimed.

“If you hadn’t noticed free speech had been abolished, don’t beat yourself up. Like several other executive actions, the order that aspires to ‘end federal censorship’ is based on a conspiracy theory. Despite its flimsy pretext, it could usher in an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen.

Fox News mainstreamed the narrative that conservatives were being unfairly censored by social media companies in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss. The lies gained steam across right-wing media and on the same social media sites apparently doing all this censoring—and by 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the conspiracy-minded inmates were running the asylum.

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/making-censorship-real-again

Townhall on The Media Saturday

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Join us Saturday, 1/25


The event is at Simpson House, 4509 Walnut, KC MO and on-line over Zoom

Stop the Non-Profit Killer Bill & Protect Non-Commercial Community Media!

January 25, 2025, 4-6 PM Pacific / 6-8 Central / 7-9 Eastern

Co-sponsored by Friends of Community Media, Pacifica Fightback, PeaceWorks KC

Register now in person, or on Zoom at:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/VE-Hxs0kRw6qZrmBMs3TuA

After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email with information on joining the meeting.

ACCESSIBILITY: A-I captioning in English or A-I translation of your choice is available.

Tik Tok Media Clock Not Ticking Now

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Article in Mother Jones by Anna Merlan, 1/20/25

Headline:  “As TikTok Negotiates with Trump, Every Major Social Media Company Has Caved to the New President”

Subhead:  “Online life has “been taken over by the right wing,” warns Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”


“. . . Over the weekend, Tik Tok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. ‘As a result of President Trump’s efforts,’ it read, in part, ‘ Tik Tok is back in the U.S.’ The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump. . .”

“Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. . .”

“. . . A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. . .”

“All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. ‘What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,’ Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/social-media-donald-trump/

Conservative Media Under Water?

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Article in Mediaite by Isaac Schorr, 1/21/26

Headline:  “Can Conservative Media Survive Trump’s Presidency?”

“. . .“Journalists exist to seek the truth, to tell people’s stories, to lift up voices that may not be heard otherwise, to shine a light on injustice and to hold the powerful accountable,” declared Acosta during a monologue. “We are not the enemy of the people. We are the defenders of the people. Walter Cronkite once said, ‘freedom of the press is not just important to democracy. It is democracy.’”

“. . . Right-wing publications and TV — supplemented now by podcasts, and Substacks, and social media addicts — rose out of the recognition that mainstream media was left-wing media. The groupthink was bad when National Review announced itself in 1955, worse when Fox News came on the block in 1996, and is downright intolerable now; a 2023 Syracuse University study found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. In such an environment, conservative truth-seeking is an imperative, not a luxury, not just for the GOP’s political prospects, but for the health of the country.

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/can-conservative-media-survive-trumps-presidency/

Fair-Weather Media

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Article in The Nation by Wen Stepenson, 1/21/25

Headline:  “In Our New Climate Reality, There Is No Getting Back to Normal”

Subhead:  “The media is failing to warn us about the scale of the disasters that lie ahead. In Los Angeles, as everywhere, we need more than liberal technocratic tweaks”

” ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt.… We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.’ ”

So begins the latest “State of the Climate Report” by an international group of 14 leading climate scientists from the United States, Europe, Australia, China, and Brazil, declaring in no uncertain terms that we have entered what’s coming to be known as the Age of Consequences. . .”

You might think the harrowing scenes of Los Angeles burning would elicit a similar reckoning in our national conversation, but almost nothing resembling those stark, factual, and, yes, alarming sentences will be found in the pages of our august organs of elite opinion. Rather than such clear language about our global emergency—the all-important context in which LA’s situation must be understood—the mainstream response has largely sought to contain the wildfire narrative within an Overton window of acceptable, i.e., unalarming, discourse. Much of the media is treating LA’s tragedy as extraordinary, yes, and somehow related to climate change, but ultimately manageable and preventable—if only smarter state and local policies and protocols are implemented.

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-reality-fires-los-angeles/
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Right Wing Media Like Pardons

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Article in Media Matters by Lis Power & Gideon Taffe, 1/21/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media gloss over Trump’s pardons for violent January 6 rioters”

“Right-wing media have been quick to obscure the facts about President Donald Trump’s pardon of January 6 rioters, suggesting that he pardoned only nonviolent offenders and ignoring the pardons that went to violent offenders who assaulted police and carried weapons.

“The list of people pardoned by Trump includes at least one person who was charged with seditious conspiracy and hundreds more who were “convicted of assaulting police, carrying firearms, destroying property or otherwise contributing to the violent rampage.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/right-wing-media-gloss-over-trumps-pardons-violent-january-6-rioters