Breaking the Sound Barrier

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan We’ve been writing this weekly column for close to 20 years. This one will be our last syndicated by King Features. We have aspired to stay true to this column’s original intent, to “break the sound barrier,” highlighting voices excluded from the corporate media, covering the movements that drive change, and holding to account those in power, regardless of political party. One goal, in addition to serving our readers and the newspapers that have long carried the column, has been to inspire other journalists to pick up our stories. We call this trickle-up journalism, centering grassroots struggles that are too often marginalized in our civic discourse. While we leave this particular platform of weekly syndication, our work continues, as demanded by the tenor of these times. Democracy Now!, the TV/radio/internet news hour we produce each weekday, turns 30 years old in February. Carried on over 1,500 stations around the globe, and with a growing audience of millions across multiple digital platforms, the program has become a leader in the burgeoning non-profit news space, as we collectively grapple with a multipronged crisis in journalism. In November, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism released its 2025 State of Local News Report. Using data compiled over 20 years, Medill reports that, since 2005, close to 3,500 newspapers have ceased printing. In the same period, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs, 75% of the total, have disappeared, with fewer than 100,000 remaining. As the role of print journalism changes, many people, and especially young people, turn to the digital realm for news. The Pew Research Center recently reported that “38% of those ages 18 to 29…get news from news influencers,” that is, not reporters, but people who have large followings on social media. Content there is notoriously unvetted, subject to increasingly sophisticated “artificial intelligence” or AI fabrications and distortions, and favored for distribution by black-box algorithms unleashed on the planet by a small circle of immensely powerful corporations like Google, Facebook, and Elon Musk’s X. The climate for journalists is eroding as well. President Donald Trump regularly denounces the press as the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s violent rhetoric has real-world consequences, as his followers verbally abuse, harass, and even physically assault reporters. When asked by ABC’s Rachel Scott about releasing footage of the Pentagon’s lethal September 2nd double-tap strike on a boat in the Caribbean, Trump replied: “You’re the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place — actually a terrible reporter.” Trump recently called CBS’s Nancy Cordes “stupid,” Katie Rogers from The New York Times “ugly,” and when Catherine Lucey of Bloomberg News asked him about releasing the Epstein files, Trump told her, “Quiet, piggy.” Attacks on women journalists were a focus of the United Nations on November 2nd, International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, noting, “73 percent of the women journalists surveyed said they had been threatened, intimidated and insulted online in connection with their work.” The Committee to Project Journalists counted 126 journalists and media workers killed in 2025, an enormous toll. Gaza remains the most dangerous place for journalists, with Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian reporters reaching unprecedented levels – well over 200 since October, 2023. Mexico, Sudan, and Yemen have also been lethal for journalists. Despite this grim picture, there are signs of hope. Medill counted “close to 700 stand-alone digital sites, more than 850 network-operated digital sites, more than 650 ethnic and foreign language organizations,” journalistic entities springing up to fill the voids left as traditional business models that supported journalism for centuries, collapse. As we mark Democracy Now!’s 30th anniversary, we’ll be traveling across the United States, touring with a remarkable new documentary about Democracy Now!, named after one of our news hour’s mottos, “Steal This Story, Please!” directed by the Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. We’ll be holding fundraisers for public television and radio stations as they reel from the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of federal funding, and reporting on how people are organizing in their own communities. Democracy Now! started at the Pacifica radio network, founded in 1949 to provide an alternative to the increasingly commercialized media landscape, that, as the late George Gerbner of the Annenberg School of Communication once said, “have nothing to tell and everything to sell that are raising our children today.” We really do think that those who care about war and peace, those who care about racial, economic and social justice, about LGBTQ+ issues, and about the climate catastrophe, are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media. It’s our job to go to where the silence is, to be the exception to the rulers.