Breaking the Sound Barrier by Amy Goodman

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.

CBS 60 Minutes Censorship Rings Another Alarm, Warning of Corporate Media’s Threat to Democracy

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This week, we learned another lesson about how corporate media consolidation corrupts democracy. A story on President Donald Trump’s mass deportation of shackled Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison was to air on CBS’s flagship news magazine, “60 Minutes.” The segment was spiked by CBS’ newly-installed Editor-in Chief Bari Weiss. This censorship exposes a web of conflicts of interest, and demonstrates, yet again, that democracy depends on a strong, independent media that is a true fourth estate, not “for the state.” CECOT, or “Terrorism Confinement Center,” is a prison in El Salvador built in 2022 as part of President Nayib Bukele’s alleged crackdown on gang violence. Bukele, who calls himself “the coolest dictator in the world,” is an authoritarian, using mass imprisonment and torture at CECOT as one tool to exert control. Trump, who loves strongmen who praise him, is a great admirer of Bukele. The Trump administration agreed to pay El Salvador close to $5 million to imprison people deported from the US. As early as March, prisoners were secretly flown to CECOT by the Department of Homeland Security, in violation of a federal court order. Among them was the illegally deported Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and at least 252 Venezuelan men. Many of the Venezuelans were ultimately sent back to their home country in exchange for the Venezuelan government’s release of ten US prisoners. Much of what we know about CECOT comes from the eyewitness testimony of these men, and from evidence gathered by human rights researchers. The spiked “60 Minutes” piece had already been sent to Canada, where it runs weekly, and aired there as scheduled. A recording quickly became available online and went viral. It opens with correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi: “It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed from the U.S. back to Venezuela. But instead, they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras and delivered to CECOT, the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell. Did you think you were going to die there?” Luis Muñoz Pinto: “We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.” So why did Bari Weiss kill the story? She reportedly claimed the story needed more voices from the Trump administration, yet Alfonsi and her colleagues had already requested comment from the White House, the State Department and Homeland Security. In an internal email, Alfonsi wrote, “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient.” Recall, Trump sued CBS over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, which he claimed was selectively edited to help her campaign. While legal experts say CBS would have easily won that case, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was hoping to be bought by Skydance Media, owned by the son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison. So Paramount settled with Trump for $15 million. The merger was then approved by the Trump administration. Shortly thereafter, the Ellisons bought Bari Weiss’ rightwing news website for $150 million, then installed her as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. Larry Ellison and his son David now want to add to their media empire, attempting to acquire Warner Brothers/Discovery in a hostile takeover. Warner Brothers/Discovery, which owns HBO and CNN among other media properties, rebuffed the Ellisons’ bid in favor of a competing offer from Netflix (that bid does not include HBO or CNN). Neither merger is in the public interest, as fewer and fewer media giants gobble up more and more, restricting consumer choice and the power of creators – writers, actors, directors, etc. – to demand fair treatment. Trump has said he intends to intervene, and could wield the government’s regulatory authority – corruptly – to favor one buyer over the other. So, both Netflix and the Ellisons’ Paramount/Skydance have an interest in currying favor with Trump. And therein lies the reason why CBS, owned by Paramount/Skydance, spiked an important “60 Minutes” story of the US deporting innocent men to a foreign black site, to be tortured. “One of the first tenets of ethics in journalism is to seek truth and report it,” Alexa Koenig of the Human Rights Center at University of California, Berkeley, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. She was interviewed by “60 Minutes” about the center’s research on torture and other abuses at CECOT. “This is a big moment for American politics, for getting facts and truth out to the public about what has been done in their name, what is being done with taxpayer dollars.” News organizations cannot function under corrupt corporate control, answering to billionaire bosses and politicians. When that happens, democracy dies, and dictators rise. We need, and the public must demand, a truly independent media.

For Some Brown University Students, This Was Their Second School Shooting

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan On Saturday afternoon, December 13th, a gunman entered a Brown University classroom in Providence, Rhode Island, and started firing. He killed two students and injured nine, then escaped. By Thursday night, authorities had located the body of the shooter in New Hampshire, dead by apparent suicide. According to the Gun Violence Archive, this was the 389th mass shooting in the United States in 2025. At least four more have occurred since. Gun violence is not unique to this country, but its sheer magnitude and frequency here is without equal. The gun industry and its gun lobby have created a 50-state free fire zone, a killing field in the very country where, 250 years ago, its founders declared “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to be inalienable rights. Those rights have been forever stripped from Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, the two students killed in the attack. Of the nine injured, six remain hospitalized, one in critical condition. Mass shootings, especially at schools, have become so common in the US that we now have a growing population of people who have survived not one but two of them. We interviewed two such survivors on the Democracy Now! news hour after the Brown shooting. “Because I’ve already processed all the grief and the sadness before — I’ve been grappling with that for the past seven years — my most predominant emotion right now is, honestly, anger,” Brown sophomore Zoe Weissman said. She was at the Westglades Middle School in Parkland, Florida, which abuts the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where, on Valentines Day, 2018, a former student arrived with an AR-15-style assault rifle and killed 17 people, mostly students, injuring 18. Zoe continued, “If politicians actually want to show they care about their constituents and want to be reelected, they need to show a concerted effort to pass gun violence prevention legislation on a federal level. If they don’t, we’ll make sure to vote them out, because we are the only country where this happens.” Mia Tretta is a junior at Brown. She was shot by a fellow student with a handgun at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, on Nov. 14, 2019. He killed her best friend and one other student and injured two more before taking his own life. “I came to Brown as someone who was shot in the stomach at 15 years old,” Mia said on Democracy Now! “When something as horrific and terrifying as a school shooting happens to you, you want to find as much sense of safety as possible, because, at least for me, my entire innocence, my childhood was taken from me by someone I didn’t even know. A big reason I chose Brown was because of the safety I felt on campus, the community I felt, the fact that Rhode Island is a blue state that values gun laws.” Since surviving the shooting in high school, Mia has become a tireless gun control advocate. In 2022, at the age of 18, she spoke at the White House: “Ghost guns are untraceable…as a student, I don’t just have to worry about Spanish tests, but about my life. School shootings with ghost guns are on the rise. The most lasting thing I’ve learned, other than the loss of friends or the shattering of my youth, is that nothing has relieved the pain in my heart like working to prevent more senseless shootings.” Like Mia, Zoe Weissman promises action: “We are a very politically active group of students…I think that you’re really going to see a large concerted effort, once we get back on campus in mid- to late-January, from students. I think I can speak for all of us that we’re angry and we’re ready to do something, not just on the state level, but on a federal one, as well.” The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear what has been described as a “pile up” of 2nd amendment cases, including one challenging an Illinois ban on AR-15 assault rifles, the mass shooters’ weapon of choice. Other cases involve whether certain classes of people can have their gun rights restricted, like those with felony convictions, habitually addicted people, or those under the age of 21. If history is a guide, the court’s 6-3 rightwing majority is likely to reject any form of gun control as unconstitutional. So it will take grassroots action to contain this uniquely American scourge of mass gun violence. “America is the only country that takes gun violence as this fact of life, and it makes no sense,” 21-year-old Mia Tretta said. “There’s no world where walking down the street and being scared, or sitting in a classroom and getting shot and killed, is normal. This doesn’t have to happen.”

From Rosa Parks to National Parks: Trump's Racism and Bigotry Demand Resistance

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan This month marks the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her courageous act triggered the historic Montgomery bus boycott, launched the career of a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., and changed the world. Remarkable events like the boycott have long been celebrated in this country as seminal moments achieved through struggle, woven into the fabric of our collective civic life. President Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers are on a campaign to erase this history, tearing down monuments to hard-won progress and whitewashing American history to conform to their white Christian nationalist agenda. Take the recent changes to the National Park Service’s fee-free days, when the park admission fees are waived. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth have been stripped from the list of fee-free days, and Donald Trump’s birthday has been added. Gone are the only two days that celebrate Black history, which is in fact American history. Other examples are Trump’s restoration of Confederate monuments, torn down in the wake of the 2020 police murder of George Floyd and the racial justice protests that followed, and his reversal of the renaming of military bases formerly named after Confederate officers. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared, “No more woke bullshit.” Trump’s discrimination and erasure aren’t limited to race; within weeks of taking office, the National Park Service removed the “T” from “LGBT” on its Stonewall National Monument website. The pivotal Stonewall uprising, credited with launching the modern gay rights movement, was prominently led by transgender activists. It occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village around the Stonewall Inn, an LGBTQ+ bar attacked by New York City police on June 28, 1969. In recent years, Trump has been inciting virulent transphobia in his campaign to harness hate for political power. Juneteenth, June 19th, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union Army ordered the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas. Juneteenth is considered the longest continually celebrated African American holiday, and it is the newest federal holiday. The effort to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a holiday was itself won only after a decades-long struggle. It was first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1986, while many states resisted. South Carolina was the last to adopt it, in 2020. To this day, Alabama and Mississippi officially mark the holiday as the joint birthday of both King and Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Purging MLK Day and Juneteenth from the National Park Service’s fee-free days is not trivial. It signals official, government-sactioned and enforced racism and bigotry, originating in the Oval Office and radiating throughout the government, the media, and our society at large. As Professor Jeanne Theoharis writes in her book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” she did not sit down on that bus because she was a tired seamstress. Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. She had received training in nonviolent resistance at the renowned Highlander Center in Tennessee, where people like King and folk singer and activist Pete Seeger spent time, working to build movements for racial and economic justice. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first, either. Earlier that year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was also arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her seat. Decades later, she recalled her decision, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, “I could not move, because history had me glued to the seat…because it felt like Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on another shoulder, and I could not move.” History matters. History motivates. Donald Trump knows this, and is attempting to purge the history of progressive struggle, waged by communities of color and other marginalized groups. Meanwhile, key advances that took decades, even centuries to achieve, are being rapidly undone. The US Supreme Court is unabashedly advancing the MAGA agenda, most recently approving a racially-gerrymandered Congressional map for Texas that clearly violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Neither the Constitution nor legal precedent will stand in the way of the Court’s rightwing majority as they rubber stamp one noxious Trump priority after another. “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King criticized not merely “the hateful words and actions of the bad people but…the appalling silence of the good people.” Authoritarianism is on the rise, here at home and abroad, fueled by demagogues like Trump. There is no option but to resist.

Secretary-on-the-Defensive Pete Hegseth's Dept. of War (Crimes)

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat following U.S. missile strikes on September 2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the operation called a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s order to “kill everybody.” These actions, along with at least 20 additional lethal boat strikes that followed, are widely considered by legal and military experts to be war crimes. President Donald Trump has declared, without proof, that these targeted people are narcotics traffickers and thus “terrorists” with whom the U.S. is at war. “This entire operation, from the outset, is illegal,” David Cole, Georgetown University law professor, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is not legal to engage in premeditated targeting of people because you believe they’re engaged in criminal activity. … They’re now actually targeting survivors of these strikes, people who pose no threat whatsoever to the United States, are seeking to hang on for dear life, and the military is targeting them and killing them in cold blood.” The Intercept’s Nick Turse first reported the killing of the survivors, a week after the attack happened. In that report, Turse wrote: “A high-ranking Pentagon official … said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year.” Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends on September 3, boasting of the boat strike: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.” The Washington Post’s report provoked bipartisan concern in Congress and investigations into the strikes as potential war crimes. On Sunday, Trump responded to a reporter’s question on the strike, saying, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.” Hegseth got the message, apparently, stating in a December 2 cabinet meeting, seated next to Trump, “I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around.” The decision to kill the survivors, he said, came from the operation’s commanding officer, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. In Trump’s Air Force One comments, he added detail to his boat strike policy that bears mention: “Just look at the numbers … each boat, on average, is responsible for the death of 25,000 Americans.” As with every aspect of this murderous policy, Trump offered no evidence to back up his math. We know next to nothing about these boats, whether they are engaged in criminal activity, are fishing boats, or something else. Dominican Republic officials reported that one ton, or 1,000 kilograms, of cocaine was recovered from the wreckage of one of the boats the U.S. bombed. That amount, if accurate, highlights the hypocrisy of Trump’s policies. He just granted a pardon to a convicted cocaine trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras. He had spent just over a year of his 46-year sentence in a U.S. prison. In 2024, Hernandez was found guilty of flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine. That’s enough to fill over 400 of the alleged “narco-trafficker” boats Trump and Hegseth have been blowing up. Thus, using Trump’s math, Hernandez’s prolific cocaine smuggling would have killed over 10 million Americans. So why pardon the convicted felon? Trump announced the pardon days before Honduras’ national elections. Just before releasing Hernández on Monday, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, the presidential candidate from Hernández’s right-wing party, hoping to gain another Trump-allied Latin American leader. By Thursday, the centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla was leading Asfura with 80% of the votes counted. Trump, seeing his preferred candidate losing, claimed fraud. Meanwhile, the largest U.S. military buildup in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban missile crisis is underway in the Caribbean, as Trump escalates U.S. threats against Venezuela. He has again invoked the pretext of narco-trafficking, claiming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs a cocaine cartel, offering a $50 million dollar reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. Trump recently pledged that strikes on Venezuelan land would begin “very soon.” In response, a bipartisan group of senators including Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia and Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky have put forth Senate Joint Resolution 98, barring U.S. military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization. Meanwhile, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina has filed a complaint against the U.S. with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging the U.S. illegally killed him in his boat on September 15. “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth bragged on December 2. Hopefully, a war crimes inquiry against Hegseth will be beginning soon as well.