Andy Lee Roth
Andy Lee Roth
is the associate director of Project Censored, where he coordinates the Campus Affiliates Program. He has coedited eleven editions of the Project Censored yearbook, including State of the Free Press 2021, published by Seven Stories Press in December 2020. Roth has previously written for YES! Magazine about Eduardo Galeano’s legacy and the Baltimore Algebra Project’s revolutionary model of high school education.
Articles By This Author
Opinion
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
Should This Article Be Trusted?
Illustration by Carlos PX/Visuals/Unsplash
Where does our news come from? What’s the difference between “fact” and “opinion” in news reporting? Should this article be trusted?
After the past four dizzying years during which the president has consistently vilified the press and sought to undermine public trust in journalism answers to these fundamental questions are evidently far from elementary for many Americans.
A December 2020 Pew Research study found that many Americans have difficulty distinguishing between news sources that do their own reporting and those that simply circulate already existing stories. Fewer than 4-in-10 survey respondents knew whether Google News, Apple News, or
Since the tumultuous 2016 presidential election, politicians, pundits and pollsters alike have latched onto âfake newsâ as a hot issue. So, too, have corporate news media, which have found in this topic an endless source of content that is bothânewsworthyâ and a ratings-winning lure for audiences.
As president, Donald Trump has consistently denounced the U.S. press as âthe enemy of the peopleâ and has redefined âfake newsâ as a tool to dispatch any coverage, journalist or news outlet that does not serve his narrow self-interest. In doing so, Trump has fanned widespread distrust of journalism, as is well documented. But there has been less focus on how Trumpâs weaponizing of âfake newsâ and his attacks on the press have laid the groundwork for self-appointed guardians of news integrity, such as Snopes, PolitiFact and NewsGuard, to assume positions of immense influence and power. Like the Hungry Fox in Aesopâs fable, who prop
Project Censored has performed an invaluable service shedding light on the most significant news that s somehow
not fit to print. Censorship in an authoritarian society is obvious, from a distance, at least. There is a central agent or agency responsible for it and the lines are clearly drawn. That s not the case in America, yet some stories rarely, if ever, see the light of day, such as stories about violence against Native American women and girls, even though four out of five of them experience violence at some point in their lives, overwhelmingly at the hands of non-Native perpetrators. Anson Stevens-Bollen
On the Important Work of Project Censored
December 16, 2020
The American news landscape is changing, rapidly. Forty years ago Americans watched the same three network news programs and read the same handful of daily newspapers. Today the industry is divided along partisan lines, and media companies avoid challenging audiences with depressing or politically uncomfortable news, for fear of losing market share.
The news is now like sports or pro wrestling: a fan engagement business, heavily influenced by commercial considerations that have little to do with truth and untruth. This is the case with conservative outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, but also with traditionally liberal outlets like MSNBC and even the