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Media democracy to uphold the U.S. Constitution
By Mischa Geracoulis for Project Censored
An attack on press freedom is an attack on all constitutional rights and democratic norms accorded by the system of checks and balances.
At the start of the new year, Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 (Censored Press, November 2025) drops an unmistakable message: the United States is in constitutional crisis. Central to this crisis is the ongoing misuse and abuse of the press.
It should go without saying that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is fundamental to a checks-and-balances system of government, ensuring that journalists can report without fear what the government would prefer to conceal. The First Amendment guarantees that information can be published without censorship and that “citizens can criticize power without retribution.” And yet, tiresomely overplayed Trump-manufactured tropes—namely “the press are the enemy of the people”—erode public trust in media and reduce democratic safeguards to options rather than binding constitutional rights.
Although supercharged in the Trump 2.0 administration, the erosion of democracy’s safeguards has been underway for years (see Senko, pp. 192-197). With Trump at the helm, many of Project 2025’s promises are made manifest through the monopolized, right-wing takeover of media. Today, six conglomerates control ninety percent of U.S. media and five Trump-allied tech giants dominate the digital infrastructure, making it all too easy to silo attention and bend perception in ways that work against the public’s best interest. Consequences are most apparent at the local level. The sweep of media monopolies has left vast news deserts in its wake: one out of every three U.S. counties are now without even one full-time local journalist.
As government and corporate powers continue to consolidate, the propagandistic anti-media tropes have only escalated the manufactured distrust of media. Even though journalists have a “constitutionally protected right to publish government secrets,” the “enemy press” trope has gained bipartisan traction. On January 7, 2026 House Oversight Committee’s vote to subpoena New York Times investigative journalist, Seth Harp, for legally reporting the publicly-available name of the Delta Force commander instrumental in abducting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “The House knows full well the dangers to press freedom that subpoenaing a journalist poses,” said Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights and Dissent.
One week later, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her seized electronic devices. Law enforcement justified the raid, claiming it was in conjunction with an investigation into a government contractor accused of retaining classified government materials. Neither the Post nor Natanson had been apprised of the investigation. Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, has stated that this is typical behavior in authoritarian police states, not “democratic societies that recognize journalism’s essential role in informing the public.”
These fractures in democracy are not happening in a vacuum. Cited in a 2025 UNESCO world trends report on freedom of expression, media professionals are among those most harshly impacted by a near-worldwide disregard for diplomatic norms, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law. Trump encapsulated this trend in early January 2026 after his administration’s abduction of Maduro, informing The New York Times that he has no use for international law. Trump’s response to question of limits to his foreign interventions and “global powers” gives citizens pause for sober reflection. Only his own mind and morality, said Trump, could stop him.
International norms and laws clearly forbid the seizure of a sitting head of state—a U.N. member state at that—to impose a regime change. Likewise, international norms and laws prohibit attacks on civilians; and yet journalists, media workers, and other civilians are increasingly targeted by government regimes. Domestically, corporate media personalities and broadcasters fawn over instead of interrogate the administration’s overreach of power, disconnecting the public from knowing what’s being done in their name. On the foreign policy front, these rights are frequently neglected. And whether by international laws or international media freedom advocacy, there are no mechanisms to compel national political will to support press freedom.
However, media democracy—that is, media committed to public service, journalistic ethics, and constitutional and human rights—defines what’s at stake when a population becomes indifferent to the loss of freedoms that precipitate the loss of democracy itself. Protected by the First Amendment, it ensures that all people, not just the powerful, are duly informed. Through pluralism and independence, media democracy challenges the official storylines that legitimize corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatized information gatekeeping, and further distrust in media. Serving the public’s interest, media democracy creates conditions that encourage meaningful dialogue and civic engagement.
This is the very essence of the “Media Democracy in Action” chapter in Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press. Each year, this chapter features exemplars of media democracy in practice; and 2026 is no exception.
Full disclosure: since 2023, I’ve had the privilege of curating this chapter.
Contributions this year include essays by Jodi Rave Spotted Bear of Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance and by Lara Witt and Maya Schenwar of Movement Media Alliance—each describing media democracy in action as collective vigilance, information freedom, and accountability as a path to justice. The essay by Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, makes that clear, explaining how excessive government classification, surveillance, and data mining damage democratic society.
A democratic media system asks hard questions, investigates prevailing narratives, and exposes government and corporate secrets. Essays by journalist and Drop Site News co-founder, Ryan Grim, and journalist and Consortium News editor-in-chief, Joe Lauria, epitomize exactly that. While Drop Site News was founded in 2024 in response to ongoing disinformation campaigns, silencing of journalists, and corporate media’s uncritical coverage of government actions, Consortium News has been exposing government scandals for the last thirty years.
For 50 years, the work of Project Censored and every journalist ever featured in the State of the Free Press book series has been a testament to the power of public-interest journalism to balance the news and the system. If U.S. democracy is to endure, it’ll be thanks to a democratic media system that shines a light in dark places. The overarching theme of the yearbook series, and the Media Democracy in Action chapter in particular, is that media democracy is not a pipe dream but a prerequisite for a more humane and just future.
Mischa Geracoulis specializes in human rights journalism, press freedom, and media ethics, is the Outreach and Engagement Officer at Project Censored, and author of Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage: News Narratives about Artsakh and Gaza (Routledge, 2025).
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