…and if you bend over to the oligarchs, CEOs, POTUS scum, then you might as well be permanently crippled, dragging your ass and your notepad to the city or county or state hearing deaf blind dumb
May 15, 2026
Surprisingly, this piece on World Press Freedom Day (a goddamned day?!@#?) ran in the local rag, now a weekly. The editor just continues to run my stuff, and I do get a few accolades, but again, “Why the hell don’t you just leave us alone . . . . Just leave this country you despise so much . . . .Don’t you have anything positive to write about?”
And, interestingly, there is a large population of college-educated folk in Newport and environs, andf an affirmed LGBTQA community. And a larger-than-national ratio of Jews living here. Or at least that’s what some of the demographics point to. Why do I point that out? Well, I’ve written about how I have been cancelled from teaching, how I have been cancelled recently to give a talk on media literacy, and how the city hired me contingently and then rescinded that offer.
I have a stinking feeling it’s because I just don’t need no stinkin’ badge, or no stinkin’ star of destruction and death and starvation, that religious symbol on all those tanks and missiles and guns.
Here is today’s commentary in the Newport News Times by Haeder.
Nary a word in the local news organs, or on local Facebook pages about our May 3 World Press Freedom Day.
Neil Postman was correct saying we are not in a 1984 scenario “yet,” but rather in this Brave New World era where people – leaders, controllers, the average citizen – are controlled through a heightened overload of irrelevant information as well as through pleasure.
In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that the image-focused culture via TV and now social media truly erodes our capacity for rational, literate thought. No need to have Big Brother controlling us through pain and forbidden information when we seemingly are sliding into apathy.
[Neil Postman – Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another—slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.]
Trump returned to office and kicked up his heels, insulting and attacking the press on a daily basis. His penchant for lawyering up and suing media outlets speaks to his – and other powerbrokers’ – fear of truth.
Restricting press freedom is an act that figuratively has the founding members of this republic turning in their graves.
Thomas Jefferson strongly advocated for “a free press” as a cornerstone of democracy, most famously writing to Edward Carrington in 1787 that he would prefer “newspapers without government” to “government without newspapers”.
Against this backdrop, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its 2026 World Press Freedom Index on April 30.
This scoring puts 180 countries and territories on a scale indicating their level of press freedom. The Index evaluates five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and safety.
Not surprisingly, the United States has declined in each of these indicators and steadily fallen on the Index over the past decade, dropping in rank from 49th in 2015 to 57th in 2025.
- Truth is under siege as journalism faces political attacks, collapsing business models, and widespread distrust.
- How investigative journalism exposes systemic failures, even as powerful actors increasingly deny or distort inconvenient facts.
- The rising influence of corporate interests in academia, particularly in economics, where conflicts of interest run deep.
- The dangerous erosion of content moderation on social media platforms, accelerating the spread of misinformation under the banner of free speech.
- Why both journalists and academics must stay the course, even as accountability weakens and truth grows harder to defend.
Trump is an inarticulate narcissist, but he’s not the sole reason for this country’s chronically ill and abused journalism. With both parties holding power in Washington, this steady decline points to structural deficiencies.
I might be shooting the messenger, but media ownership has become increasingly consolidated among a few media moguls, as well as local rags owned on a smaller scale of consolidation. The fallout is that millions of Americans, especially in rural and low-income areas, now live in “news deserts.”
Congress has failed to enact Press freedom protections, such as the PRESS Act, while local and state governments have chipped away at press freedom.
Violence against journalists has risen to absurdly high levels, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker. And in the last decade, eight journalists in the US were killed for their journalism or while working.
The Committee to Protect Journalists report at least 260–274 journalists have been killed in Gaza, Lebanon, and surrounding areas due to Israeli actions.
Trump’s team of thugs has limited journalists’ access to government buildings and initiated huge cuts in public media funding. Trump is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism.
Trump promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his term, but the totality of his anti-press campaign signals that the self-proclaimed “Peace President” is sinking to the depths of authoritarian regimes. His war on press freedom affects all five indicators RSF measures to compile the Index: political, legal, economic, sociocultural, and safety.
But there is Big Brother seeping through the old man’s veins as Trump issued an executive order “ending federal censorship,” effectively eliminating government monitoring of misinformation and disinformation. That was day one of his illegitimate start of his second administration.
His administration has scrubbed thousands of US government pages that hosted information ranging from police violence, sacrifice zones (poor areas where pollution prevails), and climate science.
Vital resources for journalists and the public alike have been memory-holed.
“Memory-holing” refers to deliberate destruction, suppression, or erasure of information, records, making them vanish from public knowledge, often for political or personal convenience. Originating from George Orwell’s 1949 book, 1984, the holes are chutes used to incinerate documents.
This is all bizarre, for me, a journalist since age 17 in Southern Arizona and along the Mexican border now witnessing the disappearance of digital, historical, or media content.
Memory-holed or locked up, Trump’s Regime is on a rampage, as journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort have been arrested and threatened with criminal charges while doing their work.
Take this journalist’s recent report on Democracy Now as emblematic of another aspect of degraded news in the USA. Here, Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News:
“Well, you know, what I’ve been reporting over the past several weeks is that far from being in disarray, as Trump and his allies in the media have portrayed the Iranian government, it’s the Trump administration that is in a state of total chaos, erratic meltdowns, that culminated with Trump claiming that JD Vance was on an airplane en route to Islamabad to meet the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, then saying that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and special envoy Steve Witkoff, well, they’re actually on the airplane. And they were claiming, ‘Oh, the Iranians are begging us to talk, and we’re going to go and meet them in Islamabad when Foreign Minister Araghchi is there.’ The Iranians were telling me, ‘We have no intention of meeting any Americans,’ and that Iran is on its own tour now of Pakistan, Oman and Russia, where Araghchi met with President Vladimir Putin, and ‘We’re establishing our own terms for ending the war.’”
“And so, what we’ve seen here is the construction of a total propaganda narrative, that is being repeated by almost every Western news organization, that somehow there are these negotiations going on, that the Iranians are putting proposals in front of the Americans. That’s not what’s happening at all.”
This is a one-two punch dangerous time for journalists and pathetic lapdog corporate media sell-out editors and journalists. A sad time for real journalists is this Lede: The Corporate Media Is Head Over Heels for the Iran War.
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran may be surreal, unjustified, and illegal. But that’s not stopping the press from turning the propaganda dial way up. Bats in the Collective Press Belfry, I repeat.
Paul Haeder, Author 