By Andy Lee Roth

Editor’s Note: This Dispatch is adapted from State of the Free Press 2025, edited by Mickey Huff, Shealeigh Voitl, and Andy Lee Roth, and published on December 3, 2024, by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

The power to keep an occurrence out of the news is power over the news.

—Gaye Tuchman, Making News

News today is so abundant, so pervasive, and so easily accessible that it might seem improbable, if not impossible, that any genuinely important events or issues could remain unreported or not widely known. Confronted with an overwhelming torrent of media, it’s no wonder that few Americans think the problem with news is that we do not have enough of it.

Instead, from the launch of the twenty-four-hour news cycle in the late 1980s to the proliferation of news-focused websites and social media spurred by the development of the internet, we seem to be inundated with more and more news. In 2001, Project Censored’s founder Carl Jensen characterized this development as “news inflation,” noting “there seems to be more [news] than ever before—but it isn’t worth as much as it used to be.”

This abundance of news, now available at our fingertips thanks to mobile devices, promotes the delusion that nothing of genuine significance can ultimately escape our attention. With news media increasingly tailored to particular groups and communities, every possible interest and perspective appears to be fulfilled by one outlet or another.

Yet, as Jensen observed, the fundamental problem is not the quantity of news but its quality. Stipulating that news ought to be “nutritious” for society, informing members of the public about threats to its economic, political, and physical health, Jensen quipped, “We need more steak and less sizzle from the press.”

Identifying patterns of omission in “All the News That’s Fit to Print”

The nation’s most prominent outlets seek to convince us that their reporting is comprehensive, impartial, and definitive: “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” as the New York Times first asserted on its front page in 1897. Nevertheless, since 1976—for nearly fifty years now—college students and faculty working with Project Censored have identified, vetted, and promoted public awareness of trustworthy stories produced by independent news outlets on significant topics that have gone unnoticed or under-reported by the establishment press. This ongoing, critical investigation of “missing” news stories exposes gaps in corporate news coverage that raise basic questions about just how comprehensive, impartial, or definitive a view of the world they provide.

State of the Free Press 2025, the latest volume in the Project’s award-winning yearbook series, presents the top stories from the past year. These stories represent not only the best independent investigative journalism, but also the collective effort of 206 students from nine college and university campuses across the United States, who have developed and engaged their critical media literacy skills by identifying, vetting, and summarizing these important but under-reported independent news stories, with the aim of bringing them to wider public attention. These students are the forty-ninth cohort who have worked with their faculty mentors and Project Censored to expose and publicize what Jensen called “The News That Didn’t Make the News—and Why.”

The specific stories each stand on their own as vital dispatches on issues that deserve more extensive news coverage and broader public engagement than they have received thus far. For example, this year’s featured stories cover censorship by the world’s most popular social media platforms of information about abortion services, school hospital programs supporting students’ mental health and education, and a report that more than six thousand US workers died on the job in 2022, according to records maintained by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics—an astounding rate of one workplace death every ninety-six minutes. These are undoubtedly newsworthy issues, but for one reason or another, the corporate news media have not covered them. Without the independent news coverage highlighted here, the public would know little to nothing about these concerns.

But readers can only appreciate the full significance of the Project’s annual listing of important but underreported stories by stepping back to perceive deeper, less obvious patterns of omission in corporate news coverage. Thus examined, the Project’s annual story lists provide an evidence-based rejoinder to anyone who would doubt that US establishment news outlets produce a filtered version of who and what counts as “newsworthy.” Every year, a number of genuinely important events or issues are blocked or marginalized by the establishment press, as Project Censored has systematically documented since 1976.

When corporate news media consistently omit or underplay the types of stories highlighted in this chapter and previous years’ top story lists, that news judgment distorts the public’s comprehension of the world and, by extension, undermines one of the fundamental conditions for democracy, a well-informed and engaged electorate.

Official sources, conventional narratives, and established institutions

As sociologist Gaye Tuchman noted in a pioneering study of how news shapes our understanding of what we want to know, need to know, and should know, conventional news frames both “produce and limit meaning.” These limits, Tuchman argued, typically work to block inquiry and transform dissent.

How do they do this? By providing what Tuchman, drawing on the work of feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith, referred to as “methods of not knowing” that normalize and ultimately reproduce the existing social order. For example, Tuchman presented an extended analysis of how “successful” news coverage of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s eventually “limited its ability to carry forth radical issues.”

What Tuchman demonstrated regarding news coverage of social movements that challenge the status quo also holds true for news more generally. Even when news outlets seek to fulfill their role as watchdogs, alerting the public to abuses of power, news based on official sources and conventional narratives tends nonetheless to legitimize established institutions. Consequently, “News gives the feeling that there is novelty without change,” as another sociologist, E. Barbara Phillips, noted in 1976. That enduring pattern may explain why so many Americans today remain not only disinterested in news but also convinced that political gridlock is inevitable, corporate dominance is inescapable, and substantive reform is a pipe dream.

Independent journalism as a catalyst for change

By contrast, the stories reported by independent news outlets and highlighted by Project Censored serve as potential catalysts for change. They break the typical patterns of news coverage that Tuchman criticized. Some of these stories detail abuses of power so egregious that an informed public might well be outraged and spurred to organize and demand change. Additional stories document innovative solutions that could serve as models for change in similarly impacted communities or as inspiration for grassroots campaigns to tackle other seemingly unsolvable problems. Perhaps that is why these stories feature in the State of the Free Press yearbook—as important but under-reported news stories—rather than on the front pages of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers or the headlines of its most popular cable and television news programs.

Tuchman was right that much of what passes for news promotes “not knowing” in service of the status quo. However, an independent press committed to ethical journalism provides the public with meaningful alternatives. The intrepid journalists and news outlets whose work is celebrated in State of the Free Press 2025 demonstrate the power of independent journalism to inform the public about issues and perspectives that challenge the status quo by promoting critical inquiry, a plurality of perspectives, and informed dissent in the face of systemic injustices and deep-rooted inequalities.

Can independent journalism effectively contest the corporate media’s power to legitimize the status quo? The answer to that question hinges not only on the dogged commitment of independent journalists and news outlets to continue reporting stories that raise fundamental questions about systemic injustices and inequalities but also on whether we—the American public—harness that power to envision and enact new, more just, equitable, and inclusive futures.