Spectacular Female Alternative Journalists, Emerging Leaders In The Field

I’ve got a list:

    •    Rania Khalek
    •    Abby Martin
    •    Krystal Ball
    •    Caitlin Johnstone
    •    Whitney Webb
    •    Naomi Klein
    •    Anya Parampil
    •    Medea Benjamin
    •    Naomi Karavani
    •    Natalie McGill
    •    Kim Iversen
    •    Katie Halper
    •    Jane Mayer
    •    Cathy O’Neil
    •    Laura Flanders

You may think you know what my list is a list of– but I, myself, am not sure that I have yet figured out exactly what my list represents or even who, exactly, should be on it.  You can help me.

It is correct to observe that my list is all women.  We can describe everyone going on my list as a journalist.  I started formulating my list as a few significant individuals caught my eye. I grew my list beginning with a core of several women who I realized were getting my attention repeatedly . . journalists I was realized I was regularly wanting to check in with frequently, because I wanted to hear their latest thoughts and perspective on things.  And so I was noticing. . .

Those who should be on my list are doing amazing, spectacular work.  So who should be on it?           
There should be nothing unexpected about women being great journalists.  I am male.  I’d like to think that I don’t have any bias or preconceptions against women achieving greatness as journalists.  I hope not.  I come from an extended family in which there were many women with
notable achievements as journalists, writers and people who were otherwise very involved in publishing and editing.  I am not going to mention any of the members of my family here, because this rumination about “my list” and who should be on it is about women who are distinguishing themselves for accomplishing a different category of things.  This article certainly isn’t about what women from my family have achieved . .  .  Plus, frankly, by the criteria I am zeroing in to qualify those to be on this list, I don’t think my family members would measure up to some high standards I think are involved here, whatever the other illustrious achievements the women in my family have as  journalists.

The women I am thinking should be on my list should all be there because they insightfully and adroitly challenge the official narratives offered by the powerful.  Thus, it's probably redundant to say that those getting on this list should all probably also wind up being described as journalists from the alternative media.  Alternative media is now more important than ever.  Although we may have the illusion of many outlets for information throughout our culture, when the behind-the-scenes ownership of these outlets is considered those outlets shrink down to outlets outputting product for just a few similarly-minded monpolistic corporate media conglomerates.

But being an “alternative media journalist” should not, alone, be enough to get included in this list.

What I like about the journalists that got me started in trying to compile this list, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin, Krystal Ball, Caitlin Johnstone, Whitney Webb, is the kind of swipe-away-the-cobwebs, cut-through-the-crap sense of clarity I experience when exposed to their work.  I think this comes from their having a clear world view, anchored by well-informed, reference points that prevents drift when confronted by narrative fictions.  They are able to decisively dispense with and dispose of propaganda.

It is likely that media literacy and the ability to offer trenchant commentary on mainstream corporate media (i.e., like Krystal Ball, Rania Khalek, Caitlin Johnstone) when making sense of the news and what needs to be reported, will accompany other talents that get journalists on this list–  But it needn’t be de rigueur that such media literacy talent is ostentatiously displayed; it’s enough, I think, for these journalists to be able to keep their bearings in terms of knowing where to find real and/or more reliable information and what nonsense or fluff to discount or to reject out of hand.  That makes some of these journalists (e.g. Whitney Webb) remarkable researchers. 

There are female journalists who would likely want to be on this elevated list, but are not going to get on it.

I suspect that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now would want to be put on it.  Running “Democracy Now” Amy Goodman is running an important news organization that seeks support advertising itself as “independent news.”   I recommend its weekday broadcasts, particularly for keeping up with headlines.  Once upon a time, I probably would have put Amy Goodman on the list as well. Ms. Goodman would have been a candidate earlier, when Democracy Now was first being incubated out of Pacifica’s WBAI radio station in New York (Laura Flanders and Katie Halper also have connection with WBAI and shows that are broadcast on Pacifica and WBAI like Democracy Now).  Early on, Amy Goodman would probably have been on the list for things like the WBAI 2000 Election Day radio interview where she famously reeled in Bill Clinton to defend his record when Clinton called her show to get out votes for the candidates, or when Ms. Goodman was risking her life and was nearly killed reporting in 1991 on the massacre of  pro-independence demonstrators in East Timor by the occupying Indonesian government.

Nevertheless, Democracy Now is now a big organization that stays too much within the rails of its own acceptable narratives, limiting its awareness and what it is willing to challenge.  Even if it ranges more broadly than the conglomerate-owned networks to challenge U.S. wars, the limits of what DN is willing to discern have given it a sort of gatekeeper function.  That means Democracy Now can even be a conduit for official propaganda.  As Aaron Maté noted on April 10th, and actually took it upon himself to write Amy Goodman about, there was a very sad irony when, right before an interview with Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now continued “to Manufacture Consent in its Syria coverage” with a headline about a new `report' by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) about Syria that, as Maté noted, ignored (as Democracy Now has been doing for months) the OPCW whistleblowers who were pointing out how the OPCW was falsifying the basis for its reports. . . I fervently hope and expect that anybody making it on to the list I am endeavoring to compile would never let that kind of thing go by.

Clearly, if the list I am compiling were open to including men, there would be journalists like Aaron Maté, to add to it.  Max Blumenthal would probably be on it for his work at the Grayzone.  He just  married fellow Grayzoner Anya Parampil as the month of March was ushering in quarantines leading Caitlin Johnstone to quip that “Their babies are each gonna have their own Bellingcat narrative managers assigned to them at birth.” (If you are not following, Bellingcat is an organization devoted to pushing out twisted propaganda narratives to discredit the kind of journalists you would find on this list while posing as “internet sleuths” devoted to discovering the truth.)

If someone is going to mention Rachel Maddow (because she is female and may herself have the temerity to say she is a journalist), you are not understanding what the aspirations are here with respect to this list. Maddow may be bright, capable and she is recognizably very well paid ($7 million a year) to be a sell-out, but she is an example of the exact opposite who should be on the list;* she is involved in the kind of propaganda-spewing brain-shut-downs that people who should be on the list would be on the list for countering.  Being well-known or well paid as a female journalist, the way that Barbara Walters (who went to Sarah Lawrence like me) was, is not the ticket to get on this list.  It's not that easy.

(* We won’t go back to try to assess Maddow’s earlier Air America days.)

I haven’t concluded who exactly should, or should not, be on this list. I am keeping an open mind. I invite you to make you own additions and subtractions and to feel free to make modifications to criteria as well.   Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK has written articles and books; she gives talks and appears on news programs like Democracy Now, but she might be thought of more as an activist because she takes action.  (CODEPINK also has a program on WBAI radio and its sister Pacifica station, WPFW.)  Nevertheless, I think that most of the journalists on this list are at the activist end of the spectrum.  I think that, while they believe that journalism involves an obligation to be truthful, that they do not believe they should maintain false pretenses about their neutrality when they see what they see.

Naomi Klein has, at this point, integrated into the mainstream perhaps more than anyone on this list.  She has no problem getting onto Democracy Now where she appears quite regularly, and she sometimes makes it onto MSNBC, CNN, things like the Colbert Report, etc. Nevertheless, her videos like on “Coronavirus Capitalism” are much like Rania Khalek’s Soapbox videos the way that they deflate and counter official narratives.  All of Klein's work generally succeeds in this manner.

Jane Mayer is similarly accepted in the mainstream.  She is still published in the increasingly right-wing New Yorker and she is widely interviewed, but Mayer’s well researched investigative work also tears the veil off the workings of the interrelated political and U.S. economic systems.

When I began compiling my list, I tried taking a few of the names of some of the most obvious candidates for the list and Google them together.  (I was hoping to find the names of more candidates that way.)  I was surprised when nothing came up.  Maybe now, with the publication of this list, that won’t be the case.

If you are interested in what these women are doing, I’ve hyperlinked their names to their Twitter feeds, which tends to be one of the easiest ways to find out about them.  The ratings for Krystal Ball’s “Rising” program, begun on HillTV in 2018 and available through YouTube, are skyrocketing.  Whitney Webb wound up on many people’s radar screen garnering attention with her connect-the-dots series of articles about Jeffrey Epstein, most of those articles written before his announced death.  Abby Martin has a new documentary out about the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.  Katie Halper is doing a new podcast and YouTube broadcast with Matt Taibbi . . Oh, wait- That’s transitioning us back into the subject of male journalists doing this kind of work.– Didn’t mean to do that.