Welcome to the December edition of the Free Press Update, our newsletter recapping as much of our work from the last month as we can fit into one email. Let’s get into it:

[NEW REPORT] Insatiable: Inside the Tech Industry's Quest for All Our Data

Using a smartphone. Browsing an online store. These everyday activities — and so many others — generate personal data about our identities, preferences, behaviors and more. Tech, retail, insurance and marketing companies vacuum up this data to target you for their profit.

This rampant harvesting of our personal data leads to discrimination, disclosure of sensitive information and other abuses — like excluding specific users from the same information and opportunities as others.

That’s why Free Press Action released a powerful report — Insatiable: The Tech Industry’s Quest for All Our Data — which shows just how much of our personal information tech platforms like Google and Meta have access to. You can read the full report here.

The Media Must Atone for Enabling Trump's Fascism

For far too long, media execs have played along with Donald Trump’s strongman charade, aware that his tele-presence is a boon for ratings and revenues. Now, U.S. democracy is reaping what they have sown.

At a speech delivered on Veterans Day, Trump used rhetoric nearly identical to that used by Adolf Hitler 80 years earlier. Rather than honoring veterans as one might expect of a political speech on this day, Trump used the occasion to label his adversaries “vermin” — promising that, if elected, he would use his power to “root out” all his political enemies.

Parroting Hitler should not be considered normal behavior in any U.S. election cycle. But the media have grown used to covering Trump’s extremism as if it’s standard political fare. Senior Director of Strategy and Communications Timothy Karr tackled the media’s Trump habit with the gravity it deserves in a post on the Free Press blog — read it now.

Tell Univision to Keep Disinformation and Dishonesty Out of the News

Univision, provider of news coverage to more than half of the country’s Latinx population, broadcast a friendly interview with Trump that failed to hold the serially indicted former president accountable. The interview happened after network execs met in private with the former president and Jared Kushner.

We’ve sounded the alarm before about non-English-language disinformation, and Univision’s breach of journalistic integrity is yet another warning. Will you sign our petition today urging the network to put truth over profit?

Free Press Condemns the Killing of Journalists in Gaza and Israel

As of this writing, the Committee to Protect Journalists has counted at least 63 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon since Oct. 7.

Among the nearly 16,000 fatalities in the relentless bombardment of Gaza, at least 55 are journalists who were killed by Israeli military airstrikes; four others were reportedly shot by soldiers or killed by shelling from the direction of Israel. During its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Hamas killed at least four Israeli journalists, among the 1,200 people it killed that day.

Free Press condemns the killing and targeting of journalists — more of whom, according to CPJ, were killed in the first month of this war than in any conflict in the past 30 years.

A View from the Field

Check out the latest updates from the field as Free Press and Free Press Action staffers work alongside our amazing allies and activists to create a more just and equitable media system. Below are just a few snippets from our latest View from the Field blog — you can read the entire post here!

• Earlier this year, the Media 2070 team and the Black Thought Project debuted the Black Future Newsstand exhibit in Harlem. In November, Diamond Hardiman and Venneikia Williams went to Austin to present a travel-sized version of the newsstand at the AfroTech conference. “Black Future Newsstand continues to offer space for people to share their dreams for a future media, one where Black people control their stories from ideation to distribution, a world that will exist on the other side of media reparations,” Diamond wrote in a powerful blog post.
• Nora Benavidez took part in the Open Markets Institute’s “AI & the Public Interest” event. She spoke during a panel discussion considering how monopoly control over AI threatens to exacerbate online disinformation and the destruction of news.
• Nora also took part in the panel discussion “What Threats Loom Over the 2024 U.S. Elections, and Are We Prepared to Face Them?” — a look at how elections are becoming a battleground instead of a civic activity. The event, which Ethnic Media Services hosted, explored the impacts of disinformation, threats to election officials and baseless claims of election fraud.
• Timothy Karr took part in the Saving Journalism Summit at Columbia University, where he presented a recent Free Press Action study on the California Journalism Preservation Act. The report, which S. Derek Turner and Alex Frandsen wrote, shows that the CJPA would reward large and very profitable media outlets, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and People magazine — and steer very little money to the independent media outlets that are struggling to survive.

Thank you for reading! The info here represents only a small fraction of what Free Press and Free Press Action are doing every day to fight for your rights to connect and communicate. Will you donate today to power our work forward? A generous donor is matching all gifts dollar for dollar through the end of the year, so your gift today will go twice as far.

Thank you for everything you do to help power our movement,

All of us at Free Press and Free Press Action
freepress.net

Credit for photo of journalists: Flickr user Al Jazeera English