OPINION | ‘No Kings’ Coverage Is How Independent Media Should Be Done
Several former cable hosts joined forces for weekend protests
This weekend’s massive, nationwide “No Kings” protests brought out millions of Americans to take a stand against the repressive policies and authoritarianism of Donald Trump.
With some 2,000 individual protests from coast to coast, Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations will go down in the history books as the largest protests so far in Trump’s second term.
But they also should be remembered as the day that so-called “independent media” started coming into its own.
Independent media has been a phenomenon that’s been taking off in recent months with a growing number of well-known journalists who rose to prominence working for major, corporate media have struck out on their own.
This includes the likes of ex-CNN personality Chris Cillizza, one-time Meet The Press host Chuck Todd, and the recently axed ABC News anchor Terry Moran.
These are folks who take their famous name, a Substack presence, and a YouTube channel and go into business for themselves.
The problem is, however, that as a one-man or -woman shop, they’re typically not actually digging up any actual news.
Rather they’re mostly reacting and commenting on the reporting broadcast or published by the legacy, corporate media. Watch them, and they’ll be quoting news stories often from the very organizations that once employed them.
Folks to analyze and comment on the news aren’t actually in short supply. What we need is a truly independent media to bring us stories that we aren’t getting from corporate sources.
And we saw Saturday that that is possible.
Three of the biggest names who have jumped into independent media — Jim Acosta, Don Lemon, and Joy Reid — teamed up to provide streaming coverage of the “No Kings” events. By coming together, they provided coverage of the protests that rivaled what corporate media could have done, if it had really wanted to and we’re already fixated on offering Trump’s grotesque military parade in Washington DC to their viewers on a wall-to-wall basis.
With Lemon and Reid anchoring in their studios, Acosta looked just as comfortable as in his old days at CNN out in the field reporting from the protests themselves.
And they smartly reached out to other prominent pro-democracy podcasters and analysts like Glenn Kirschner, Olivia Troye, and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan and Jennifer Welch of I’ve Had It to give their protest coverage respectable national scope and depth.
Sure, this trio might have had to contend with some sound and bandwidth issues that they probably wouldn’t have if they were still with their former employers.
But what they lacked in resources and the highest-end technology, Acosta, Lemon and Reid more than made up for in authenticity and honesty.
And in the process showed us that true independent media won’t be women and men mouthing off alone behind a microphone in their home offices or bedrooms.
Rather it will be likeminded professionals who pool resources to bring Americans news that they won’t get anywhere else.
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