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FEATURING ANDY LEE ROTH - As Netflix and Paramount make aggressive bids to buy Warner Bros, our increasingly consolidated media ecosphere, controlled by billionaires and serving their agendas, distorts, under-covers, or even censors major news stories entirely. It’s a long trend that’s getting worse, and is the reason why Project Censored, now in its 50th year, continues to publish the most censored news stories of the year. 

Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’s State of the Free Press 2026 and a coauthor of The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about some of the year's most censored stories.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, as I mentioned, we are seeing greater media consolidation. I figure, eventually, maybe in our lifetimes, there'll be one great company controlling it all, and of course that limitation of who's in charge limits the stories as well. Tell me, just for those who aren't familiar with Project Censored, what is this State of the Free Press book that comes out at the end of every year, and why is it put together? 

Andy Lee Roth: Yeah. Well, the project exists to hold the corporate media accountable when they fail to provide us the kind of news and information that we need to be informed and engaged in our communities as citizens, as global citizens. And also, to celebrate the important work of independent journalists who bring us those stories and independent news outlets who have the courage to support research on, and publish those stories. So, a kind of a cornerstone of the yearbook every year is our report on the year's most important, but under reported stories. And that's something the project has been doing for 50 years now. 

This is the 50th cohort of undergraduate students working with Project Censored at colleges and universities across the country, starting at Sonoma State University in California. Students working with their faculty mentors are identifying these important but potentially undercovered stories and then researching them to see, have they indeed been left unaddressed by corporate media, or addressed, but in partial terms in both senses of that word, partial, either incomplete or also biased?

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