Editor's Note: Last June, we published the first part of an essay analyzing both the historic and modern harms caused by Atlanta legacy paper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Here, we have published the second part of that essay, which has been updated for timeliness.
On January 26, 2026, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Atlanta's most prominent legacy daily newspaper, published an opinion article penned by Republican House representative Earl L. "Buddy" Carter titled, "We need more ICE presence in Georgia." It was published shortly after the murder of Keith Porter by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles on December 31, 2025, and the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026. The opinion article ran one day before the brutal execution of Alex Pretti by ICE in Minneapolis.
Atlanta communities had already begun reporting increased ICE presence since mid-January. Citizens have reported sightings of black window-tinted SUVs with "ICE" decals on Ted Turner Drive, federal agents staging at local shopping centers, and a new satellite office for ICE in South Atlanta. This highlights how Carter's article is emblematic of the racist, sensationalist opinion publishing in the AJC that has long been a bipartisan tool for manufacturing consent for an expanded police state. I covered this long history in part one of this analysis, which connected the paper's pro-Cop City publishing to the historic harms caused by the AJC's predecessors, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, that directly incited the historic 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre. Since the construction of Cop City in Atlanta, at least 77 other similar facilities have reportedly been approved and/or are being built across the U.S. This indicates a deadly trend implicating The Atlanta Way's influence in carceral infrastructures that far exceed the city's limits.
In his article, Carter is given the space to perpetuate fear-mongering and Nixon-era "tough on crime" rhetoric, while weaving the big lie that more policing keeps people safe, despite the overwhelming evidence that the issue isn't police training, budgets, or personnel, but policing itself.
Beyond Carter's rhetoric, the paper allowing an author to cite the Department of Homeland Security's "Worst of the Worst" database as credible evidence to support their sensational claims is perhaps the most egregious part of the coverage. It validated DHS, ignoring its role as an arm of the fascist state apparatus that has circulated numerous lies to the public, including labeling Pretti and Good as "domestic terrorists" to justify their murders.
Carter opened his article by naming six individuals who were "convicted of crimes before being arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Atlanta," as the basis of his call for ICE and DHS to "send more resources to metro Atlanta to get these criminals off our streets for good." Carter then proceeded to blame the current state of affairs on former President Joe Biden's "soft-on-crime, open-border policies," despite the fact that the effort to expand ICE and increase deportations has been a bipartisan effort since the agency's founding in 2003—and the Biden administration's record-high deportation numbers.
Reading this article gave me flashbacks to the previously cited editorial published by the AJC in a critical moment during the Stop Cop City movement in August 2021, when the editorial board urged the Atlanta City Council to push the deal for Cop City through in order to address the "crime wave" in Atlanta. The board published the claim, despite statistics showing the city's crime rates had decreased between 2016 and 2021.
This is the kind of reporting Mainline exists to push back against. Running primarily on a grassroots subscription funding model, Mainline strives to be the news outlet that confronts the city's establishment rather than becoming part of the establishment itself or perpetuating its patterns.
From the Atlanta Race Massacre to Cop City: The AJC Incites Harm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long legacy of circulating pro-police and corporate talking points, which, in the past, have directly led to violent police or mob killings in the city.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the media molds the public's perception of issues, and that this type of manipulation can lead to state terror. In addition to the AJC's role in inciting the 1906 Race Massacre, their widespread demonization of the Stop Cop City movement justified the state murder of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrol in January 2023. Tortugita, the 61 RICO defendants, and others have all been labeled "domestic terrorists" in an effort to make the case for the training facility and an expanded police force—false claims by the state that have been regurgitated in the AJC without challenge.
As the South anticipates increased ICE and DHS presence, and regional cities including Atlanta, Houston, and Miami prepare to host the World Cup this summer, Scalawag returns to the question of, "Will Atlanta protect immigrants and refugees from the Trump administration?"—a question Scalawag editors and contributors have considered since the first Trump administration's Muslim travel ban and other anti-immigrant policymaking.
While Atlanta is fortunate that its biggest daily paper hasn't been bought by a hedge fund, like 50 percent of local newsrooms in the U.S., the AJC has solidified its role in the establishment and cozied with corporate leaders, favoring the state's wealthiest districts, politicians, and the police. The paper's role in ensuring the construction of Cop City—whether through manufacturing consent for the deadly facility, fearmongering editorials, sensationalized and racist coverage, producing excessive amounts of copaganda, or platforming racist policymakers—is a prime modern example of the robustly interwoven relationships between legacy media, corporations, police, police foundations, and politicians and how they function to realize material and systemic repression.
As funding support for movement media continues to wane—at potentially the worst possible time as the Trump authoritarian regime continues to successfully consolidate its power and control even more media than it ever has—it is imperative that the people take back control of independent media sources and help sustain them, rather than continuing to pay to sustain harmful media entities. In this continued analysis of the AJC's cycles of harm specifically, I consider these patterns in more detail along with what it might take to break away from harmful media cycles that pose deadly consequences to our communities.
BREAKING CYCLES OF HARM: MEDIA REPARATIONS BEYOND THE AJC
Atlanta's journalism scene has hosted a number of alternative outlets to the AJC, many of which have shuttered. The AJC and its parent company, Cox Enterprises, have contributed to the demise of alt-weekly papers by eclipsing the competitive market with weekly editions that cut into the ad revenue of other local papers. In addition to this direct competition, Cox Media has used its exorbitant wealth to buy up local affiliates to dominate the market. Beloved alt-weekly Creative Loafing is now unrecognizable after massive lay-offs, new ownership, and dwindling circulation numbers, while Atlanta Gazette and Black newspaper the Atlanta Enquirer have folded.
The journalism crisis and local journalism collapse in Atlanta, defined by shuttered newsrooms replaced by outlets promoting profit-driven fluff pieces over robust investigative journalism, has had devastating impacts. This can only be expected to worsen without substantial, sustainable investment in independent journalism, particularly from "progressive" funders. Progressive funders must shift their investment priorities from the issue-specific political campaigns they have historically supported to nurturing a robust media ecosystem, with sustainable operational infrastructure. Low-income communities of color receive little to no resources or airtime from newsrooms, with paywalls and subscription structures now further marginalizing them with regard to accessing information essential for community building.
During election cycles in particular, municipal elections tend to be rooted in the false narrative that more police will unequivocally make people safe, while the material conditions continue to unravel, widening Atlanta's record racial wealth inequality gap. In fact, the Center for Civic Innovation reported last March that Atlanta's fiscal year budget for 2025 was expected to be $20 million over, citing Cop City as one of the primary factors for the overspending. The remedy? To cut up to 10 percent of budgets across other departments, including infrastructure and social services. Meanwhile, Mayor Andre Dickens ran for office during last year's election cycle completely unopposed.
And like we've seen throughout previous cycles, the news outlets with robust resources fail to ask candidates appropriately challenging questions regarding their proposed policymaking, focusing instead on candidate profiles that sensationalize crime and normalize genocide. Coverage of the local 2021 elections was marked by reporters being systematically instructed to cover the "increase in crime," rather than address false claims from police or politicians. Resources will continue to be allocated to covering local "crime" issues rather than white supremacist movements taking form across the state. Progressive and radical candidates are ostracized from media coverage, which directly impacts their fundraising efforts. (For example, the first Black trans woman mayoral candidate in Atlanta, Brittney Geter, went completely uncovered, except in Mainline in 2021.) In such a press climate, voters are left grasping at straws for reliable and true information to help them effectively use their votes to address their community's needs.
This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City
The struggle today around Cop City is the result of a decades-long fight over who Atlanta belongs to, who is run for, and who it stands against. Making sense of it requires understanding the city's history of shifting dynamics of class and racial domination.
In that critical summer of 2021, our small team worked to combat the barrage of mis- and disinformation and police propaganda that was spun by the AJC, the police foundation, and politicians ahead of the September city council vote. With minimal funding and no full-time staffers, our best efforts were not enough to overcome it; however, we were the only news source at that time that provided deep dive reporting and environmental-focused reports about the land deal, detailing potential public health and safety impacts development will have on local residents. Mainline coverage served as the index for a report in The Intercept, which garnered national attention to the issue. Although I was shunned by a majority of council members in my investigative work, we were able to reveal important documents leading up to council's vote, including internal memos from the Atlanta Police Foundation to council members and official documents showing the city's efforts to keep the Cop City deal as private as possible.
Our reporting at the time was the only accurate depiction of the realities of and the overwhelming opposition to the facility, while other outlets turned, and continue to, look the other way. Today, our struggle continues materially, as we persist in covering the unprecedented RICO indictment against 61 protesters. While a Fulton County judge dropped racketeering charges last year, the domestic terrorism charges against five individuals linger, and the Georgia Attorney General has now appealed the judge's decision, indicating they don't plan to let up on their bogus indictment. We've also continued our investigation of the facility, and now, the deadly exchange between the Israeli military and Cop City efforts in the so-called U.S. All these efforts, and more, at Mainline are attempted on an annual average operating budget of less than $50,000. We have also shifted our mission to provide guerrilla-style journalism and media trainings for aspiring reporters and community organizers across the U.S., breaking barriers to journalism education while it is largely being wiped away from higher education systems, with many colleges and universities removing traditional journalism majors from their rosters.
While our independent journalism has demonstrated immense value to Atlanta residents, particularly among the working class, its value has yet to be matched monetarily with the means that can properly sustain it. Without proper investment, work like ours will cease to have any opportunity to make a dent in the continuing cycles of corporatized, status quo news coverage, such as the AJC's dominating Atlanta.
We've seen this play out in Atlanta acutely in the years preceding the Trump administration's second term. Now, as we quickly descend into the throes of fascism, more premonitions of Atlanta's "Stop Cop City" movement builders are coming to fruition: Political dissent has been flippantly labeled as terrorism, now prompting mass unconstitutional deportations and ICE kidnappings; more public executions of citizens by ICE agents; climate change disasters are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration; police budgets are ballooning, eclipsing basic needs of society; unchecked politicians are consolidating their power exponentially; and more. While journalism can function absent a strong democracy—and can even make more of a profit while doing so—the events leading up to Cop City's passage in Atlanta shows that democratic processes can not exist without real, independent journalism.
Will we finally be willing to hold papers like the AJC accountable and do what it takes to save what's left of the city's independent media ecosystem?