"…the work people set out to accomplish is vulnerable to becoming mission impossible under the […] structural prohibitions that situate grassroots groups […] in the shadow of the shadow state." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in the shadow of the shadow state
"Decolonization […] cannot be accomplished by a wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a gentleman's agreement." Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of The Earth
"[The] major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. […] In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience." Kwame Ture
"…all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda […]. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent." W.E.B DuBois, Criteria of Negro Art
"A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace. [They have] to be. [They have] to make you ask yourself, make you realize that you are always asking yourself, questions that you don't know how to face." James Baldwin
"Most radicalism that counters institutionalized poverty, hate crimes, and postcolonial imperialism cannot be pretty or expressed in the niceties of civility..." Joy James, Resisting State Violence
A few months ago, Scalawag experienced one of the most glaring examples of media repression we've ever encountered. One of our then-funders claimed that our newsletter published on October 7, 2025—wherein we commemorated the lives of Palestinians lost since October 7, 2023—crossed a line. Specifically, this funder claimed that by hyperlinking to a source from the Hamas Media Office, which functions as the core communication arm for Gaza's Hamas-run government, we not only "condone[d] but actually celebrate[d]" violence and therefore no longer appeared to share their vision or values. On that basis, the funder concluded that continuing to support Scalawag would conflict with its stated commitment to "dignity for all people," and opted to rescind our remaining grant funding for 2026. This funder was Scalawag's oldest, having supported us recurrently since 2018. They had already approved our 2026 funding—scheduled to be released in January—before pulling the grant just three months prior, leaving an immediate hole in our budget. That decision has had direct material consequences for us, but it also reveals something much larger about the conditions under which independent journalism is being expected to operate.
The charge itself requires a willful flattening and misunderstanding of journalism and its core mission. Reporting, contextualizing, and analyzing political violence requires engaging with sources and narratives that might be uncomfortable for some. Since Hamas is recognized as the governing body of Gaza, even from a viewpoint of "objectivity"—which Scalawag vehemently condemns—citing Hamas is no different than citing any other government. Despite it often being invoked as such, "objectivity" isn't some neutral position; it's a white, Western frame presented as universal while overdetermining what's considered knowledge and what must be rendered incoherent in order to maintain the world social order. The expectation embedded in the accusation from this funder is that any engagement with Palestinian political reality must be confined to a narrow script, one that strips away context and refuses to examine the conditions that shape resistance and repression alike—and one that is approved first, only, and always by the state apparatus. When that expectation is enforced through the withdrawal of funding, it functions as a lashing at the whipping post, as a reminder that there are topics that can be covered only within tightly controlled boundaries. Those boundaries shape what is considered acceptable discourse, which limits the scope of what can be examined and understood. And there are consequences for those who refuse to stay within those boundaries.
Over the past several years, legacy newsrooms across the United States have faced escalating pressure around coverage of Palestine and other "politically charged" subjects. Journalists at legacy media outlets have been disciplined and punished after expressing views that are antithetical to those of the institutions they work for. At the Associated Press, a journalist was fired in 2021 after past social media posts expressing solidarity with Palestinians resurfaced amid a doxxing campaign. At CNN, staff have shared that there is an internal policy that states every journalist reporting on Israel and Palestine must first submit their stories to the media company's Jerusalem office for review. (CNN also reported that all journalists in Israel are subject to the Israel Defense Forces' censors.) At the Los Angeles Times, 38 journalists were banned from covering Gaza for at least three months due to their signing an open letter demanding Western media to cover the genocide with more integrity. (The Los Angeles Times claimed it was against their ethics policy.) At the New York Times, reporters are not allowed to use the words "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," or "occupied territory." In fact, they were even instructed to not use the word "Palestine" in "datelines, routine text, or headlines" except in "very rare cases."
Independent outlets and nonprofits are not insulated from this pressure. In many ways, we are more vulnerable. In 2025, 18 Million Rising, a nonprofit that organizes Asian Americans, lost $250,000 for an Instagram post they made in defense of Palestine. Across the United States, at least four abortion funds have lost funding due to their support of Palestine, including Access Reproductive Care-Southeast (ARC-Southeast), the largest abortion fund in the South. It has been reported that philanthropists have pulled over $8 million from pro-Palestine nonprofits. And according to coverage from Prism, several more nonprofits are feeling the weight of funding loss amid the ongoing genocide. Without the backing of large corporate structures, nonprofits and independent media rely heavily on philanthropy, partnerships, sponsorships, and reader support. That reliance creates openings for influence—influence that, however unfounded, controls how "radical" many publications are "allowed" to be. "Progressive" funders often describe their role as supportive rather than directive, yet moments like these make clear how conditional and limited support and progressivism actually are. The stakes of this censorship are even higher under a federal government actively targeting radical nonprofits for their politics and services provided to marginalized and oppressed communities. A newsroom's survival can and often does hinge on whether its analysis aligns with the political comfort of those writing the checks.
The antagonism I'm exploring here is indivisible from the funding landscape that cohered in the wake of 2020. Following the 2020 uprisings after the police and vigilante murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks, philanthropic corporations and foundations pledged millions of dollars to black-led nonprofits and organizations. For a brief period, there was an appearance of expansion and inclusion—newsrooms scaled up, grassroots organizations were able to serve a greater number of people, and scarcity became less of an issue. Or at least that's how it felt.
But that influx was less of a distribution of power and more of a temporary adjustment made necessary by rupture. Antiblackness is structured such that capital is able to reorganize itself in the face of confusion—not as an undoing of the conditions which create it, but to ensure its continuity by placating the masses. In other words, the "investment in black life" was a stabilizing force whose purpose was to absorb the threat of black insurgency back into the structures the insurgency sought to unsettle. Those resources were always tethered to a condition of counterinsurgency. And as that moment has receded, so too has the illusion (and delusion) that it marked any kind of structural shift. The organizations, nonprofits, and newsrooms that expanded to fulfill the demand of that moment are now on decline under renewed constraint—contingent on proximity to palatable narratives for the sake of survival.
The suppression of pro-Palestine press alongside the decreased funding for media and progressive causes is especially clarifying given the scale of resources being dedicated to supporting the Zionist entity and, by extension, its genocide. As demonstrated by a report from Good Shepherd Collective's The Call, billions of dollars circulate through nonprofits to sustain U.S.-Israeli relations and interests, often routed through the same philanthropy institutions that fund "progressive" work. This overlap is intended to help set the terms and the limits for what can be funded, and thus what can be written.
The nonprofits that exist to challenge power are frequently resourced within the same structure upholding that power, and that overdetermines the limitations of which critiques we can make and which we can be disciplined for. In this way, the odds aren't simply "stacked against us." A much more accurate claim is that those with the power to fund and repress overwhelmingly support the very violent structures and institutions independent media works to discredit and abolish.
What we're experiencing clarifies that there was never a departure from the world social order, but rather antiblackness governs the terms under which "radical" stories can be shared and when. What is happening to Scalawag reflects that dynamic. The decision to withdraw funding is presented as a stand for values and a defense of dignity, implying that our reporting undermines basic human decency. But this posturing ignores the reality that the very concepts of "human" and "decency" are predicated on the violent disavowal of all non-white being. Under a neoliberal purview, all violence is the same. This flattening obscures the conditions that make resistance necessary in the first place, collapsing forms of violence that are fundamentally different into one indistinguishable category. Revolutionary violence and state-sanctioned violence are asymmetrical, as the former is only made possible because of the latter. After all, it's chattel slavery that gave birth to rebellion. As James Baldwin wrote for the New York Times in 1967, "The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums…" This racialized distinction structures how resistance is perceived and whether it's legitimized or condemned. And as Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of The Earth, "decolonization is always a violent event." When journalists refuse to collapse all violence into a single category, when we insist on situating violence within the proper context under which it's produced, we are framed as violent ourselves.
But we don't flatten violence here. We are heavily influenced by the investigative journalism of Ida B. Wells, who said, "The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press." At its core, journalism collects, verifies, and presents news, information, and opinions in ways that deepen the public's political literacy and consciousness, especially in an era of increasing mis-/disinformation. Our reporting must be accurate, timely, and provide necessary context for readers to make informed decisions and hold power to account. As such, we must cover slave revolts, anti-lynching mobs, and prison breaks without defaulting to the state's position. To do otherwise would be to contribute to the state apparatus's mass efforts to propagandize and censor, or propagandize as it censors the public.
The broader political climate intensifies the pressures I've written about here by showing that these constraints are part of a wider pattern that's much bigger than media. Across the country, there has been a significant increase in legislative and structural efforts to regulate how certain topics are discussed, particularly in education and public institutions. From book bans and the continued scrutiny and defunding of academic programs, to heightened surveillance of protests and our communities, to the fascist crackdown on the journalists who cover them. The narrowing and attempted control of discourse and reporting is not siloed; it exists within a broader framework wherein the ruling class works to maintain its dominant narrative at all costs.
In this context, movement media carries a distinct responsibility. We must trace connections between local and global struggles and deliberately push the perspectives of people who are often spoken about rather than listened to from the periphery to the forefront. It's our responsibility to help shape the narratives and narrative strategies on which our movements and struggles for liberation are built. This approach is all but guaranteed to create friction with dominant narratives, especially when those narratives rely on selective storytelling.
This isn't something we're unfamiliar with. As we're tied directly to the South, Scalawag covers a region that is frequently mischaracterized or dismissed. Our reporting on incarceration, labor, the climate crisis, reproductive justice, queer and trans rights, and migration is grounded in the experiences of those directly impacted. Extending that lens to the Global South, including Palestine, follows the same logic. The backlash and punishment we're experiencing suggests that this kind of commitment is increasingly seen as a liability. The expectation is not simply that journalists avoid explicit endorsement of violence, but that we avoid engaging with frameworks that challenge dominant geopolitical offerings altogether. Even when no explicit directive is issued, the consequences for principled solidarity faced by one outlet reverberate through the industry. Executive leadership take note of what leads to funding loss or professional discipline, and many will structurally adjust their newsrooms accordingly. That adjustment has a dangerous cost.
When journalists self-censor to maintain institutional stability—and, for many of us, to maintain our livelihood—it disrupts the larger news ecosystem and makes it easier for state narratives to go unchallenged and unchecked. Over time, this becomes the standard for what audiences come to expect from the news, reinforcing the very constraints that produced it. This is the very premise of the text The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex, wherein the writers offer incisive critiques of the 501(c)(3) structure co-opting and quelling radical resistance for the sake of funding. This highlights the contradictions inherent to a capitalist structure: we must sustain the only platforms committed to telling the truth, even as the terms of that survival threaten to dilute it.
Movement journalists are asked time and time again to choose between our livelihood and being accountable to the communities we not only serve but also live within—and under fascist authority, that choice is never theoretical, it's a daily struggle over what can be said and what must be risked.
This approach may protect institutions in the short term, but it erodes the capacity of journalism to function as a space for rigorous, honest engagement.
As a response to our funding loss, the many examples of media repression outlined in this essay, and the over 300 journalists who have been murdered by Israel and other countries throughout the West since 2023, Scalawag is operating under the theme of "rePRESSion" this year as we contend with levels of press and media censorship that make it increasingly difficult and dangerous to report truth in these times.
Today, we launch our CENSORED campaign. We recognize that relying solely on traditional funding structures leaves independent media exposed and vulnerable. Our team is made up of community organizers and cultural workers, so we also recognize that building a broader base of support creates a different possibility for accountability—one that includes our readers and the communities we exist among rather than solely in a small number of institutional relationships. We believe in and are thankful for the funders who are brave enough to support the true meaning of journalism in a time where it's being actively fought against; we also believe that this grassroots, relational campaigning will signal that there is an audience willing to sustain journalism that refuses to compromise in the face of fascist terrain.
Investing in Scalawag at this moment means recognizing the aforementioned stakes extend beyond a single newsroom. It's about whether independent media can continue to operate without being reshaped to fit a tighter vision of acceptability. It's about whether journalists can engage with complex, contested issues without facing disproportionate repercussions. It's about whether the public will have access to reporting that reflects the full scope of political reality, rather than a curated subset deemed safe by those with power.
The conditions we are living under reward silence and compromise. They encourage a version of journalism that's careful to the point of omission, and it's easy to succumb to such pressures when you are not accountable to anything or anyone else. Here at Scalawag, we are committed to the communities we know rely on our South-to-South reporting. We are launching this campaign, and I am writing this story, with hopes that it will keep open the possibility of a media landscape that is more honest, more accountable, and more capable of meeting the moment—today and every day.
I also write this in memory of Refaat Alareer—a Palestinian professor, poet, and writer who contributed to Scalawag in June 2023 and was killed by Israel in December that same year—and in honor of all of our Palestinian writers we have lost contact with, whose fates remain unknown.