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Today is World News Day, which coincides with the United Nations International Day for Universal Access to Information. More than a thousand newsrooms from more than 100 countries are today pointing out the value of a free press, including Minnesota Women’s Press.
Natalia Antelava
Commentators on behalf of World News Day include Natalia Antelava, whose father was a journalist in the Soviet Union. She writes that in the U.S., overt censorship might not be as apparent as it was for her father, but “the institutions capable of assembling the larger picture are becoming more vulnerable to power. … Most newsrooms cover school-board fights, elections, technology, food prices, wars and trade routes as separate stories. … But illuminating every dot is not the same as drawing the map. If the dots never connect, a press can remain busy, prolific and technically free, and still tell us nothing about how power really works.”
Branko Brkic, from the former Yugoslavia, said he has watched communities and entire countries “lose their grip on truth … when the shared facts that held our society together for 40 years came apart, piece by piece, until people could no longer agree on what our country stood for, on its basic values, and finally, what was actually happening.”
He writes that World News Day exists “so we can strongly express our belief that reliable information is the infrastructure of our modern, information-based society. Like water or electricity, it is fundamental to our existence and yet nobody thinks about it until it isn’t there, or it’s been replaced by something that looks like news but isn’t.”
Brkic writes that a “society that fights for truth can still find its way back. … A world that stops knowing will never be free — just easier to fool.”
Fernando Belzunce writes that tech companies have warped what media was in the past — platforms that decided what was relevant, provided context, cross-checked facts, and helped inform public conversation.
In today’s consumption mindset, however, relevance has given way to what is viral and “explanation competes with reaction. … Platforms are not designed to distinguish true from false, but to maximize attention and interaction” based on “emotion, simplification, and conflict.” Algorithms reward the most appealing content, “regardless of whether it is false, misleading, or deliberately manipulated.”
It is no wonder that today’s debates are polarized and the leaders of the political current are “born or sustained in the heat of interpreting opinion trends and the emotional states of the populations they govern. Misinformation … constitutes an architecture designed to influence, confuse, and erode societies.”
Meera Selva
In an essay that celebrates the form of journalism that Minnesota Women’s Press centers, Meera Selva writes about “the storytellers … who sit and listen to the grieving and try to understand those who are furious.” These are journalists who “turn people deluged with information into informed citizens, able to advocate for themselves and to push for change. … Who allow the voiceless to have a voice and help people tell the story of their lives.”
Selva adds: “Anyone who wants to sow confusion and misery takes away information, silences those who ask questions, and denies people the right to know about the world around them. There is an easy way to fight back. Read the news, tell your story, be informed. Be heard.”
A recent press freedom forum titled Speak Up for Justice focused on the first amendment under pressure. Mary McCord, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said that assaults on press freedom to share truth includes: FBI investigations of journalists for reporting that the administration disapproves of; the pressure to cancel shows featuring people the president does not like; and the withholding of press passes based on, for example, whether or not a media organization is willing to call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.”
Gretchen Carlson
As in so many other industries, the concentration of ownership in a few wealthy hands also means that the news can be fed to groups of people in certain ways — opinion-based, rather than fact-based. Gretchen Carlson said at the forum that this leads to “more and more people only wanting to watch what they want to hear. … The news information that people are receiving is nothing that they don’t want to hear, and so that division just grows more and more.”
Minnesota Women’s Press was founded in 1985 by Mollie Hoben and Glenda Martin because women’s voices were rarely heard in the media. Men were at the podium, covering the stories, anchoring the news desks, deciding what and who was important to talk about.
Today, we see more women involved in journalism — as reporters and story sources — but male editors and publishers still dominate as gatekeepers of what is considered important. As we have shared, a story about domestic violence is more likely to be front-page news if police officers are shot, rather than unpacking the pervasive reality of abusive behavior that compels attention to preventative solutions.
I strongly believe that if media stories were more focused on calling out publicly the bullying and terroristic behavior of particular men — not simply on Epstein islands, but in places like the Cornell fraternity houses — we would reduce the continuously high rates of gender-based violence.
For example, we hear — treated like gossip — how the President of today’s United States berates female journalists in particular. Yet we don’t hear, Carlson pointed out at the Speak Up for Justice forum, that reporters push back collectively if a female journalist is targeted. Why not ask the same question that the woman asked, again and again, until the power broker is forced to respond differently?
If journalists are afraid of losing access — which happened collectively to several news outlets a few days after the forum — the ability to overpower continues. As Carlson said: “What is the message, then, to the public? The message is that misogyny lives. The message to our young men is that you can treat women like that. The message is there are no penalties if you treat women like that.”
In our never-ending quest to find funding for our form of journalism, I recently rounded up some of the stories we have done on another ongoing lack: quality pay and support for caregivers, from children to elders. Here is a snapshot from Collective Health, one of the core ongoing series about needs and solutions that our future MN Press Changemakers Alliance consumer-owned media co-op intends to focus on:
Next up for us — a series of explainers about election issue facts, from affordability to fraud.
Our everyday lives are shaped by political power-brokering in ways both profound and barely visible. Journalism, like the door-knocking and kitchen-table conversations that come alive during election seasons, can help make that power visible — and remind us that we have a right not only to know what is being decided in our name, but to have a voice in what comes next.
Democracy depends on that participation: on people seeing the connections between the decisions made in distant rooms and the realities of their own lives.
Journalism is one way we build those connections, and one way we begin to imagine — and make possible — a world in which every life is affordable, every voice matters, and every person has a place in the circle of care.
Help us reach our World News Day goal to increase our supporting memberships by 50 people. Please join or share today:
Publisher’s Commentary: “A Work in Progress” Documentary by Robert Reich
Three Decades Covering Gender-Based Violence
Ohio Advocacy Group Is Tracking ICE Agent Violence Against Women
Beth Bertelson Law Office
Crooners Lounge & Supper Club
Davina Baldwin at State Farm
Dental Health Care Center
Hagen’s Autobody
Heather Demetrios Fehst at Pneuma Mental Health Care
Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church
Home Sown Gardens
Joan Gilles at Encore Financial
Mary T, Inc.
MB’s Cleaning
Metre Agency
Minnehaha Falls Family Dental
Northeast Bank
Placemaker Hospitality
Revitalize Retirement Coaching
Sunrise Banks
Trio Landscaping
Turbo Tim’s
Washburn-McReavy Funeral Chapels
Women Winning
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Impact
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
Minnesota Women’s Press has been sharing the authentic voice and powerful vision of women since 1985, as one of the longest running feminist platforms (print and digital) in the U.S. Please be part of our membership-supported story development.