{"id":225991,"date":"2026-09-29T17:56:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T17:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/publishers-commentary-on-world-news-day-why-our-feminist-media-platform-exists-minnesota-womens-press\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T17:56:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T17:56:26","slug":"publishers-commentary-on-world-news-day-why-our-feminist-media-platform-exists-minnesota-womens-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/publishers-commentary-on-world-news-day-why-our-feminist-media-platform-exists-minnesota-womens-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Publisher\u2019s Commentary on World News Day: Why Our Feminist Media Platform Exists – Minnesota Women's Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t-Advertisement- \t
 
\"\"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<\/a>, 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 \u201cthe 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. \u2026 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.\u201d
Branko Brkic<\/a>, from the former Yugoslavia, said he has watched communities and entire countries \u201close their grip on truth \u2026 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.\u201d
He writes that World News Day exists \u201cso 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electricity, it is fundamental to our existence and yet nobody thinks about it until it isn\u2019t there, or it\u2019s been replaced by something that looks like news but isn\u2019t.\u201d
Brkic writes that a \u201csociety that fights for truth can still find its way back. \u2026 A world that stops knowing will never be free \u2014 just easier to fool.\u201d
Fernando Belzunce<\/a> writes that tech companies have warped what media was in the past \u2014 platforms that decided what was relevant, provided context, cross-checked facts, and helped inform public conversation.
In today\u2019s consumption mindset, however, relevance has given way to what is viral and \u201cexplanation competes with reaction. \u2026 Platforms are not designed to distinguish true from false, but to maximize attention and interaction\u201d based on \u201cemotion, simplification, and conflict.\u201d Algorithms reward the most appealing content, \u201cregardless of whether it is false, misleading, or deliberately manipulated.\u201d
It is no wonder that today\u2019s debates are polarized and the leaders of the political current are \u201cborn or sustained in the heat of interpreting opinion trends and the emotional states of the populations they govern. Misinformation \u2026 constitutes an architecture designed to influence, confuse, and erode societies.\u201d
Meera Selva
In an essay that celebrates the form of journalism that Minnesota Women’s Press centers, Meera Selva<\/a> writes about \u201cthe storytellers \u2026 who sit and listen to the grieving and try to understand those who are furious.\u201d These are journalists who \u201cturn people deluged with information into informed citizens, able to advocate for themselves and to push for change. \u2026 Who allow the voiceless to have a voice and help people tell the story of their lives.\u201d
Selva adds: \u201cAnyone 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.\u201d
A recent press freedom forum titled Speak Up for Justice<\/a> 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 \u2014 opinion-based, rather than fact-based. Gretchen Carlson <\/a> 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.\u201d
Minnesota Women’s Press was founded<\/a> 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 \u2014 as reporters and story sources \u2014 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<\/a> 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 \u2014 not simply on Epstein islands, but in places like the Cornell fraternity houses<\/a> \u2014 we would reduce the continuously high rates of gender-based violence.
For example, we hear \u2014 treated like gossip \u2014 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 \u2014 which happened collectively to several news outlets a few days after the forum \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 and make possible \u2014 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\u2019s Commentary: “A Work in Progress” Documentary by Robert Reich<\/a>