Media and Contributors in Support of Democracy
Photo by Elimende Inagella @elimendeinagella at Unsplash
At first glance, it may seem as if progressives are facing a collapse of reputable news sources. What we are seeing instead is rapid change as people who seek evidence-based journalism and opinion migrate to platforms and contributors who are not beholden to wealthy owners of traditional main stream media. Corporate media and broadcasters are typically driven for profit by clicks, viewers and listeners who are served ads, and feeds generated by computer algorithms.. Many main stream media (MSM) outlets and platforms are bending the knee to the Trump regime. This is driving people to a growing abundance of new sources. This page offers a partial list of sources with journalistic integrity. Please support them if you can with your subscription, and contact us with comments or suggestions.
Publications
The Bulwark
“The Bulwark was founded in 2019 by Sarah Longwell, Charlie Sykes, and Bill Kristol. The idea, then and now, was to tell you what we think—with honesty and good faith. To put country over party. To know that we’re all in this together. And to build a home for the politically homeless.” Its founders are conservatives, but its mission is to support democracy.
The Columbian
This is our main local paper and is politically moderate. During election season, its editors interview local and state candidates and provide thoughtful endorsements. It has not fallen prey to right wing extremism. “The Columbian was founded in 1890 and is a fourth-generation, family owned media company that is the leading source for Clark County news. We are committed to providing truthful, non-biased news to our community: an essential service for a healthy democracy.”
The Contrarian
Started in early 2025, The Contrarian was founded by Jen Rubin (formerly of the Washington Post) and Norman Eisen (former ambassador and White House counsel on ethics and anti-corruption). This Contrarian has lined up distinguished contributors. It pledges to be an alternative to corporate media and be “unflinching, unapologetic, and unwavering in its commitment to truth-telling” — and to “defend our fundamental freedoms and the values essential to a pluralistic democracy.”
The Guardian
This is a British publication that was founded in 1821 and provides robust coverage of U.S. and world news. “Guardian Media Group is a global news organisation that delivers fearless, investigative journalism - giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account. Our independent ownership structure means we are entirely free from political and commercial influence. Only our values determine the stories we choose to cover – relentlessly and courageously.” Rebecca Solnit is a visionary opinion writer and author who frequently contributes to The Guardian.
Huffpost
From its message to engage new subscribers: “America is facing the greatest challenge to our democratic experiment since the Civil War. Now is not the time to cower or capitulate, and HuffPost is doing neither. As we turn 20 this year, our mission is clearer than ever: We won't back down when it comes to providing impartial journalism.”
PBS
From its’ mission statement, and described here as a source of news: “PBS is a private, nonprofit corporation, founded in 1969, whose members are America’s public TV stations -- noncommercial, educational licensees that operate more than 330 PBS member stations and serve all 50 states, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.” “PBS is a membership organization that, in partnership with its member stations, serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain and express a diversity of perspectives. PBS empowers individuals to achieve their potential and strengthen the social, democratic, and cultural health of the U.S.” It is now largely funded by foundations and its viewer audience and is known for in-depth reporting with journalistic integrity at the PBS News Hour, Frontline and other programs.
The Seattle Times
This is a family-owned newspaper that proudly endorsed Kamala Harris for president as other media outlets had started obeying the incoming regime in advance. In addition to its staff, it features syndicated contributions from some of America’s leading journalists. From its
About section: “The Seattle Times enlightens, informs and engages with storytelling that is as dynamic and vibrant as our region. Our coverage directly impacts our local community and has changed public policy. We are steadfast in our commitment to provide principled, quality, public-service journalism and to continue to innovate to ensure the future of the local free press.”
Wired.com
WIRED is doing an excellent job of reporting on the Trump regime and Elon Musk’s involvement. From its About section: “WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design.”
Pro-Democracy media and sources recommended by members of national Indivisible
This document was posted by Indivisible in January 2025. This page offers a more extensive list than the publications you see highlighted above.
Independent Contributors
The next section lists independent writers and sites, by category of coverage. You will find many well-known journalists and experts. Some of them recently left main stream media so they could continue to write and create with integrity. Please support them if you can with a subscription.
Current Events and Advocacy
This has become a resistance site for all civil service employees contending with the Trump regime. They ask that we get their information out to the media and tell our elected officials what is going on. This is where we see posts of what it’s like to face DOGE operatives who insist on getting read/write access to federal data and posts of civil servants who have faced the chopping block describing the vital services they provided and the dream jobs that have been ripped away from them.
Jessica Craven: “Chop Wood, Carry Water”
Jess Craven writes: “When I’m not writing this newsletter I’m either working to elect great Democratic candidates, teaching my Activism 101 workshop, or making political content for social media. I have a trans teenager who’s amazing, a husband who likes woodworking, and a gray tabby named Walter. There’s also a sweet dog named Dolly.” She is a seemingly tireless advocate who is on top of all the latest developments. Through her newsletter, you can learn about many opportunities for activism and sign up for ResistBot messages that advocate for the greater good. Each Friday, she offers a long list of wins for democracy to counteract the almost universal emphasis on the fight to save our country.
Thom Hartmann: The Hartmann Report
Thom Hartmann describes himself as “NY Times bestselling author [of]* 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.” He is a long-time progressive voice, and each post and podcast provides context with extensive knowledge.
* The apparent omission probably reflects that character limit of this SubStack entry.
Robert Hubbell: “Today’s Edition”
He describes his newsletter as “a reflection on today’s news through the lens of hope." Robert Hubbell is a husband, father, grandfather, retired attorney, an amateur astronomer. His wife, Jill, is his “managing editor” and offers a podcast of her own, Every Day with Jill, which is the personal perspective of her and her husband’s activism in the context of family life. Robert Hubbell offers a fatherly voice to help subscribers steady themselves and cut through the BS perpetrated by the MAGA movement. He offers opportunities for activism in just about every newsletter and ends each post with a beautiful astronomical photograph he has personally taken to put our situation in perspective. He also frequently hosts live video events where people can interact with him.
Dan Rather is a distinguished and dedicated journalist and a former anchor of CBS News who followed the legendary news anchor, Walter Cronkite. In other words, Dan Rather’s career hearkens back to a time when most Americans could count on broadcast news as a national resource that reported the day’s events with objectivity and integrity. Well into his 90’s and still dedicated to his craft, Dan Rather describes himself as a “journalist, storyteller, and lifelong reader. A Texan, by birth and by choice.” What he doesn’t say that is implicit in his reporting is that he’s a patriot who loves this country.
Economics
Professor, CUNY Grad Center, Nobel laureate and former columnist, NY Times. In his SubStack newsletter, Paul Krugman is the same informative voice many of us have learned from at the NY Times. He’s having fun writing a newsletter without the constraints of working for a mainstream media news platform, and he has a tuxedo cat! He is generous in offering most of this column at no charge. Although new features are being added behind a paywall, you’ll still be well-informed about economic and political issues of the day. The paywall will probably offer features for those who really want to wonk out.
“Professor, writer, former Secretary of Labor, author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. Co-creator of "Inequality for All" and "Saving Capitalism." Co-founder of Inequality …” Robert Reich is a unique talent, a superb teacher and a dedicated advocate for a healthy democracy that serves the greater good. He was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration. His central focus is wealth inequality, and his 10-episode free online course entitled “Wealth and Poverty,” is a must for anyone trying to understand the economics and regulatory failures underlying how our nation wound up in its current mess.
Healthcare
Katelyn Jetelina @yourlocalepidemiologist
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina has a Masters in Public Health and PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She writes that she’s an epidemiologist, data scientist, wife, and mom to two little girls. She adds, “during the day, I wear many hats, including scientific consultant to a number of organizations, including CDC. At night, I write this newsletter. My main goal is to ‘translate’ the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions.” She was very helpful in discussing the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove the Covid pandemic and posts updates about pathogens affecting our nation and world, discussing evidence found in sources like wastewater. She is also a clear voice of reason when discussing vaccines.
This high-quality blog and podcast is the brainchild of Alan Unell and his wife, Vokouhi Hovagimian, both members of the planning team of Indivisible Greater Vancouver. They are parents, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, and long-time healthcare analysts who advocate for universal healthcare.. This is a very informative blog and podcast that explores healthcare issues in the news, and it highlights how we could do so much better. Each blog post also includes actions you can take to advocate with elected officials. You’ll find a resource list at the bottom of each post. Videos are available for these posts here.
Historical Perspective on Current Events
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at NYU and a specialist in helping us understand the authoritarian playbook and illiberalism worldwide. She has testified before the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — the real one, not the one that will be staged by Trump loyalists. And, she contributes to many media outlets, is the author of Strongmen, Mussolini to the Present, which “looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence, and machismo - and how they can be defeated.” She writes that she “started Lucid in 2021 to separate the signal from the noise in politics and provide big-picture thinking about authoritarianism and threats to democracy in the US and around the world.” “It also covers the global resistance to tyranny past and present. With informed awareness and clarity of purpose, Lucid readers have the tools they need to effect change.”
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American
Heather Cox Richardson writes that she is “a history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics. I believe in American democracy, despite its frequent failures.” Her newsletter is enormously popular because of her lucid perspective on how current events rhyme with earlier ones in our nation’s history. She also narrates her newsletter to make it available as a podcast the next day.
Timothy Snyder: Thinking About ...
Timothy Snyder has been warning us steadily about the threat of authoritarianism in the United States and what we can do to resist an authoritarian takeover. He teaches history at Yale. He writes that he is “a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. I speak five languages reasonably well, a few more quite badly, and read about a dozen. My work concerns east European history, the Holocaust, the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of Ukraine. I have also written about U.S. history, international relations, digital politics, and political thought. In the pamphlets On Tyranny(2017) and Our Malady (2020) I use some of what I have learned from history to make judgements about civics and politics in the present.”
From her website, linked above: “Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).”
* Your browser may warn you that her site isn’t secure. It’ll issue what warning whenever a website hasn’t had its technology upgraded from http to https. The extra encryption required matters more for sites that handle financial or healthcare data.
Law
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
Joyce Vance is a former United States Attorney and currently a law professor and a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC. She also co-hosts two podcasts, #SistersInLaw and Cafe’s Insider, and she is a contributor to The Contrarian. I believe that being a citizen is the most important work any of us can do. As citizens, a key part of our role is to educate ourselves and stay informed. Her explanations about legal actions involving the Trump regime, Supreme Courts of the United States and individual states cut right to the relevance of such events. And those explanations are crystal clear. When she occasionally needs to take breaks — and these are brief — she posts narratives about her pets, especially her chickens.
Messaging
FrameLab is a newsletter about politics, language and your brain. It was founded by Dr. George Lakoff and Gil Duran in 2017 (as the FrameLab podcast). FrameLab helps our readers understand how political language works, and illuminate the key frames (thinking structures) in our political discourse – ideological structures that are often hiding in plain sight. We also analyze and deconstruct propaganda tactics which, unfortunately, are accelerating in the digital age. George Lakoff is the founder of cognitive linguistics and has written extensively about how our cognition is emotional and embodied and lives in neural connections that are strengthened when invoked. An author of many books, including The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame The Debate, and many other works. He helps us understand conservative and liberal thinking and how they are shaped by metaphors of the nation as family. Each perspective believes it’s morally right, and these worldviews are difficult to understand from the other perspective.
From the site: “Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was developed by a team of social and cultural psychologists, primarily Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, to explore why, despite vast differences across cultures, morality often has shared themes and similarities across populations. In essence, MFT suggests that there are several innate psychological systems at the core of our “intuitive ethics.” Cultures then build virtues, narratives, and institutions upon these foundational systems, resulting in the diverse moral beliefs we observe globally and even conflicts within nations.” MFT does not judge whether the moral intuitions of liberals, conservatives, libertarians and others are right, in other words, it doesn’t take a political position. It has an evolutionary psychology perspective. MFT’s characterization of distinct moral foundations, such as Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity, Liberty and others, map differently to political orientations. Recognizing how to appeal to these perspectives is helpful in shaping messages that match people’s emotional intuitions, where emotions are powerful in shaping opinion.
Antonia Scatton: Reframing America
From her SubStack newsletter: “Hacking the public debate with cognitive science. My missions: Revitalize the Democratic Party. Unleash the power of volunteers. Build IRL community. Make basic human decency popular again! Protege of George Lakoff. @antoniascatton.bsky.social “ She writes a newsletter that instructs us on how to frame political discourse to be effective. Her writing is clear, and her instructions can be put to use immediately to advocate for progressive values.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: ASO Communications
“Host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications, Anat Shenker-Osorio examines why certain messages falter where others deliver.” She is a consultant to national Indivisible, an author and contributor to many publications.
Psychology
Bob Altemeyer: The Authoritarians
“Bob Altemeyer studied the authoritarian personality for over 40 years while a professor of psychology at University of Manitoba. His experiments drew high praise from other scientists, and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Prize for Behavioral Science Research. This book summarizes his many findings, and has been widely acclaimed for the relaxed, conversational way the author presents far-reaching and penetrating insights into American life today.” His book, The Authoritarians, is available as a free download on this site. Dr. Altemeyer helped develop instruments to characterize authoritarian personalties, power mad personalities and other groups, and has conducted simulations of political decision making with people who scored high on those scales. He has co-authored essays on the site with John Dean warning about authoritarianism in the United States. Dean was the White House counsel in the Nixon Administration, whose testimony helped force Nixon’s resignation.
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Additional sources will be added who have written about the personalities, family, and cultural backgrounds that feed into authoritarianism and about how and why people on each side of the political divide believe their position is morally righteous. These sources will include Jonathan Haidt, Bob Altemeyer, and others.