Join Mickey Huff for a conversation on State of the Free Press 2025 with Carolina Cedraschi and Elle Wilcox.

About the Book: In their new book, Project Censored highlights the vital stories that corporate media underreported, exposes rampant news abuse, and tracks emerging threats against the press from financial and political powers.

Every year, Project Censored publishes its State of the Free Press, which takes the pulse of the media and shares the 25 most important but underreported stories of the past year. In STATE OF THE FREE PRESS 2025 (The Censored Press & Seven Stories Press, December 3, 2024, paperback), editors Mickey Huff, Shealeigh Voitl, and Andy Lee Roth look back on a year in which significant news stories lost out to coverage of celebrities and non-events. Tragically, 2024 also stands out as the year that the corporate media failed to adequately cover Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and the threat it poses to the whole world. With their gaze trained elsewhere, the powerful got a pass from the very institution that should hold them to account.

State of the Free Press 2025 comes at a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low. A 2024 Pew Research Poll found that a remarkable 73 percent of adult Americans believe a free press is either extremely or very important to the well-being of society—though only a third of those polled believe that US media are completely free to report news. Half of those surveyed believe that US news organizations are influenced a great deal by corporate/financial or government/political interests. Reporters Without Borders gave the US a score of 66.59 out of a possible 100 points in their 2024 World Press Freedom Index—a drop of nearly five points from 2023. Last year, the organization labeled US press freedom “satisfactory;” in 2024, they called it “problematic.”

MICKEY HUFF is director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has coedited sixteen volumes of Project Censored’s annual book and contributed numerous chapters to these works dating back to 2008. He is coauthor with Nolan Higdon of United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About It) [City Lights Books, 2019]; and Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022). He has taught social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College since 2000. In 2019, Huff received the Beverly Kees Educator Award as part of the James Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Society for Professional Journalists, Northern California. He is also the executive producer and host of The Project Censored Show, the weekly syndicated public affairs program that airs on more than 50 stations around the U.S. and originates from KPFA Pacifica Radio in Berkeley, CA. Along with his work with Project Censored, Huff is the new Distinguished Director of the Park Center of Independent Media at Ithaca College and Professor of Journalism at the college’s Roy H. Park School of Communication