Turn on the News

In this month’s interview Columbia University journalism professor Sheila Coronel talks about the challenges the news media face today: consolidation of ownership, competition with online influencers, and accusations from the White House that they are an “enemy of the people.” The Sun’s founder, Sy Safransky, left the newspaper business in the 1960s in pursuit of what he called the “real truth,” which he felt was bigger than the day’s news, and the magazine he started has largely reflected that view. But that hasn’t stopped our authors over the years from reflecting on the role of journalism or the importance of a free press.

Our trip through the archives starts with Derrick Jensen and author Robert McChesney discussing how journalism became big business and major corporations sought to control what we read and heard at the end of the twentieth century.

Next, translator Nasrin Alavi shares the voices of Iranians who, in the early 2000s, fought back against their government’s oppression by sharing their writing online.

Then poet Tony Hoagland writes in 2016 about the effect an endless diet of Fox News had on his elderly father.

Stephen J. Lyons gives us a glimpse of what it was like to (try to) make a living writing for magazines and newspapers in the late 1990s.

And, finally, Sy Safransky offers his thoughts on the nature of journalism in the Watergate era, revealing some of the skepticism that had led him to start The Sun just two years earlier.

We hope you enjoy this multifaceted examination of the media and journalism.

Take care and read well,
Andrew Snee, Managing Editor