Break Through News is under attack from the Trump administration and its allies in Congress. BT News was founded in the US in 2020 as a “nonprofit media and educational organization dedicated to independent, fact-based reporting, and analysis on the issues shaping our world.”¹ Since its founding, it has become one of the most important independent outlets in the US media environment, consistently reporting from the frontlines of pickets, mass mobilisations, and community meetings while amplifying the voices of those engaged in anti-imperialist struggle in the Global South right into the heart of empire.

This attack has not come in a vacuum. As BT describes, “For years, Republican lawmakers have painted a target on our backs, falsely claiming that our political views and reporting are part of some foreign plot.”² In 2023, the New York Times (NYT) ran an article pushing the spurious allegation that various organisations associated with the International People’s Assembly, including BT and the People’s Forum, were involved in a global conspiracy to spread pro-Chinese government propaganda.³ Marco Rubio, who was a senator at the time, used this article as his basis in his attempt to instigate an investigation into these organisations, alongside Codepink and others.

In July 2026, the US Congress’s House Ways and Means Committee was drafted into this battle. Despite complying with all tax, audit, and public reporting requirements, the House Ways and Means Committee has issued a subpoena to BT demanding internal communications and financial records, among other things. BT is not charged with any actual crime; their “only ‘crime’ has been to tell the truth – by covering the activities of the Palestine solidarity movement, unmasking the truth of ICE’s terror in our streets, and exposing Washington’s crimes around the world, from Cuba to the Congo.”⁴ The goal is not to legally ban BT, but to overwhelm them with legal proceedings and hostile media to drain their meagre resources and render their continued operation untenable. 

Repression of the People’s Forum and Cuba Solidarity

This most recent attack has not been restricted to BT, with the commission also issuing subpoenas to several other organisations, including the People’s Forum, a hub for working-class movements, political education, and solidarity with people in the Global South who are fighting for independence, sovereignty, and self-determination. The US State Department’s recent report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” has attempted to smear organisations like the People’s Forum, which are most active in organising against the US’s criminal blockade of Cuba, as “left-wing terrorists.” A farcical yet dangerous escalation of the neo-McCarthyite witch-hunts underway in the USA. 

Those in the US can add their name to this petition calling on the House Ways and Means Committee to drop its disgraceful investigation against BreakThrough News. For those of us in Australia, who have come to rely on BT News for an accurate picture of events unfolding in the US, undistorted by corporate media spin, donations can be made to aid BT’s fight against the openly fascistic policies of Trump’s clique. Similarly, donations to aid the People’s Forum as they defend themselves can be made here. More than this, socialists in Australia must take up the call and organise solidarity campaigns here, not only to support our comrades in the US but to steel ourselves for the struggle for independent, progressive media at home. This campaign is more than just a US phenomenon. It has global dimensions and arises from the shifting political economy of the media in a conjuncture characterised by the structural crisis of the US-led imperialist system.

A global campaign against independent media

The targeting of BreakThrough News is just the latest in a series of assaults on independent media over the last few years. In May 2025, red.media, a German-based revolutionary, anti-imperialist media organisation, was forced to close after “a coordinated campaign” was launched “against red.media…by an unholy alliance of German media outlets, journalists, union representatives, and NGOs, some of which were even founded or directly financed by the German and Israeli state.”⁵ As they describe, “The aim of this campaign is to intimidate, criminalize, and ultimately silence red.media through lawsuits and media repression — with the calculation of forcing a criminal conviction through fabricated allegations and media pressure.”⁶ Their crime? Exposing Israeli genocide and criticising NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. That is refusing to submit to Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state). 

Then, in July 2025, the pan-African media platform African Stream was forced to cease its operations. In September 2024, the then US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had levelled slanderous accusations at African Stream, claiming:

RT [Russian state broadcaster] also secretly runs the online platform African Stream across a wide range of social media platforms.  Now, according to the outlet’s website, ‘African Stream is’ – and I quote – ‘a pan-African digital media organisation based exclusively on social-media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad.’  In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.⁷

And with equal seriousness, in the midst of the US-funded genocide in Gaza and brutal crackdown on Palestine solidarity campaigners on American streets and university campuses, Blinken would also claim:

The United States respects and champions freedom of expression, even when it comes to media outlets that wittingly spread government propaganda, and we’ll continue to lead the world in defending and promoting media freedom.  But we will not stand by as RT and other actors carry out covert activities in support of Russia’s nefarious activities, and we’ll continue to respond forcefully to Moscow’s playbook of aggression and subversion, one that includes invading sovereign nations, fomenting coups, weaponizing corruption, carrying out assassinations, meddling in elections, and unjustly detaining foreign nationals.⁸

As the saying goes, every accusation is a confession.

Despite the baselessness of Blinken’s accusations about a covert RT network using African Stream as its puppet, the mere accusations were enough to allow tech capital to swing into action. African Stream soon saw its accounts removed from YouTube, Meta, Google, and TikTok, while even personal accounts linked to the project were restricted. This level of censorship proved fatal for such an alternative media project. In a farewell statement, African Stream’s Editor-in-Chief, Ahmed Kaballo, said, “These actions shattered our ability to survive financially…We are deeply proud of the work we’ve done since 2022, bringing attention to the most underreported and misrepresented continent.” Kaballo went on to describe how the bans resulting from Blinken’s speech made continuing operations impossible while nevertheless urging the project’s supporters to continue advocating for pan-African media.⁹

The legal architecture of media censorship was further reinforced in the EU in early July 2026. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the ban on disseminating content from RT “also applies to those who operate a website that is freely accessible to the public and funded solely by users’ voluntary contributions.”¹⁰ This means, in effect, that private individuals can face criminal prosecution — and even prison — for sharing RT videos on public websites. Furthermore, this would even seem to apply to sharing RT coverage of a sports event. It should be noted that this case arose from the ongoing German prosecution of three people for having broadcast videos from RT on a public website. One has to wonder what possible propaganda Russia could concoct that would be more damning of the Ukrainian war effort than the actuality of the integration and institutionalisation of Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces and state apparatus.¹¹

Canary, a British independent media outlet, came under attack at the end of June 2026. They describe themselves as an “anti-oppression, decolonised, and recolonised radical media outlet that publishes the truth without fear or favour.”¹² Canary’s reporting and analysis, as with the other outlets discussed, is from a progressive, left-wing perspective, and has been unflinching in its exposure of Israeli crimes and highly critical of the UK’s support for the US war of aggression on Iran. So, on 30 June 2026, Canary found themselves debanked by the banking giant Lloyds.¹³ Despite holding their account for nearly a decade, Lloyds suddenly terminated Canary’s business banking facility without a clear explanation and withheld a significant amount of their money.¹⁴ As Canary points out:

We do know that multiple other politically engaged people have suffered similar actions by other banks in recent times. It is not lost on us that powerful banks are able to restrict the financial activity of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals. Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this.¹⁵

Why is independent media being suppressed?

In Herman and Chomsky’s 1988 Manufacturing Consent, the hyper-concentration of the news media, it’s ownership by monopoly capital with interests in other spheres of production (in Australia, Gina Rinehart recently purchased a %10 stake in Southern Cross Media, not to mention Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes, or Apollo Global Management’s stake in Nine), and the restricted access to the means of media production and distribution to an élite, ideologically disciplined media class, meant that many Western countries could celebrate their formal “freedom of the press,” while in actuality the mainstream media unfailingly reinforced the perspectives and interests of the capitalist class and their state with little need for recourse to overt repression or censorship.¹⁶ The situation in the mainstream news media, nearly four decades later, is, if anything, worse than when Herman and Chomsky first advanced their analysis.

Furthermore, the promises of a free, decentralised and democratic internet, which were given such prominence at the beginning of the 21st century, ring exceptionally hollow today as the ownership of the major tech platforms becomes even more concentrated than the traditional media sphere.¹⁷

While the ownership of digital platforms may be highly concentrated, they have nevertheless dramatically lowered the entry requirements for the production and distribution of news media. In other words, these monopoly platforms have created the conditions for a flourishing of small, independent, progressive media organisations.

Herein lies one of the contradictions of our present moment: the rise of independent media and alternative news sources concomitant with the ever more rapid decline of the hegemony of liberal/bourgeois ideology has forced capitalist states of the imperial core to shred their pretences to elementary liberal-democratic guarantees — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of protest and assembly — and increase their repression of dissent. The live-streamed genocide perpetrated by the IDF upon the Palestinian population in Gaza and the increasingly intolerable apartheid regime inflicted upon them in the West Bank, accompanied by the impunity afforded to terroristic settler violence, has served only to radically accelerate the assault on democratic freedoms in the Western imperialist states, in particular the institutionalisation and consolidation of media censorship. The timing of the wave of social media bans for the young and impressionable is far from arbitrary, reflecting the desperation of ruling classes aware they are losing their hegemony in the “battle for ideas,” particularly in shaping and disciplining the consciousness of the new generation.¹⁸

It is in this context that we should understand the series of draconian assaults on independent media organisations over the last few years, the targeting of BreakThrough News being only the most recent example. 

Press freedom has never been granted; it has been fought for, hard-won, and long defended as a vital tool to be wielded in the struggle for the socialist transformation of society. From underground socialist presses raided by the police to independent media channels suppressed by tech capital, the ruling class and their state apparatus have always sought to silence revolutionaries who have dared to speak the truth. We revolutionaries must respond by shouting this truth from the rooftops.

1. https://breakthroughnews.org/about/ ↩︎
2. https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/07/22/breakthrough-news-is-under-attack/ ↩︎
3. https://red-spark.org/2023/11/17/hands-off-newsclick-free-prabir-purkayastha-and-amit-chakraborty/ ↩︎
4. https://breakthroughnews.org/2026/07/22/breakthrough-news-is-under-attack/ ↩︎
5. https://thered.stream/red-media-is-closing-this-is-why/ ↩︎
6. https://thered.stream/red-media-is-closing-this-is-why/ ↩︎
7. https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-to-the-press-29/ ↩︎
8. https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-to-the-press-29/ ↩︎
9. https://presscouncilsa.org.za/2025/06/22/kenya-based-media-outlet-set-to-close-after-censorship-by-us/ ↩︎
10. https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/07/02/ban-on-broadcasting-russia-today-the-eu-court-clarifies-that-it-also-applies-to-free-websites/ ↩︎
11. See this disturbing and enlightening series: https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/the-o9a-and-the-rdk-i?utm_source=publication-search ↩︎
12. https://www.thecanary.co/about-the-canary/ ↩︎
13. https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/06/30/lloyds-canary/
    ↩︎
14. https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2026/07/06/canary-debanking-latest/ ↩︎
15. https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/06/30/lloyds-canary/ ↩︎
16. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/27/gina-rinehart-pays-for-bruce-mcwilliam-purchase-southern-cross-media ↩︎
17. See in particular Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2017). ↩︎
18.  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/24/australia-under-16-social-media-ban-no-substantial-effects-study; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/28/tech-firms-are-losing-the-public-social-media-age-bans-near-tipping-point ↩︎