When you hear someone speaking from his or her own experience—a Palestinian child, an Israeli mother, a grandfather from Afghanistan—it breaks down s… - Amy Goodman

We need a media that covers grassroots movements, that seeks to understand and explain the complex forces that shape our society, a media that empowers people with information to make sound decisions on the most vital issues of the day: war and peace, life and death. Instead, the media system in the United States, increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer multinational corporations, spews a relentless stream of base "reality" shows (which depict anything but reality), hollow excuses for local news that highlight car accidents and convenience store robberies larded with ads, and the obsessive coverage of traffic, sports, and extreme weather (never linked to another two words: climate change). Perhaps most harmful of all, we get the same small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.

This bears repeating: the sixty-two wealthiest people-a group that could fit on a bus-control more wealth than three and a half billion people.

Free speech is democracy's last line of defense. We must demand it. Defend it. And most of all, use it-now.