Video Mondays: Steal This Story, Please! & The Importance of Independent News — JosephBruceBustillos.com

The role of Journalism has never been more important than now but level of trustworthy signal to noise has never been more at risk of being overwhelmed and silenced.It seems a bit odd that at a time when we should have access to all of human knowledge with a simple web search, local newspapers are rapidly disappearing and the potential democratization of information is falling victim to whoever owns the search and social media algorithms that pumps the memes and video clips into our streams.

I had this poster that I hung up in my classrooms that came from the early days of desktop publishing in the late 1980s and I hung it up because I recognize how important it would be for my students to be able to communicate in writing. I never realized that the growth in our communication technologies could lead to greater censorship and a narrowing of the voices that would be heard, that political interests, using the weakness of corporate controlled media would use the power of the algorithm or “flood the stream with noise” to silence voices that they didn’t want to hear. Technology was supposed to raise the voices of the best not support the corporate “chosen.”

Having earned my bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1991 this subject is of great importance to me. And having watched this documentary, I recognize how professional journalists and journalism is under fire from politicians who want to control the news and the corporate media owners who are chiefly interested in squeezing every last cent out of the paying public so that we can have access to much needed information. If democracy is to survive in the United States we have to get a lot more serious about supporting journalists and journalism organizations who don’t just tell us what we want to hear, don’t flood the zone with doom and gloom, but get the information that we need so that we can properly participate in our local and national governments and it all begins with information. As Amy Goodman says in the documentary, “Journalism is the oxygen of democracy.”

Please click on the links below, find where the documentary is showing in your community (because it’s good to be among others who share your concerns about journalism and democracy), and find a way to support independent journalism organizations like Democracy Now!

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Sources:

• Steal This Story, Please! (Official Theatrical Trailer v2), posted by Elsewhere Films (2026–03–19), https://youtu.be/oeg6j97XERk?si=RJrYlnpXGwzqKo_h
• Steal This Story (retrieved 2026–04–25) http://stealthisstory.org
• Democracy Now! (Retrieved 2026–04–26), https://www.democracynow.org/

Tags: Amy Goodman, documentaries, independent journalism, journalism, video Mondays

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Originally published at https://josephbrucebustillos.com on April 27, 2026.