Shealeigh Voitl and Andy Lee Roth join Steve to talk about Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2025. The book – an annual publication – compiles the year's most important yet underreported or misreported news stories, which they’ve identified through a student-led research process.

Andy highlights the point that corporate news focuses on what went wrong today but ignores what goes wrong every day. “It's the difference between dramatic events and systemic problems.”

The #1 underreported story is that of ICE soliciting private contractors to monitor social media for critics and assess their "proclivity to violence," a move toward normalized surveillance that received little corporate media attention.

Steve and his guests also discuss broader themes, linking media patterns to cultural hegemony and manufacturing consent, where state and oligarchic interests align to shape public perception. Examples include coverage of Israel-Palestine, university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech, and the hiring of figures like Bari Weiss.

Andy Lee Roth is editor-at-large for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, The Censored Press. He is co-editor of Project’s State of the Free Press yearbook series, and a coauthor of The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.

Shealeigh Voitl is Project Censored's associate director. She helped develop the State of the Free Press 2024 teaching guide, the Project’s Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames, and The Project Censored Show’s forthcoming segment Frame-Check.

Find their work at https://www.projectcensored.org/

@ProjectCensored on X

Let’s face it, even “good” macro talk can fall into the trap of treating the economy like a tidy spreadsheet while real lives get crushed in the margins. To help us peer beneath the covers, Steve invited Emma Holten, a Copenhagen-based political economist to talk about her book Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World. We often discuss deficits around here, but Emma is looking at a different kind. She reframes deficit as what societies rack up when they systematically undervalue care: the paid and unpaid labor (still disproportionately done by women) that keeps people healthy, capable, and alive.

Emma and Steve discuss the way mainstream economics has long treated the home, the body, and the mind as a black box, as if workers spring fully formed from the soil and arrive at the labor market already fed, healed, soothed, socialized, and ready to produce.

They talk about measurement and the way the GDP counts a $3,000 ambulance bill as added value instead of predatory extraction. They also look at power and social cohesion. Steve connects Emma’s thesis to MMT’s real-resources focus and the Job Guarantee as a way to fund socially necessary work that markets underprovide, while also admitting the hard question: even if policy is sound, capital and its political machinery never volunteer to be disarmed.

Emma Holten is a feminist activist and gender policy consultant. Since 2018, she has worked with feminist economics. In 2024 she published her first book “DEFICIT - On the value of care” in Danish. It is available in English, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Dutch, and Italian - and forthcoming in 6 other languages. It has won the Politiken Literature Prize, The Library Reader’s Prize, The Sara Danius Prize, The Sprout Prize and was shortlisted for the Montana Literature Award.

For a masterclass in true bipartisanship, look no further than the guest list of Jeffrey Epstein! We all love a good conspiracy story, but it’s often just business as usual for the class in power.

Nolan Higdon – lecturer, media critic, and author of The Gaslight Gazette – is back for a deep analytical dive into the Epstein saga. Moving beyond true-crime sensationalism, Nolan and Steve frame the scandal as a stark case study in systemic class power, media complicity, and the mechanisms elite networks use to protect their own.

The discussion hinges on several key points: evidence from released emails shows Epstein’s role as a trans-partisan power broker, connecting figures like Trump and Clinton to finance (Les Wexner) and tech (Bill Gates, Peter Thiel).

The media’s failure to investigate is no accident. (Are we surprised?) It’s a function of class interests acting to manage public perception and manufacture consent. The episode goes on to connect Epstein’s documented interest in spyware and AI to a broader project of militarized surveillance for social control.

Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, propaganda, and critical media literacy. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Find his work on Substack: nolanhigdon.substack.com

@NolanHigdonCML on X