Mumia on Press Freedom @ 22nd Century Initiative (People-Powered Democracy) Conference, Atlanta, June 2025

Audio Transcript

Mumia Abu-Jamal – Statement for Press Freedom Workshop at 22nd Century Initiative Conference, June 17, 2025

My friends, my brothers, my colleagues, my dear comrades,

When we think about journalism, we have to erase as many ideas as we acquire. Why? Because in many ways, unless we’ve really researched this issue historically, we have false ideas, we have false beliefs, and we have false recollections of what journalism really means in America.

I speak historically, of course, and I speak from a history of what the FBI called “news friendlies.” That was their code speech for journalists who worked for them, as opposed to working for their readers and their customers and the public. These were people who wrote in their columns or in their articles, rumor and innuendo and slurs and insults against members and supporters of any group that the FBI opposed—for example, the Black Panther Party.

In my book, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, I write about these “news friendlies.” But guess what? They were never friendly to the people who were protesting the system of white supremacy and oppression and government snooping and surveillance of freedom movements. In my chapter on COINTELPRO [the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program], I write about professors who lost their jobs, teachers who lost their jobs, average workers who learned that the FBI visited their jobs and got them fired.

These people were not people committing crimes, they were people who opposed how the government was doing what it did every day. And we’re talking about decades ago. And there are dozens and dozens and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of such people. This, in a society that claims that there is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to speak, to think, and to let others know about the wrongs supported or done by the government of the United States.

I write that the FBI was in essence a political police, because they served a political function and they treated Americans—people born in the United States of America, whether they were Black, whether they were women, whether they were supporters of workers’ rights, whether they were communists, whether they were feminists, or whether they opposed the war—they treated these people as if they were enemies of the state instead of enemies of the government entire. You can oppose what the government does. That is supposedly your right.

But if you get fired for that, if they are supporting rumors in the media that lead to people being divorced. Or worse, think about Fred Hampton sleeping in his bed in December of 1969 when the FBI supported a raid on his apartment, ostensibly for weapons, and they killed the man in his sleep, in his bed with his wife. We forget that, don’t we? That’s pretty convenient. And we’d like to think that the excesses of the government today are something quite extraordinary. We cannot ever forget what happened in this country for years, for decades, against people who spoke out against the government or who organized against this state.

There was a saying by a deputy director of the FBI about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That guy, William Sullivan, said that King was the most dangerous Negro in America. Can you imagine? So when we talk about journalism and we talk about the morays of journalism, we cannot and should not forget what happened in this country.

We’re looking at right now a new era in journalism, right? In some ways it is the democratization of journalism. By that I mean that every person who has a cell phone can perform the function of a journalist without any special training. All he or she has to do is point and record. We saw that in the George Floyd case, a 17-year-old young lady turned her phone on and recorded that injustice. And you know, you have to know, if this 17-year-old had not done that, then that whole situation would’ve been reported differently because we would not know anything other than what the state, the government, the police wanted us to know.

We live in a new era, but we cannot forget the errors—E-R-R-O-R-S—of the past. In this new era, we have to think about journalism differently now. It is a citizen’s right to use their phones to record that what they wish to record, that what the state does every day and usually goes unrecorded because their cameras malfunction or they were never turned on.

So the people have to think about journalism differently — not as a profession, but as something that citizens do and people do every day to record what the state is doing to them. The other thing is this: When I talked about COINTELPRO, these were secret files. Remember, a group of very young people in Media, Pennsylvania, raided an FBI storage house and seized those documents and sent them to reporters all across the country. And in many ways, they changed people’s minds about what was happening in their name by the FBI.

I talked about the FBI’s “news friendlies,” but guess what? In every major newspaper in America, especially if they have a foreign desk or a foreign affairs department, there is usually an approved reporter who sits in that department. And that person is really working for the CIA, because being a journalist is a perfect cover for spies. They have a byline usually, they have journalistic ID and they say they represent a newspaper. They don’t say they represent the government, but in many ways, they do. And just like you had news friendlies, you have CIA people who are listening to what’s happening in newsrooms and using their place in journalistic systems to transfer information to readers who really have no deep knowledge of who they’re reading.

So journalism is not what it used to be, but let’s not be foolish, and let’s not paint it as if it was a perfect picture. It never was, and it never will be. It’s a business, it’s an industry, and it’s always in transition.

We do live in a new era because of the transformation of technology, but how that thing is used is also important. I rarely use the term social media. People I talk to are aware. When I discuss it, I say anti-social media. And that’s because of its effect on young people and how young people are deeply harmed by what they hear and what they see on anti-social media. And that again, is because industry is pushing people to the limits to make more money.

I don’t know if journalism will succeed in this new era. I know that it has to be transformed from a voice, print and scribe for those in power and begin reflecting the ideas of average people. People should be the power in a democracy, not politicians, not the CIA, not the FBI, not then and not now. Journalism has to become the voice of the people. If not, it, like all institutions, will fade away. Already, very few young people read newspapers today. Very few Americans read books. It’s not popular anymore. That may change, but it will only change if the substance of newspapers and books begins to make sense again to people who read.

I thank you for your time. I thank you for your comments. I even thank you for your criticisms.

With love, not fear, this is Mumia.