As the starvation genocide in Gaza continues with the support of the United States and its Western allies, the importance of Green Left as one of the most longstanding people-powered alternative media projects was underlined by the many statements of support it received during its “Powering Rebellion” livestream broadcast on August 16.
“There is so much that is hidden in the mainstream media,” said Wendy Bacon, independent investigative reporter and professor of journalism. "And our job is to dig out those stories”.
“When I looked back on the issue of Aboriginal death in custody — an issue that has been going on since colonisation but was highlighted in the 1990s by the campaign that led to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the only place I could find this is in the archives of GL.
“One of the important things that GL does is to document the struggle.”
Bacon said she also appreciates GL for its internationalist perspective.
Abigail Boyd, a Greens New South Wales Member of the Legislative Council, said: “Independent, people-led media is more important than it has ever been and more under threat than it has ever been.
“We are taking a fight to the most powerful people and the only way they can continue business-as-usual in the face of the most extreme crises and horrifying events happening around the world, is to keep politicians more worried about what will be said about them in the media than what the people actually think on the ground.
“Independent media helps get the truth out.”
Journalists in the mainstream media are under pressure not to write the whole truth, Boyd added. “We have to support GL and other independent media that can actually take it to the big end of town.
“As an environmentalist and also a socialist — and as a human being — I really want to read about the truth and I want to read journalists like you have at GL.”
Christy Cain, retired National Secretary of the Construction Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, said GL is a “paper for working-class men and women and communities not just in Australia but around the world”.
“It’s a paper that tells it how it is and I salute them.”
“We have a media establishment that is totally hostile to the project of left-wing, working-class politics,” said comedian and Serious Danger podcaster Tom Ballard. “The case for an independent, left-wing media has never been stronger.”
Jake Lynch, a University of Sydney lecturer, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and a former BBC journalist, knows what it is like to have to fight for the right to speak the truth. He had to go to the Federal Court to uphold his right to advocate for an academic boycott of Israel, as part of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
Mainstream and corporate media have been engaging in “genocide denial”, he said, but GL has “rendered outstanding service amid this tragic and outrageous episode unfolding in front of the world’s cameras [in Gaza].”
Countries like Australia have been deeply complicit in the occupation, the Israeli apartheid system and the Gaza genocide and GL has “been at the cutting edge” of exposing this, said Lynch, expressing “whole-hearted support” for GL.
Dr Ayesha Jehangir, a lecturer in journalism at the University of NSW and former journalist in Pakistan and Afghanistan, said in a world where “press freedom is under attack and the right to know and speak truth has never been more important”, the media is increasingly “controlled by a handful of billionaires”.
Their interests “shape what stories are told and whose voices are silenced” and this monopolisation of media is creating “a narrative which serves the powerful and where the oppressed are pushed to the margins”.
“This is where alternative media steps in. Platforms, such as GL, break through the noise because they don’t answer to shareholders or corporate donors. They answer to the people.
“They shine a light on injustice, amplify the voice of those who have been silenced by the mainstream news outlets and tell the stories that matter — from workers fighting for their wages, to indigenous communities resisting land grabs, to global struggles against war, racism and climate destruction.
“GL tells the stories the billionaires don’t want you to hear.”
You can help by becoming a GL supporter, or making a donation to our Fighting Fund, which has so far raised $97,614 of its target of $180,000 for 2025.