American media routinely criticizes countries designated by the U.S. Government as geopolitical adversaries—such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and Russia—for alleged restrictions on free expression and deviations from liberal human rights norms. These nations are often branded "authoritarian," accused of stifling speech, press and assembly—rights the U.S. claims to champion.

Such accusations, however, rarely withstand scrutiny. Facts are cherry-picked, stripped of context and repackaged into moral indictments.

American media seldom lies outright; instead, a decontextualized truth can sometimes be as powerful a tool for shaping discourse. Comprehensive investigation takes a backseat to storytelling that aligns with U.S. strategic interests. The goal isn't truth—it's persuasion.

The hypocrisy is glaring. While Chinese, Russian or Cuban media are dismissed as "state propaganda," American outlets perform the same function, just with subtler methods.

The difference? One is framed as "ideological servitude;" the other, "professional journalism."

My experiences when visiting and studying these countries have led me to believe that the conception the American media holds is topsy-turvy—a hypocritical projection of its own deficiencies onto other countries. With a method of reporting through the meticulous selection and rearrangement of facts, American media manufacture stories designed to perpetuate the status quo.

I experienced one such artful rearrangement of facts when Fox News mocked one of my recent speaking engagements on national television. It was a lecture on my recent book, Why We Need American Marxism, and how such ideas are being implemented through my party, the American Communist Party (ACP).

It seems that Fox News did not want the core message of my lecture to reach their audience, namely, that American socialism is what could most plentifully uphold the patriotic values of 1776—the values of a democratic creed rooted in having a government of, by and for the people.

The statement they asked me to provide on my speech the day before I delivered it, and the speech itself, were equally ignored. Instead of airing the speech they were commenting on, the segment featured a clip from a different talk I gave at the ACP's national convention in October 2024, in which I addressed, in my capacity as my party's secretary of education, the importance of encouraging free, creative and critical thinking.

As political analyst Edward Smith argued, by ridiculing a clip where I promote anti-dogmatic thinking, Fox News is, knowingly or not, implying that they do not encourage free, creative and critical thinking for their audience. Are they not the first to say that the value of U.S. "democracy" over these so-called "authoritarian" regimes is found in our rights to critical speech and media? What else could it be possibly called, other than hypocrisy, when you condemn in the act what you claim to endorse in the abstract realm of ideas?

What they seem to appreciate, then, is the idea of the right to free speech, not the actual right to free speech, which must include speech critical—as mine was—of the current state of affairs. To paraphrase the great American comedian George Carlin, how could these be called "rights" if they could be freely taken away as soon as their exercise challenges the narratives of those in power? Are they not, at that point, simply "privileges" which you can enjoy only if you think in the right way—that is, if you think what they want you to think?

Such an incident is not the exception, but the norm, the modus operandi, of American media. This is the role they must perform to maintain U.S. society as it is currently structured—a function that grows exponentially important during periods of mass disillusionment with the dominant order, like the one we're experiencing today.

As the proverb goes, when American media points its finger at the media of other countries to label them as censorial mouthpieces of the ruling order, it is, at the same time, unknowingly pointing three fingers back at itself. 

The author is an adjunct professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the U.S., and secretary of education of the American Communist Party

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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