The Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law (RIIPL) and Free Press hosted a panel with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Anna Gomez about threats to free speech in the U.S. and New Jersey. Gomez is on a First Amendment Tour challenging government censorship and control. She joined several New Jersey community leaders for this special forum on November 13 at the Rutgers-Camden Campus Center.
The panel began with welcome remarks from Rutgers Law Dean Johanna Bond who emphasized the timeliness of the event taking place at a time when “free press and responsible journalism are under threat.”
Introduced by RIIPL Co-Director and Distinguished Professor Ellen Goodman as the lone Democrat on the FCC, Gomez spoke about her background in the Clinton and Biden administrations where she worked on media mergers and licensing decisions that shape who gets access to public platforms. She then explained why she’s on tour.
“I embarked on my First Amendment tour earlier this year because I became alarmed by the campaign of control and censorship that I saw this administration embarking on,” Gomez said. “This administration is using the weight of government to suppress lawful expression because it challenges those in power and reflects views that they oppose. And it is an administration-wide campaign.”
She also pointed to efforts to rewrite history, pressure universities to drop diversity policies, arrest peaceful protesters, threaten law firms, and remove dissenting voices from the media. Her point was blunt: staying quiet only hands power to those eager to control the narrative.
The panel also featured those doing on-the-groundwork in New Jersey. Kenneth Miles, founder of the Trenton Journal, described building trust through community-centered reporting to counter years of distorted coverage of Black and brown neighborhoods. Vanessa Maria Graber of Free Press highlighted Camden’s severe lack of local news and the broader collapse of public media, noting how disinformation and political pressure make accountability reporting increasingly difficult.
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Graber said, “Our safety is at risk, and the beauty is we do it anyway, and we’re willing to take the risk, and we think it’s important to report on all these things, but it’s unclear what the future is. I’m glad to work at Free Press where we’re a part of the solution, and we’re trying to put our brains together to figure out how to keep everyone safe and informed.”
Ayinde Merrill of the New Jersey Civic Consortium discussed the struggle to sustain new local newsrooms, stressing that building an audience is far harder than launching a publication. Cristian Moreno-Rodriguez of El Pueblo Unido AC added a different angle. His organization is not a news outlet, but it stepped in to share vital information on ICE activity, detention centers, and shifting policies because no one else was doing it. Service organizations often become reporters by necessity in communities ignored by traditional media. The panel then took questions from the audience which included censorship, hostile reporting environments, student vulnerability, and the wide gap in media literacy.
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