Joy Reid

the mainstream is knuckling under.

And so what you're getting is what happens quite frankly in Israel, where when I was working at MSNBC, the major networks could not go into Gaza without the permission of the Israeli government.

And the coverage was so limited and truncated so that only the story that the Netanyahu administration wanted out would get out through mainstream media.

How did so many people become outraged for what was happening in Gaza?

It was independent journalists.

It was individual Palestinians who in some cases weren't even formally journalists.

They were just live streaming their own murders, their own deaths, their own bombings, the bombings of their communities.

That independent journalism shook an entire nation from left to right, from MAGA to progressive are in many ways now on the same page when it comes to Gaza.

They were outraged equally.

Absolutely.

The Arab Spring was the same thing.

What regimes fear is independent media because independent media tells the stories that the mainstream media suppresses on behalf of the regime.

Can I just add one more thing on the idea of these protests?

Because it is chilling.

And I think whatever your politics are, whatever your political party is, you should be alarmed at the idea of your government attempting to use the highest sort of its awesome power

of the state to stop people from protesting.

I'm old enough to remember when people showed up to protest against President Obama, our first Black president, with long guns, standing opposite the Capitol with long guns.

And they were fully protected by the First Amendment to stand there

in this threatening posture against the president of the United States.

There was nothing you could do.