Right now, I’m waiting on my post-production team to send me the final cut of our upcoming episode with special guest, Zerlina Maxwell.
It’s one I’m especially excited about sharing with you.
Zerlina is the host of Mornings With Zerlina on Sirius XM and the creator of The Inner Work Dispatch, a Substack space focused on mental health and her life as an expat. She’s also a journalist, author, political analyst, and strategist—and in our interview, she opens up about her Blaxit journey to Italy for the very first time.
Now based in Sicily, Zerlina traded the hustle and bustle of D.C. and New York for the peace and serenity of Palermo, a stunning seaside city that feels like a world away from the chaos back home.
And she talks about how she managed to dip out just days after the Inauguration. If that ain’t divine timing!
Our conversation is so relevant to what’s happening in the U.S. right now, and I can’t wait for you to see it.
We’re almost at the finish line, so stay tuned. I’ll share it here as soon as it’s live. Make sure you’re subscribed to the Black Expat Stories YouTube channel so you’ll get notified when the new episode is available!
Speaking of mental health, for my own, I’m being super intentional about my news intake these days.
What about you?
I’m not a headline watcher by any means, because lately I find myself strategizing the best ways to stay informed about what’s happening without getting pulled into despair.
Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been editing this upcoming episode, I’ve kept circling back to something Zerlina said about the current state of affairs in the U.S. and its impact on those of us committed to truth-telling:
That resonates with me not just because it mirrors what I’ve been witnessing, but because I share her vantage point.
In our conversation, Zerlina also talked about how being out of the fray gives her the distance to see the global impact of what’s happening in the U.S. — and to view it with a more critical eye:
Living abroad has given me that same clarity.
The further I am from the noise, the more I can see the patterns and power plays for what they are. Especially when it comes to the mainstream media in America.
This was one headline I just couldn’t ignore:
Trump to deploy National Guard and federalize D.C. police in crime-fighting effort
Granted, by the time you read this, there might be another one dominating the news cycle decrying another one of his many abuses of power. But something tells me we’ll be talking about this one for a while.
And if you think this has anything to do with “cracking down on crime” in D.C., I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Violent crime has been decreasing since 2023 and has fallen 26% there this year alone. So I call B.S.
Anything to stave off the stench of Epstein, I guess.
It’s chilling enough that this sitting U.S. President has dispatched the military on U.S. soil more than any other in history. Targeting homelessness and making it synonymous with criminality this time is utterly despicable.
You know what solves that problem? Jobs that pay a livable wage. Equitable access to healthcare that isn’t tied to employment. Social support and safety nets because as the one percent hoard more wealth, those of us in the ninety-nine percent will need help when hard times come.
Deploying the National Guard isn’t a solution. It’s a ruse and a terrifyingly blatant display of unchecked power.
And where the hell is Congress?
Many on the Left have been too busy pointing fingers and whining about how “he can’t do that” while he’s been methodically defunding, dismantling, and demolishing the very institutions they told us would check him.
The problem is, nobody’s checking him. And that’s exactly how fascists take hold. They mow down every check and balance, consolidate power by hook or crook, and then weaponize that power to hold hostage the very folks they leveraged to claim their throne.
I say “throne” intentionally because the Supreme Court has essentially signaled that the U.S. President is now a King, imbued with immunity per their recent ruling. He can do whatever he wants under the cloak of “official acts” and the courts have his back, effectively making him, or whoever occupies the office, above the law.
So, who (or what) is going to check him? Not the mainstream media. That’s a glaring red flag that we can’t afford to ignore anymore.
I’ve been a media scholar and professional for 20 years, and here’s what I can tell you: The American media is playing in the public’s face.
That should be of grave concern for us all because a compromised media landscape is another key indicator of a deteriorating democracy.
This is why media literacy matters. If you don’t read or watch critically, you’ll miss the sleight of hand and the sneaky ways language gets weaponized to sanitize, sidestep or obscure the truth.
When it comes to America’s 47th President, those linguistic gymnastics have been happening in plain sight for years.
Once upon a time, our major news outlets were once bastions of sound journalism and beacons of the Fourth Estate.
But these days, I’m not so sure how trustworthy that Fourth Estate really is. The ideals are still printed on many mastheads, but journalistic practices feel like they’ve been massively compromised.
For those who might not know, the Fourth Estate is the unofficial but essential pillar of democracy: the press. Its role is to act as a watchdog, to hold the powerful accountable, to investigate and expose corruption, and to inform the public so we can govern ourselves wisely.
The First Amendment protects it for a reason: without a free, independent press, the balance of power between government and the governed collapses.
That’s the ideal. But in recent decades, the Fourth Estate has been steadily corroded by political pressure, corporate consolidation, shareholder demands, and the relentless gutting of newsroom budgets in pursuit of profit.
Billionaires have bought up—or built up—media giants whose tentacles now reach into nearly every corner of our information ecosystem.
That influence extends from legacy newspapers and broadcast networks to the algorithm-driven feeds of social media that shape what we see, share, and believe.
Propaganda is far more insidious and entrenched when your billionaire buddies control the media. The political rallies may be loud and garish, but the real influence lies in the surgical precision of the news framing: passive constructions, softened verbs, and the artful blurring of who is truly pulling the strings.
In their hands, infotainment has replaced journalism. Investigations have been swapped for punditry. Brand management and market expansion have eclipsed the mission of public service.
Each merger and acquisition chipped away at editorial independence, making it harder for journalists to serve the public without answering to corporate overlords whose primary loyalty is to shareholders, not citizens.
What was once an institution dedicated to truth-telling has become an industry devoted to content production. And content can be bent, blurred, and bought.
It’s resulted in NEWS DESERTS, robbing local communities of vital information that could save lives.
Commodifying information has turned into big business, which has left sparsely populated areas in the U.S. behind - even in the Information Age.
A study conducted at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism indicated a rise in “news deserts.”
The 2024 Medill report found that 206 U.S. counties now have no local news sources, affecting nearly 55 million Americans, while over 1,500 counties are served by only one news outlet.
In effect, this pattern reflects a democracy in rapid decline because local communities are starved for nuanced coverage, while national media serves up sanitized, crisis‐driving narratives that justify militarized responses and erode civil liberties—especially the right to dissent.
Back in June, when 47 deployed federal troops in Los Angeles in response to immigration-related protests, many national media outlets narrowed the narrative—framing the crackdown as a matter of public order rather than a story rooted in systemic racial dynamics, immigration policy, or civil liberties.
As Joy Reid put it, the mainstream press “sold a lie” by echoing Trump’s inflammatory portrayal of L.A. as a city in chaos, justifying military intervention while ignoring peaceful protest and context. Many residential streets where demonstrations took place were far calmer than the national headlines implied, while evidence of FBI-led ICE raids and other overreach was largely sidelined.
The corrosion of the Fourth Estate threatens the Freedom of the Press.
Out of 180 countries, the U.S. now ranks 57th in the world in global press freedoms, according to the annual press freedom index by Reporters With Borders, putting it on par with countries like Uruguay and Gambia. That’s a sharp fall from 44th in 2023 and 55th in 2024, and proof that we’re sliding in the wrong direction.
It’s because corporations own so much of our media.
Have you noticed how just about everything is paywalled now?
Paying for journalism isn’t the issue I’m lamenting here. My biggest qualm is that a handful of conglomerates have swallowed up or merged with so many outlets that the majority of what we consume comes from just a few corporate giants.
On the surface, it looks like we have a buffet of ways to stay informed. In reality, most of the “choices” are coming from the same small circle of power brokers, with fewer and fewer outlets still upholding rigorous, independent journalism. That should set off alarms.
Have you noticed how tough it is now to get your news without a side of commentary or punditry?
That’s not normal. It’s not coincidental, either. It’s also why the U.S. President’s targeting of public media is so concerning.
In just the past few months, Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in funding over the next two years. That funding is a lifeline for public media outlets like PBS and NPR.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting just announced it will shut down entirely by October, leaving hundreds of stations—especially those in rural and underserved communities—without essential news, cultural programming, and emergency services.
As a PBS kid-turned-NPR adult, I see this as a direct and calculated assault on what little remains of U.S. democracy.
Civil liberties groups have begun sounding the alarm, too, warning the FCC that “allowing for even more media consolidation poses too great a risk to our democracy, and to the free press on which it depends.”
Have you noticed who’s been appointed the head of the FCC now?
Brendan Carr—a veteran FCC commissioner who literally wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025. He’s openly backed relaxing rules that limit media consolidation, making it even easier for a handful of corporate players to swallow up local outlets. He’s also floated punishing broadcast networks that air content he doesn’t like, including the possibility of stripping licenses from local stations owned by NBC, ABC, and CBS.
He’s signaled that he’ll fall in step with weaponizing the FCC against critical media while green lighting further corporate control over what we see and hear.
People love to dismiss 47 as a bumbling fool. Believe that if you want, but make no mistake about it: he is a ruthless, calculating media manipulator.
He’s known - for a very long time - that when you control both the message and the megaphone, winning becomes a lot more inevitable in America.
That’s why I wasn’t the least bit surprised when he won the first time, or when he reclaimed the White House again in the 2024 election.
If we thought the first four years were rough, the first six months of Trump 2.0 alone have been enough to make me stick to my standing therapy appointments. America’s serving its second bid, and this time, it doesn’t feel like there’s a release date on the sentence.
So I moved to Mexico right after Biden’s inauguration.
When Biden clinched the win, I was hopeful, but only cautiously so. I even served on an informal White House advisory committee representing Americans overseas during the final year of his presidency.
By November 2024, I cast my vote and waited with my heart in my throat for what my intuition had been warning me about since our decision to Blaxit in early 2021 (mere months after the January 6th insurrection). Some friends and family thought we were overreacting, maybe even a little crazy. Fast forward four years later and I’m grateful every day that I didn’t let that skepticism derail our exit plan.
It affirmed for me that sometimes you’re not crazy, you’re just early.
When 47 won, I was dismayed but not blindsided. As a Black woman, reading the writing on the wall is part of my survival. It’s an instinct honed over generations of women in my lineage who learned to see danger coming long before it arrived.
Plus, by the time I made my exodus, I’d spent nearly two decades in and around the media game. I knew how to read the tea leaves. I could spot when coverage started to shift, when headlines lost their edge, and when watchdogs stopped barking altogether—sidling up to the very people they were meant to hold to account.
Since the early aughts, I’d been studying the way the press gets finessed by mediocre white guys.
In 2011, I published my Master’s thesis on racialized media portrayals at Penn State. So by 2020, the pattern was glaring at me. And once I saw it for what it was, I couldn’t unsee it.
That clarity was unsettling, and it was also my cue to leave the U.S. Because what’s painfully evident is Trump has made mainstream media his b*tch.
CNN fired Don Lemon. MSNBC cancelled Joy Reid’s highly-rated show.
Fired—just like the singular catchphrase he loved to bark on The Apprentice.
Newsrooms across the country are shrinking or shuttering altogether, starved of resources and gutted from within.
Cut off—like wayward children who’ve displeased their powerful and petulant patriarch.
For reasons that go beyond his habit of weaponizing the courts stacked with his appointees, media giants seem genuinely afraid of him.
Why?
Whatever the cocktail of fear, profit, and access that’s driving their behavior, the result is the same: too many have caved. Maybe it’s because they also need him. He’s their cash cow and they’ve been using him - for clicks, ad dollars, and audience retention - just as much as he’s been using them.
So now, what we have left is less journalism and far more propaganda.
For much of the media, informing the public doesn’t seem like a high priority anymore. In some cases, it’s barely an obligation. They care more about stock prices, shareholders, and access…
Which means it’s important for you to take everything you see, read, or hear from them with a grain of salt.
We’re consuming more information in a single day than any generation before us, and our brains haven’t evolved to keep pace. Media companies know this (and they exploit it), shaping stories to serve their own agendas and deciding which ones even see the light of day, betting that you won’t have the bandwidth to think critically about any of it.
So, no, you can no longer afford to blindly trust many mainstream media sources to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Because money is their god. And their god has no morals…or scruples.
If you trace how we got here, where propaganda masquerades as news and corporate interests outweigh the public good, you’ll see it wasn’t sudden. It’s been a slow erosion, drip by drip, headline by headline.
Step back and the pattern becomes clear: the mainstream media cleared Trump’s runway and greased the wheels for America’s slide toward authoritarianism.
Because:
1. They Platformed Him
Long before the gold escalator moment, Trump was already a household name because the media made him one. He was a tabloid fixture in the ’80s, all messy divorces and (shady) business deals splashed across the gossip pages. By the 2000s, The Apprentice had crowned him “America’s Boss” and handed him a catchphrase. The perils of celebrity worship in real time.
But the truth about who he really was had been there all along, well-documented and hiding in plain sight.
In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump, his father Fred, and their company for one of the largest race bias cases of its time. They charged them with refusing to rent to Black tenants in their New York housing developments.
Evidence from undercover testers showed that Black applicants were told no apartments were available, while white applicants were welcomed and shown units. The case was settled two years later with no admission of guilt, but the Trumps were required to advertise that they welcomed Black tenants and to comply with the Fair Housing Act.
So when Trump stood on a 2024 debate stage claiming immigrants were “taking Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” no one paying attention should’ve been shocked. The phrase dripped with racial essentialism and served its real purpose: pitting marginalized communities against each other while sidestepping his own long trail of documented discrimination.
And then in 1989, he paid a reported $80,000 - EIGHTY GRAND - for full-page ads in all 4 of New York City’s major newspapers, including The New York Times. He was demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty so five innocent Black and Brown teenagers could be executed for a crime they didn’t commit.
Today, they are known as the exonerated Central Park Five. The penalty didn’t get reinstated but the boys were convicted, and lost their youth to a system that used them as scapegoats, and Trump called for the state to execute innocent children.
It’s something he still refuses to apologize for.
And yet, he still became a media darling, a train wreck that America just couldn’t get enough of.
So when he announced his run for president, it’s unsurprising how the press practically broke its neck to cover him. Rallies broadcast in full. Every insult he hurled was treated as breaking news. His most inflammatory soundbites dominated the 24 hour news cycle, handing him unfiltered access to millions of living rooms.
47 knew exactly how to finesse the media because he had over 30 years of practice. He knew the media needed the captive audience and he needed the spotlight. It was a match made in hell, and it turned his celebrity persona into political capital.
By the time the shot callers claimed to fully grasp the stakes, he became more than just another businessman running for president. America had plenty of those already.
He was a cultural juggernaut the media had dangled in front of us like an irresistible carrot, priming audiences to follow him straight into prime time.
We shouldn’t have been shocked by his ascent to power, although the U.S. was woefully unprepared for the reality of it as a country.
I’ve heard too many people say, “He doesn’t represent America.” I argue he does. Trump is America’s native son: greedy, brash, domineering, and tragically mediocre.
He’s kind of man the U.S. has been rewarding since the birth of that nation.
But putting him on the stage was only half the blunder. The other half was believing he’d never win the Presidency. So…
2. They Underestimated Him
Even with the platform the mainstream media helped America’s 47th President build, many of its professionals still didn’t take his candidacy seriously in 2015.
Instead, they treated it like a circus sideshow act. For many, it was nothing more than an amusing detour from “real” politics. Anchors flippantly declared he didn’t stand a chance, pundits smirked, rolled their eyes, and over-relied on polls that told them Clinton would pummel him at the ballot boxes, and headlines leaned on punchlines instead of policy.
They wrote him off as a reality star and an entertainer. But that was the fatal miscalculation.
He didn’t fit into their definition of a politician. He wasn’t trying to. He was redefining it. He’d already spent 3 decades positioning himself as a brilliant businessman with an empire worth emulating and a living avatar of the “American Dream.” Plenty of Americans, already conditioned to idolize (white) wealth and (white) power, bought it wholesale.
The press thought his brashness, vulgarity, and obvious corruption would disqualify him.
But they forgot that the U.S. is a nation founded on theft, so it’s no surprise that it always pedestals its biggest crooks.
And in Trump, it found a man who mirrored its own reflection perfectly: loud, lawless, and convinced the rules they wrote only applied to everybody else.
Turns out, he did win in 2016. And when he didn’t take home the W in 2020, he didn’t bow out gracefully. Unlike the average political candidates, he never stopped campaigning.
Instead, he toured the country peddling lie after lie about a “stolen” election. It’s the same rhetoric that emboldened his base and incited the deadly January 6th riot on the Capitol to overturn the election results.
That was yet another inflection point in America’s democratic backslide and marks how quickly a leader’s lies can metastasize into violence and undermine one of the world’s most celebrated democracies.
But once they realized he wasn’t going anywhere, the coverage shifted from mockery to deference. Then…
3. They Capitulated to Him
Somewhere along the way, the media’s bark faded and its bite disappeared. Outlets that once puffed their chests about “holding power to account” started pulling their punches. Many became toothless amplifiers of his antics.
Here’s where the mainstream media really showed its hand for me: when they let candidate Trump get away with musing about murder.
In Iowa while on the campaign trail, he declared: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” It takes a hell of a lot of audacity to say something like that with one’s chest. If the remark cost him voters, it wasn’t enough to matter.
He still won in 2016.
Mr. Shock-and-Awe had done it. He stunned the world. He stunted on his haters. So by his second term, the gloves were off. He was back with a vengeance and a vendetta.
When you vow—out loud—to prosecute your political opponents, it’s naïve to expect anything but governance driven by grievance. So it makes perfect sense he’s now weaponizing the courts to bleed media outlets dry with lawsuits.
Recently, Paramount had to cut him a $16 million check.
It was a payoff that should have never happened. In the lawsuit, the then former President claimed that the CBS program 60 Minutes “deceptively edited” an interview with VP Harris to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party” leading up to the presidential election. An election he still won.
A case that was once viewed as meritless by nearly all legal experts was shockingly ruled in his favor. That payout marked a chilling inflection point: proof that his threats work.
Very thuggish. Very gangster. Very mob moss.
The age old maxim sprang to life right in front of our eyes: Talk shit*. Get hit…
With a hefty lawsuit and at least 72 hours of the President disparaging your “failing media” company.
*shit = anything that doesn’t praise 47 or anything that attempts to hold him accountable.
What we’ve been watching is the mainstream media undergo a slow, humiliating surrender—one headline, one firing, one lawsuit at a time—until the very institutions sworn to challenge him have become too afraid, or too dependent on him, to even try.
Then came the final tell. Quite plainly…
4. They Profited Off of Him
But even as media organizations cowered, they kept feeding the beast because the beast kept paying their bills.
The gag is: they profited from the chaos.
One of the most infuriating parts about it all for me is that they built the stage, sold the tickets, and then acted shocked when the headliner went scorched earth.
Once they realized the mayhem was good for business, the mainstream press covered AND commodified it. Especially CNN. Fear sells. Rage bait gets clicks. Nothing spikes ratings, subscriptions, and ad dollars like a fresh Trump scandal.
Unfortunately, what we’ve been served stopped being news a long time ago - before 47 claimed the White House the first time around.
Now, a troubling amount of what passes for news is just an endless churn of entertainment content designed to hijack your dopamine and keep you glued to the screen.
By the time the reality TV-star-turned-politician arrived, the machinery was already primed to package him as a blockbuster franchise instead of a political pariah.
The dirty little secret is that the head honchos of these media giants bet on that franchise (and still do) because he’s been one of their most profitable cash cows yet.
The New York Times more than tripled its paying base—jumping from about 2 million subscribers in early 2017 to over 7 million by the time Biden was elected.
The Washington Post went from barely 200,000 digital subscriptions in early 2016 to a million by the end of 2017, then hit 3 million in 2020.
Cable news viewership exploded. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News’ combined prime-time audience ballooned from 3.1 million in 2015 to nearly 7.2 million in 2020.
Even contentious moments—like when NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly clashed with Mike Pompeo—sent donations surging.
As news anchors wrung their hands on-air about the dangers of his rhetoric, their networks were quietly betting on it.
Come to find out: they’ve been in on the con. The entire time.
Which means waiting for the mainstream to “do better” is a losing game. They’ve shown us who they are, and they’re not going to stop cashing in. Trump’s just too good for business.
These examples I’ve given you aren’t even comprehensive, and during the rise of authoritarian regimes, that’s by design.
The playbook includes overwhelming the public—“flooding the zone,” as Steve Bannon so cynically put it—until the sheer volume of crises blurs together. He knew it was no longer about persuasion. It was about disorientation. His words. Not mine.
Because that’s exactly when the despair, dread and paralysis set in.
It’s the kind of dystopian drift Octavia Butler warned us about in her prophetic Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), and Margaret Atwood presciently laid bare in The Handmaid’s Tale.
But I don’t believe we’re powerless. Or too far gone. Not yet anyway.
So that begs question: what do we do about it?
Where We Go From Here
Media literacy is just the first step. Discernment matters, but so does resource allocation. If we want news and storytelling that centers humanity over profit, we have to fund it.
That’s why independent media like Black Expat Stories are more important than ever. While the mainstream feeds on our fear, I’m committed to telling stories that expand our horizons, spark critical thought, and document what I believe is America’s Next Great Migration. We’re capturing a modern Exodus of Black Americans seeking freedom beyond the “Land of the Free.”
That’s how I’m doing my part. And I hope you’ll join me.
The world needs to see more Black people thriving because mainstream media loves to show us merely surviving.
Now is the time for us to evolve this platform from a podcast into a global docuseries, so we can bring these stories to an even wider audience and preserve them as part of our cultural record.
Your contributions will directly fund development, on-location filming, post-production, and distribution to reach audiences worldwide.
Every dollar helps ensure these narratives are captured with the depth, care, and production quality they deserve.
We don’t censor our storytellers or polish away their truth to fit a palatable narrative. They speak in their own words and you’ll hear things from them you’d never hear covered with nuance in the mainstream.
This work is about preserving our stories for future generations. It’s also about amplifying the voices that are too often misrepresented, underestimated, and silenced.
If you believe in our mission, there are 2 ways to give:
You can become a monthly contributor. Even $10 helps sustain this work.
Or you can make a one-time donation. Any amount is appreciated and goes directly toward production and distribution.
In the face of an empire that thrives on our silence, your support ensures we keep documenting our powerful stories and illuminating the path for others to imagine life beyond the U.S.
Because what if the new American Dream is to leave? For many of us, pondering that question has now become a matter of survival.
My mission is to tell the stories of those who made that leap and are thriving because they had the courage to.
Are you with me?
-Courtney
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