Maj. Danny Sjursen

Recently, I was home with my sick toddler. Due to his lethargy, he alternated all day between sleeping across my lap and watching “Fireman Sam” YouTube videos on my phone. Writing my next column or reading for my upcoming think-tank piece was thus out of the question. So, for my sins, I was relegated to watching CNN for 12 hours straight. It served mainly as background noise, admittedly, but to do what I do week after week one must stay on top of the “news”—to the extent the big three cable news channels still report it. In all that day’s time, CNN, the self-styled "world’s news leader," spent a whopping two and a half minutes covering America’s longest-ever, ongoing, war in Afghanistan.

See, whether it’s reflexive hatred of Donald Trump (MSNBC), adulation of the president (Fox News) or pathological obsession with him (CNN), the mainstream press has decided—cha-ching!—to report on little else. And why not? Trump is nothing if not entertaining and a profits-boosting machine. (CBS Chairman Les Moonves quipped in 2016 that “[Trump’s candidacy] may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.”) That the top networks don’t even bother to deny the motivation demonstrates that establishment media has gone into full-tilt entertainment mode over information mode.

Most Americans, struggling as they increasingly are to make ends meet in a decades-long era of working-class wage stagnation, have sunken so far into despair that they hardly notice that our wars are being ignored. Not me. Maybe because I now make a living covering the nation’s endless wars, and certainly because I buried eight beloved soldiers, along with my emotional health, in those very conflicts, I’m personally insulted! How dare CNN (and the others) hardly mention the Afghanistan War—in which U.S. troops are still dying—across 12 hours of nonstop “news” coverage?

In such times, truly involved citizens—and they are still out there—have no choice but to turn to alternative media, which, though ignored in the mainstream press, is actually flourishing … creatively, if not financially. Among such publications, Truthdig has always stood out for me—long before I ever dreamed of writing professionally for Truthdig or any other site.

Once upon a time, then-1st Lt. Danny Sjursen—yes, I weathered plenty of “Lt. Dan” jokes—had just returned from Iraq and was intellectually and morally lost. If I had had any real courage, I would have resigned from the Army right then. Only I didn’t. Still, I had an unquenchable desire to absorb any and all writing that was vaguely antiwar, and that took an (empirically) skeptical view of America’s post-9/11 military deployments. Around that time, I discovered Chris Hedges’ work, which led me to Truthdig and opened my eyes to a plethora of other courageous, honest writers. I was immediately hooked.

So, when Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer began publishing my work, I—an inexperienced, burgeoning writer still on active duty in the Army—was on cloud nine. Eventually, I would become a weekly columnist. As a veritable Chris Hedges “fan boy,” it was an honor to be his colleague, of a sort. More than that, Bob, Publisher Zuade Kaufman and the whole team at Truthdig proved even more creative, fearless and willing to take artistic risks than I’d imagined. When I pitched a U.S. history series—of nearly 40 parts, with some individual installments reaching nearly 15,000 words—I expected to be laughed out of the room. On the contrary, Bob and Zuade not only accepted my proposal but encouraged me to frame the series as a future book bearing the Truthdig stamp.

This publication believes in its writers, pushes against barriers in the quest for truth and performs a vital service for readers in ways that surpass even the aspirations of most other media outlets. Here I’ve found not just a space for creative control and unflappable journalistic support—an increasingly rare situation these days—but a genuine home.