Abby Martin

Abigail Suzanne Martin (born September 6, 1984) is an American journalist, TV presenter, and activist.

She helped found the citizen journalism website Media Roots and serves on the board of directors for the Media Freedom Foundation which manages Project Censored.

She became interested in journalism when her old high school boyfriend enlisted in the military after the September 11 attacks in 2001.

"I didn't want him going to war, let alone fighting in one," she recalls.

"I began to critically ask 'What is really going on?'" By the time she was a sophomore at San Diego State University, she began questioning what she called the "selling" of the Iraq War by the media.

She received an undergraduate degree in political science and minored in Spanish.

In 2008, Martin was active in the 9/11 truth movement, a movement which disputes the consensus regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Martin set up her own "truther" group in San Diego, California.

That year, Martin said that the attacks of September 11 were "an inside job, and that our government was complicit in what happened".

Martin grew up in Pleasanton, California, where she attended Amador Valley High School, graduating in 2002.

Glenn Greenwald compared Martin's statement favorably to the unquestioning behavior of the United States media during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Critics of Martin argue that she appeared to be reading from a teleprompter, implying that her remarks were made with the consent of the show's producers.

RT issued a statement saying: "Contrary to the popular opinion, RT doesn't beat its journalists into submission, and they are free to express their own opinions, not just in private but on the air."

RT added: "[W]e'll be sending her to Crimea to give her an opportunity to make up her own mind from the epicentre of the story."

Martin declined the offer, saying "I am not going to Crimea despite the statement RT has made."

The New York Times wrote that RT notified Martin that what she had said about Ukraine was "not in line with our editorial policy".

In 2004, she campaigned for John Kerry's presidential campaign, but became disillusioned with the left–right paradigm, a concept proposing that societies have a tendency to divide themselves into ideological opposites.

Martin worked for a time as an investigative journalist for a San Diego-based online news site until moving back to Northern California.

In 2009, Martin founded the organization Media Roots, a citizen journalism platform for reporting news.

In the fall of 2010, she moved to Washington, D.C.

As an independent journalist with Media Roots, Martin covered the Occupy Oakland actions during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

Her documentary video footage of Occupy Oakland protests was used by the family of Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former Marine and Iraq War veteran, in a lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department.

Martin's footage was used to argue that the protests were non-violent at the time Olsen was allegedly hit in the head with a police projectile.

RT took notice of Martin's work and began using her as a correspondent.

She hosted Breaking the Set on the Russian state-funded network RT America from 2012 to 2015, and then launched The Empire Files in that same year as an investigative documentary and interview series on Telesur, later released as a web series.

From 2012 to 2015, Martin hosted her own show, Breaking the Set, on RT America.

The program described itself as "a show that cuts through the false left/right paradigm set by the establishment and reports the hard facts".

The original opening credits depict Martin applying a sledgehammer to a television tuned to CNN.

Shortly after beginning her show on RT, Martin stated in an interview with Mark Crispin Miller that "the media dismisses things that are too controversial as conspiracy theory".

Martin appeared in the documentary film Project Censored The Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News (2013), and co-directed 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film (2013).

In March 2014, Martin told the Associated Press that she "no longer subscribes" to conspiracy theories regarding the attacks.

In 2014, Martin gained attention for her criticism of RT's coverage of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.

Martin closed her show on March 3, 2014 with a minute-long statement condemning the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Martin left RT in February 2015.

Speaking for RT, Anna Belkina told BuzzFeed: "Abby decided that this is the time for her to try something new. We are proud of the great work she has done as the host of Breaking the Set."

Martin called the charges of foreign control over her and Tulsi Gabbard "neo-McCarthyist hysteria" typical of the New Cold War.

She said that the "campaign to malign RT" by "the corporate media" had resulted in a chilling effect over legitimate dissident reporters.

She said that she had "complete editorial control" over her RT show, as did other American RT journalists like Chris Hedges and Lee Camp.

She had earlier refused RT's offer to send her on a tour of Crimea, saying she didn't want a "vetted PR experience."

In 2019, she released the film documentary, The Empire Files: Gaza Fights for Freedom.