Abby Martin

Abby Martin is an American journalist, television 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. 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).

She hosted Breaking the Set on the Russian state-funded network RT America from 2012 to 2015 and gained attention for condemning the Russian annexation of Crimea on-air, 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. In 2019, she released the film documentary The Empire Files: Gaza Fights for Freedom.

Born in Oakland, California, Martin grew up in nearby Pleasanton, where she attended Amador Valley High School, graduating in 2002. 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 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 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". In March 2014, the Associated Press wrote that Martin no longer believes that U.S. government officials might have been complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In 2009, Martin founded the organization Media Roots, a citizen journalism platform for reporting news. 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 employing her as a correspondent. In the fall of 2010, she moved to Washington, D.C.

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 media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller that "the media dismisses things that are too controversial as conspiracy theory".