Audio By Vocalize I recently reread my father’s diaries from the 1960s: pages of hurried scribbles of an ambitious twenty-something, furious about the hypocrisies and injustices around him. For years, I read his journals as the record of a frustrated man trying to practice a profession the system has stripped of its purpose. He was a journalist in a country where reality was pre-written: the Soviet Union. This time, I read them as a stark warning: good reporting can exist without a free press. In an age of AI and resurgent authoritarianism, we risk rebuilding the same trap in…