New Media's Top 10 Independent Voices: No. 10 — Kim Iversen
Raw and honest journalist, unwilling to fall in line.
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“My job is dependent on telling you the truth, because the minute you can sense that I’m not telling you the truth is the minute that you’re not going to be here anymore.” — Kim Iversen
IN a media landscape largely dominated by male political commentators on YouTube, Kim Iversen carved out her own space almost overnight. Her hard-hitting, independent news show quickly gained traction, becoming a trusted source for agenda-free reporting. In just eight months after launching her YouTube channel in January 2019, Iversen amassed over 100,000 subscribers.
Her secret?
Reporting on news stories truthfully, with no misleading narratives or agenda. It may seem shocking how basic of a standard that is, but the amount of corporate news journalists, and even independent personalities on Youtube, whose views are routinely, neatly packaged for consumption, is staggering. If these platforms are not purposely adhering to a set of pre-approved narratives about a given event, they’re framing the story in a way that completely misrepresents the event. So finding a voice that cuts through all of that noise easily becomes distinguishable.
Iversen’s emergence as a political journalist and commentator, on the surface, appeared to be instantaneous, but behind the facade of a quick success story was an arduous, but passion-filled, climb from corporate radio into independent media, with lots of sacrifices made along the way. She briefly details that journey in a September 2019 video celebrating a milestone of 100,000 subscribers.
From the start, Iversen set herself apart with her commitment to true independent thought and her unapologetic honesty—delivering the truth as she sees it, whether her audience agrees or not. “I don't fall in line when the line leads to bullshit,” she shares in her show description on Youtube. And that much is clear from her critical and, at times, controversial coverage on a myriad of topics including: elections, foreign policy, Covid-19 lockdowns, vaccine safety and efficacy, Anthony Fauci, censorship, press freedoms, Russia-Ukraine war, Israel-Palestine conflict, and many more.
She pulls no punches, is daring enough to take informed but unpopular positions when it matters most, is beholden to nobody but herself, and is quick to offer corrections when she gets something wrong. Her experience with the Tulsi Gabbard 2020 presidential campaign as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s response, among other events, is especially instructive about her principles and priorities as a journalist.
In March 2019, with a newly growing platform, Iversen sat down with Tulsi Gabbard on the campaign trail to achieve a crucial goal: offer a thorough look at Gabbard’s policies, positions, and priorities—something legacy media outlets failed to do amidst their relentless smear campaigns.
This early conversation would lay the foundation for Iversen’s staunch support for Gabbard’s campaign throughout that year and would culminate in Iversen wholeheartedly endorsing Gabbard, and even joining her on the campaign trail.
In March 2020, when Gabbard announced the suspension of her presidential campaign, she also made an announcement that caught many of her most loyal supporters off guard, including Iversen: her full endorsement of then Vice President Joe Biden. The candidate who’d made her name on the campaign trail as the anti-war and anti-establishment figure capable of uniting various political factions against the Washington DC elite crowd had suddenly fallen back in line to endorse the establishment candidate.
In a moment where corporate journalists and establishment political pundits would immediately and unquestionably justify Gabbard’s unexpected decision to voters as a necessary tactic “to defeat Trump,” Iversen took a slightly different route. “I’m really disappointed that she endorsed Joe Biden, I’m not going to lie,” she said in a segment covering the announcement. “This is not the way that I would’ve done it… I would’ve endorsed Bernie Sanders, or I would have not endorsed anybody at all.” She continued, trying to be empathetic with a candidate she’d personally grown close to while remaining steadfast in her own principles, “Yes, Tulsi Gabbard was my favorite candidate. But at the end of the day, I am loyal to an idea, an idea that I personally am holding firm to, and that is that I want the establishment to come down.”
This event marked the beginning of Iversen’s critical coverage of Gabbard’s political evolution, from Democrat to Independent, anti-war candidate to a war hawk, and from endorsing Vice President Biden to endorsing President Trump in 2024.
During the Covid-19 hysteria, Iversen’s coverage, from the very beginning, was measured, analytical, and absent the unhinged hysteria that populated the airwaves of major news television networks. She critically reported on all things Covid-19, vaccine safety and efficacy, vaccine mandates and injuries, the pandemic response by the Trump and Biden administration, Dr. Fauci and the CDC, and much more, directly from her own Youtube channel, and for The Hill’s Rising, during a brief stint with the Washington D.C. daily news web show.
During her tenure at Rising from 2021 to 2022, Iversen’s coverage harkened back to the straightforward honesty of 1980s newscasters—delivering the news with a direct, matter-of-fact approach that felt refreshingly authentic. Iversen’s uncompromising journalism during this period is deserving of the highest recognition, as it came at a time when Big Tech, acting under government pressure, was at the height of enforcing the most draconian censorship policies. These measures silenced independent journalists and commentators who dared to challenge official narratives, often through suspensions, demonetization, or outright bans under the guise of combating “misinformation.” She brought attention to a variety of suppressed issues—many of which her very own corporate journalist colleagues were evidently not comfortable addressing—including illogical vaccine mandates, infringement on bodily freedom, and business closures, the ever-evolving efficacy claims of the vaccines, the FDA’s conflict of interest funding by the Big Pharma corporations it’s supposed to be regulating, Fauci’s documented lies and flip-flopping, email leaks that revealed collusion between Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH’s Francis Collins to smear scientists and shut down scientific debate, mass formation psychosis, court-ordered vaccine documents revealing side effects of Pfizer’s covid vaccine, Bill Gate’s “expert” plan to handle future pandemics, and many more.
Iversen’s groundbreaking reporting on Covid-19 and the botched top-down response would eventually come to a head when Dr. Fauci was scheduled to appear on the show, in July 2022, while making his media rounds. For Iversen, this was an investigative journalist’s mission realized: the opportunity to hold power to account, in real time. This was essentially one of the final pieces to the story of the pandemic, a disastrous response by health organizations and governments (US), and the impending health crisis to follow, especially for the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who’d faced no critical lines of questioning at all, save for his appearances before the Senate with Sen. Rand Paul.
To Iversen’s dismay, she was blindsided by the producers of the show when Fauci’s team inquired about who’d be hosting the interview and she was not among those listed. Strangely, the show’s most beloved host, whose “report on natural immunity in August 2021 is one of The Hill’s most popular YouTube videos, with over 2 million views,” according to a report in Nasdaq, was coincidentally left off of a critical interview segment with the key conspirator of the Covid narrative.
When the show made a final decision to move on with the interview without Iversen, it signaled a major abandonment of journalistic duty and the violation of trust with the show’s core audience. In response, Iversen immediately tendered her resignation, returning back to her self-produced show, integrity still intact.
BOOKMARK & STAY UPDATED WITH KIM IVERSEN’S JOURNALISM:
¹ The Kim Iversen Show — Uncensored, independent critical analysis of current politics (on Rumble).
² Twitter/𝕏 — Realtime insights and reflections on politics and culture.
I enjoyed watching Iversen on Rising, and I'm really appreciative of all the links you've provided so I can go back and review them. Already watched a couple, including the one where she reports on the vaccine mandates that President Biden announced.
One of the things I'm worried about is that my belief that government officials lied/covered up is itself a false narrative. Especially when I read the fact-checks that say things like, "The problems with this Covid vaccine were already well known when it was taken off the market." And so it's good to go back through the reporting and realize that, yeah, the government and Big Pharma were not always forthright.
She would be in my Top Five. I will be curious whose your Top Five are. :)