The Real News is a member-supported, global online video news network. Launched in 2007 by Paul Jay, The Real News Network describes itself as "focused on providing independent and uncompromising journalism", on "the critical issues of our times".

The Real News Network uses internet broadcasting, but it has contracts with satellite and cable television channels which it intends to use for broadcast once it reaches its first sustainability goal of 50,000 supporters. The Real News is based in Washington D.C., with bureaus in Baltimore and Toronto.

The stated goal of The Real News is to provide "independent and uncompromising" verifiable worldwide coverage of "the critical issues of our times". However, they also write that bias will affect the elements of the stories they choose to highlight.

The Real News also operates forums where their work can be debated and criticized, purportedly to remain aware of their own biases.

The Real News relies exclusively on supporters' donations, and does not accept funding from advertising, government or corporations.

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies. His most recent book is The World As It Is (2011).

Hedges is also known as the best-selling author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A quotation from the book was used as the opening title quotation in the film The Hurt Locker (2009). The quotation reads: "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990–2005).

Liberal elite is a political stigma used to describe highly-educated, politically left-leaning people, whose education had traditionally opened the doors to affluence. It is commonly used with the pejorative implication that the people who claim to support the rights of the working class are themselves members of the upper class, or upper middle class, and are therefore out of touch with the real needs of the people they claim to support and protect. The phrase "liberal elite" should not be confused with the term "elite" as used by writers such as Vilfredo Pareto and C. Wright Mills. They use the term to mean those who exercise the most political power.

The label is essentially a rhetorical device with flexible meaning depending on where in the English speaking world it is used. As a polemical term it has been used to refer to political positions as diverse as secularism, environmentalism, feminism, and other positions associated with the left.

The originating usage in the United States is applied with various changes to other English speaking countries and by extension to left-leaning elites in other countries.