Jane Velez-Mitchell Built UnchainedTV Because Mainstream Media Keeps Burying Animal Rights Stories

Jane Velez-Mitchell stopped waiting for mainstream media to grow a spine and built UnchainedTV, a vegan streaming network for the animal rights stories corporate news keeps cutting away from.

Lancaster, PA – June 10th, 2026 – Jane Velez-Mitchell did not leave mainstream media because she lacked a platform.

She had one.

She had the television résumé, the national audience, the newsroom experience, the interview chops and the kind of credibility that comes from years spent inside the machine. She knew how legacy media worked because she had worked in it at local TV stations like WCBS-TV in New York and KCAL-TV in Los Angeles, at syndicated TV shows like Celebrity Justice and at national cable TV news outlets. She knew what made air and what got buried. She knew which stories were treated as urgent and which were politely shoved to the margins.

And, somewhere along the way, the silence around animals, specifically animal rights, became impossible to ignore.

Because mainstream media has never had a shortage of cameras. It has had a shortage of courage.

That is the uncomfortable truth sitting underneath “Who is Jane Velez-Mitchell?” The video interview, conducted by  Searching for Goodness podcast host Bessy Adut, dives deep into the life of the TV journalist, New York Times bestselling author and animal rights activist who founded UnchainedTV. It’s the world’s only free, nonprofit, streaming and FAST channel TV network for veganism and animal rights. This is not just a founder bio. It is a reminder that UnchainedTV exists because the media landscape failed to make room for the stories animals needed told.

So, Jane built the room herself.

From the Newsroom to the Front Line

Before founding UnchainedTV, Velez-Mitchell was already a nationally recognized journalist. She worked as a television news anchor and reporter, covering major national stories. For six years, she hosted her own nightly show on HLN/CNN Headline News and built a career in the kind of media world most people spend their lives trying to break into.

But, professional success does not mean much if the truth keeps getting edited out.

For decades, animal stories have been treated like side dishes in the media buffet: a cute rescue segment here, a plant-based trend piece there, maybe a brief flash of outrage when cruelty becomes impossible to sanitize. But the system itself? The slaughterhouses, laboratories, factory farms, climate collapse, wildlife exploitation and speciesism baked into law and language?

That usually gets softened, skipped or repackaged until the horror becomes palatable or simply disappears entirely.

That is the whole damn problem.

UnchainedTV did not emerge because veganism needed another lifestyle channel. It emerged because animals needed witnesses with cameras, microphones and distribution.

HLN: The Wonderful Exception to the Media Ban on Animal Rights

Velez-Mitchell was also inspired by a wonderful exception to the mainstream media rule that treats animals as mere commodities in farming or fashion. When she was hired in 2008 to host her own nightly, hour-long TV show on HLN,  she requested and was granted permission to do a weekly news segment on animal rights. For six years, from 2008 through 2014, Velez-Mitchell ended her weekly run with a 4-minute news segment highlighting animal rights news. She interviewed virtually all of the leaders in the animal rights movement, from Whale Wars star Captain Paul Watson to former animal trainer turned activist Rick O’Barry, from Farm Sanctuary visionary Gene Baur to PETA Co-Founder Ingrid Newkirk. When the show ended its run in late 2014, Velez-Mitchell decided to turn that short weekly segment into a new career, launching an animal rights news network that – in 2018 – became an official non-profit, now called UnchainedTV. She works round the clock running that streaming and FAST channel TV network, a labor of love for which she does not take a salary. Velez-Mitchell puts it this way. “It’s a team effort with lots of like-minded volunteers. Of course, I’m working just as hard as I ever have, but now it’s a passion project through which I hope to help animals trapped in factory farms, slaughterhouses, laboratories and zoos.” She added, “I will always be grateful to my bosses at HLN for allowing me to showcase animal rights on a national, indeed global, TV network. It was the basis for everything I’ve done since.”

The Stories Mainstream Media Would Rather Keep Quiet

But, despite that admirable exception, mainstream media’s blackout on animal rights remains firm. Velez-Mitchell jokes that – for the most part, “You have to either get naked or get arrested to get an animal rights story on mainstream media.” Legacy media loves a food trend once it becomes profitable. It can cover oat milk. It can cover celebrity vegans. It can cover a plant-based burger when Wall Street is interested.

But, ask it to sit with the actual violence behind animal agriculture, and suddenly the room gets very uncomfortable.

Words like “processing,” “harvesting,” “livestock,” “culling” and “humane slaughter” do not just describe a system. They protect it. They keep viewers in the dark. They turn living beings into abstractions before the public ever gets to decide whether it cares.

UnchainedTV interrupts that script.

It covers vegan food, yes. But it also covers the rescue workers, undercover investigators, doctors, lawyers, sanctuary founders, filmmakers, activists and everyday people trying to drag the truth into the daylight. With more than 2,000 videos and counting, it treats animal protection not as a fringe hobby, but as one of the defining ethical issues of our time.

That matters.

Because animals do not just need sympathy. They need media power to inspire real change in order to stop their suffering. 

Journalism With a Spine

One of the most compelling things about Velez-Mitchell’s work is that she rejects the tired idea that journalism must be emotionally dead in order to be credible.

Facts matter. Accuracy matters. Evidence matters.

But, pretending not to care while mass suffering unfolds is not objectivity. It is performance.

There is nothing neutral about ignoring slaughter. There is nothing balanced about giving violent industries endless room to explain themselves while advocates are dismissed as extreme for noticing the blood on the floor. There is nothing serious about a media culture that can spend hours analyzing a celebrity scandal but treats the industrialized torture and killing of  more than 80 billion animals a year for food as background noise.

Velez-Mitchell brought something different to the table: journalism with a spine.

That is the force behind UnchainedTV. It does not ask whether animals deserve to be part of the story. It starts from the recognition that they have been the story all along.

The Alternative Was Necessary

The question “Who is Jane Velez-Mitchell?” is really a question about what happens when someone stops waiting for permission.

Velez-Mitchell could have stayed inside mainstream media and occasionally pushed the conversation forward from there. Instead, she helped create a TV news and entertainment platform where animal stories are not occasional exceptions. They are the centerpiece.

That is a radical shift.

UnchainedTV is a free streaming TV network devoted to plant-based living, animal advocacy, documentaries, cooking shows, talk shows, lifestyle programming and original reporting. But, beneath that programming is a larger argument: the future of media cannot be built on the same moral blind spots that shaped the past.

Animals cannot remain invisible because advertisers are nervous.

Veganism cannot be reduced to a diet because the full ethical conversation makes people uncomfortable.

And, journalism cannot keep pretending that the systems destroying animals, human health and the planet are just another lifestyle choice.

The Camera Is Already Rolling

Jane Velez-Mitchell’s story matters because it shows what happens when professional media experience meets moral refusal.

She knew the old system. She understood its reach, its rhythm and its power. Then, she took those tools and turned them toward the beings most often kept off-screen.

That is not just career reinvention.

That is a media intervention.

UnchainedTV is what happens when someone looks at the silence, recognizes it as complicity and decides to build a broadcast home for the truth anyway.

The mainstream had its chance to tell these stories with urgency.

Jane Velez-Mitchell picked up the camera instead.