Investigate journalist Sharyl Attkisson says combatting censorship in today’s media and big tech landscape requires Americans to “speak up” and stand firm against people and groups that seek to silence them. “I think the most important single thing people can do is to speak up and not be bullied by the people that want to keep the voices silent so that it appears, in this artificial world that we live in online, that everybody’s on the same page and everybody thinks the same thing and this is okay,” Attkisson told The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program. “Don’t be kowtowed into not speaking out. Don’t act like that’s okay.” Attkisson, author of “The Smear,” has been researching how information has been controlled in the United States, particularly by political and corporate interest groups. She said these groups began ramping up their efforts to control information once Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. But …