'"[9] By the time she was a sophomore at San Diego State University, she began questioning what she called the "selling" of the Iraq War by the media.

[10] Martin worked for a time as an investigative journalist for a San Diego-based online news site until moving back to Northern California.

[30] Shortly after beginning her show on RT, Martin stated in an interview with Mark Crispin Miller that "the media dismisses things that are too controversial as conspiracy theory".

[32][33][34][35] Glenn Greenwald compared Martin's statement favorably to the unquestioning behavior of the United States media during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

[36] Critics of Martin argue that she appeared to be reading from a teleprompter, implying that her remarks were made with the consent of the show's producers.

She has hosted guests including Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Richard D. Wolff, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

[45] In 2018, Telesur stopped funding The Empire Files due to increasing US sanctions on Venezuela, according to a press release published by Martin's Media Roots website.

Martin, her co-producer and husband Michael Prysner, and other Telesur contract journalists had their funding blocked by the application of United States sanctions against Venezuela.

[46] Academic Stuart Davis cites the cancellation as an example of how United States sanctions hamper public funding of media production in Venezuela.

[51] In May 2021, in a federal court hearing in Georgia, District Judge Mark Cohen ruled in Martin's favor when he found that a law created to discourage the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was in violation of the First Amendment.

He said her "lamentations for lost American freedom" did not equate to anti-authoritarianism and criticised her for "fail[ing] to notice Russia’s previous brutal military interventions and ongoing brutal war on terror" prior to its invasion of Crimea and for saying Hugo Chávez "cannot be dismissed as a tyrant because his voice of opposition, and others like him, serves a necessary divide to prevent global corporate enslavement and tyranny".

[56] James Kirchick, in a 2015 article for The Daily Beast, commented: "Thanks to her paymasters in the Kremlin, she had three years to use the network's airwaves and wildly popular YouTube channel to broadcast paranoid diatribes that would otherwise have languished in anonymity on the Internet fringe.

"[57] Regarding her work on Venezuela, libertarian journalist and author John Stossel states that Martin "does government-funded propaganda for Telesur".

In 2014 New York Times columnist Robert Mackey contrasted Martin's critical remarks on the Russian annexation of Crimea with her conviction "that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were part of a government conspiracy.