Showing posts with label Project Censored. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Project Censored. Show all posts
Monday, April 22, 2013
Sociology of Conspiracies
Latest Class given by Peter Phillips at SSU
Program: Academic Credit: Summer 2013, Sonoma State University
SOCI 497: Sociology of Conspiracies is an academic upper division class on the history and cultural understandings of conspiracies by elites and the powerful in society.
We will ask the question do elites and the powerful make plans and take actions that may harm others or democracy. We will study the theories State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD) and Power Elite Theory. We will explore how people in the US have long held conspiracy theories going back to the Revolutionary War. We will take a look at contemporary efforts by elites to use media to discredit research regarding the orgins of 20th wars, political assassinations, 9/11, and US election fraud. We will focus on solid academic research for discussion and challenge those who explainations for events goes beyond available evidence.
Textbooks:
Conspiracy Theory, Lance deHavenSmith, University of Texas Press, 2013
9/11 and American Empire, Intellectuals Speak Out, David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, Olive Branch Press, 2007
And a Course Reader
The Course will include Guest lectures, Films and Discussion on this very important topic for Democracy.
Instructor: Peter Phillips
Credit: 4 units
Fee: $1280
Peter Phillips Ph.D is a Professor in the Sociology Department at SSU. Phillips has written and lectured extensively on the Power Elite, Transnational Corporate Class, and Conspiracies. He is the author and editor of seventeen books on Censorship and the Interlocks of Elites in the world.
12 mtgs: M-Th, Jul 15-Aug 1, 1:00 PM -5:50 PM
Salazar Hall 2019
SOCI 497; #1127; 4 units; $1280
http://www.ssuexed.com/course.php?id=2544&sem=2&year=2013
Summer Housing Available During the Class
http://www.sonoma.edu/summerhousing/
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Monday, November 5, 2012
Elite Class Folly in Sonoma County California
Peter Phillips
ProjectCensored.org
The September 29, 2012 opening of the Green Music Center (GMC) at Sonoma State University (SSU) was nothing less than a grand celebration of wealth and privilege. Beaded dresses, tuxedos, and political elites blended in a glorious aristocratic coming out. The ceremonious inauguration was a joining of the regional symphonic upper elites in delusional expectations of continuing high-class cultural immersions.
Built in a time of an economic recession and including $47 million in public bonds, the $150 million GMC represents one of the most opulent expensive building projects in the history of Sonoma County. The website for the GMC claims it is “Destined to become one of the most sought-after music and arts venues in the world.” “All three floors of Weill Hall are filled with handcrafted, European steamed beech maple seats, which remain acoustically neutral whether occupied or empty.” An A level seat for the first eight concerts costs $626 and B level concerts are $459 for the same. A single ticket for the first concert was $81.00. Dinners at the GMC Prelude restaurant range for $31-50, not including wine.
One attendee was reported to have remarked, “the bathrooms were nicer than my whole house.”
Splendid indeed are the ten majestic 118-year-old olive trees, which grace the Green Music Center’s Trione Courtyard leading to Weill Concert Hall, which are old growth Sevillano olive trees dug up and transported on a flat bed truck from Corning, California.
Weill Hall is named after a semi-billionaire, whose wealth accumulation is directly linked to the impoverishment of millions of American families and home foreclosures in the thousands in Sonoma County.
While SSU is suffering tuition increases, declining student-faculty ratios, and widespread institutional cuts, the corporate media fell over itself with acclaim for SSU President Ruben Armiñana’s “vision”—vaunting magniloquently his personal drive. Presidents of state colleges, with the approval of the California State University (CSU) trustees, have total financial control over their institutions. Therefore, an administrative manager of a public taxpayer supported university can cozy up to the regional elites and pro-growth forces to build a Taj Mahal without any democratic process with the stakeholders inside the institution or the public at large. This unilateral control is as much about why 73.4% of the SSU faculty in May 2007 voted no confidence in President Armiñana as was the issue of allocation of resources to instruction.
I recently asked my Sociology class of some 45 juniors and seniors if fifteen years ago the SSU development office had said to the students and faculty that they plan to raise $150 million in support of new projects, what would you like to see done with the money—how many would have supported a world-class music hall? Zero hands went up and laughter filled the room. Sometimes we can only laugh at the folly of elites.
From a public perspective, $150 million could have had huge regional impacts on poverty, homelessness, home foreclosures, and human misery. The self-aggrandizement of the symphonic elites, many of whom are multi-millionaires and one percenters, manifests a folly so classist as to challenge the very notion of human rights and equal opportunity.
The extravagance of the GMC means SSU faculty, students, and staff will continue to suffer lost resources long into the future due to continuing expenses in excess of income. All due to the willingness of regional elites and the CSU trustees to support and accept the megalomania vision of a single individual with far too much power.
In a century where humankind faces possible extinction, and 2.5 billion people live on less that $2 a day with some 30,000 dying everyday from malnourishment and simply cured diseases, wealth concentration is sinful and the celebration of wealth with grandiose monuments is the mortal sin of the elite.
Someday, these monuments to wealth will be occupied, renamed and democratically modified to meet the needs of the people. In the meantime, we must continue to denounce classism and mobilize collectively for global human betterment.
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and President of Media Freedom Foundation.
Become a Project Censored Subscription Member for $5 a month and get the newest Project Censored Book for Free!
Be a sustaining member of Project Censored and become a Media Freedom Fighter by subscribing for as little as $5 a month. This important contribution helps us keep our research going, keep our websites updated with the most current validated news stories, and will come with a special thank you gift, the most recent edition of Censored, our annual sourcebook for the media revolution. We appreciate any support you can give, and we welcome you all in the struggle to achieve and maintain a truly free press of, by, and for We the People.
Check out Project Censored Radio!
Project Censored is now on the Radio! Check out the archive here:
http://www.projectcensored.org/videos/radio-archive/
Copyright © 2012 Media Freedom foundation, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Media Freedom foundation
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Monday, October 29, 2012
Our Pitilessly Intoxicating Drones
Andy Lee Roth
ProjectCensored.org
The initial US response to the deadly attack on the nation's Libyan embassy includes deploying spies, Marines, and drones. Current reports indicate that US drones operating in Libyan airspace will be limited to surveillance. But the decision to deploy them in this highly volatile situation ought to force American citizens to reflect on a somber anniversary. It warns against believing that drones provide a costless way to curb our terrorist enemies.
Americans should remember September 30, 2011, the day that drones unleashed by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) targeted American citizen Anwar Al-Aulaqi, killing him and at least three other people, including a second US citizen, Samir Khan. Al-Aulaqi had been on CIA and JSOC "kill lists" since late 2009 or early 2010, and the target of previous drone strikes. Although US officials alleged that Khan was not a target in the September 2011 strike, they contended that he too played an active role in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A subsequent US drone strike in Yemen on October 14, 2011, killed seven people, including Al-Aulaqi's 16-year old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen.
Their deaths were part of an ongoing, systematic program of US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in countries outside the context of armed conflict. The US has conducted targeted killings in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia since 2002, though this campaign intensified dramatically in 2009 after President Obama took office.
The anniversary of Anwar Al-Aulaqi's death underscores two interrelated and intractable problems with our reliance on drones. Internationally, drones intensify our enemies' resolve because drones, no less than the suicide bombers and roadside devices that Americans have come to dread, are instruments of terror and lawless death. Domestically, drone strikes against US citizens on foreign soil usurp even the pretense of legal due process.
Force, Simone Weil once observed, is pitilessly intoxicating to those who possess it. So it is not surprising that neither the American public nor their leaders have sought an informed public debate about the use of drones for targeted killings. Does their deployment make good sense in terms of national security? Is the nation’s drone-based response to terrorism even legal under the US constitution and international law?
By invoking vague, shifting legal standards and asserting secrecy in the name of national security, government officials, including President Obama himself, have effectively situated the drone campaign on the periphery of public concern. With few exceptions, the corporate media have followed officials' leads.
Government officials seldom provide the public with evidence that targeted individuals posed specific and imminent threats, except for the assertion that they were "on the list." This was true in Al-Aulaqi's case. Government officials, including Obama's counterterrorism chief Michael Leiter, compared al-Aulaqi to Osama bin Laden. Just as exaggerated descriptions of bin Laden as a "terrorist mastermind" oversimplified the complexity of Islamist terrorist networks, so comparisons of Al-Aulaqi to bin Laden overemphasized al-Aulaqi's importance to Al Qaeda and his threat to US security. The corporate media dutifully conveyed these official views while describing Al-Aulaqi as an "alleged" or "suspected" terrorist.
By and large, the American public seems to have accepted the government's argument of guilt by assertion and rhetorical association: A February 2012 opinion poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News found that 83 percent of Americans approved of drone strikes against terrorists overseas, including 65 percent who approved even when "those suspected terrorists are American citizens living in other countries."
Neither President Obama nor Republican challenger Mitt Romney has shown any inclination to make targeted killings a campaign issue. Overshadowed by the hoopla of the Democratic National Convention, President Obama conducted a brief, formal interview with CNN's Jessica Yellin in which he acknowledged that drones are "one tool we use" in order "to keep the American people safe." Obama affirmed that targets must be "authorized by our laws" and pose threats that are "serious and not speculative." In response to Yellin's question, "Are the standards different when the target is an American?" Obama avowed that American citizens "are subject to the protections of the constitution and due process." Neither Yellin nor Obama mentioned Al-Aulaqi, and Yellin chose not pursue the contradiction between the President's claim and the facts regarding September 30, 2011.
A combination of divided oversight and economic conflicts of interest have kept Congress from effectively holding the White House, the CIA, or JSOC accountable. As the Washington Post's Greg Miller has reported, congressional lawmakers "receive scant information about the administration's drone program," and executive claims of secrecy typically muzzle them from discussing the little information they do receive. Meanwhile, drone manufacturers—including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Atomics—lobby Congress for increasingly lucrative federal contracts through industry organizations such as AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. AUVSI lobbyists and similar industry groups meet willing sponsors in Congress: The House of Representatives has its own drone caucus with over fifty bipartisan members. Divided oversight and corporate lobbying combine to render Congress ineffective in challenging the White House, CIA, and JSOC on drones.
In June 2012, a sharply worded letter to President Obama from Rep. Dennis Kucinich and 25 additional members of Congress questioned the authority for so-called "signature" strikes, characterizing drones as "faceless ambassadors" that cause both civilian deaths and "powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment." Corporate media all but ignored this congressional rebuke, thus contributing to a counter-democratic dynamic in which the American public is unaware of developing Congressional opposition, while a majority in Congress will not take a position against targeted killing until their constituents demand that they do so.
Due to the persistence of civil rights groups, the courts may be the first branch of government to hold the illegal drone campaign's commanders accountable. A July 2012 lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union names Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, Commander of US Special Operations Command William McRaven, JSOC Commander Joseph Votel, and CIA Director David Petraeus as defendants in the deaths of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi. Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta argues that the targeted killing of Anwar Al-Aulaqi was not "a last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury" and is therefore a violation of both the US Constitution and international human rights law. It also charges that the defendants failed in their obligations, under the Constitution and international law, "to take measures to prevent harm to Samir Khan, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, and other bystanders."
As present, the government's global drone campaign operates with minimal transparency, accountability, or oversight. The lawsuit could force the defendants to reveal the process used to determine that Al-Aulaqi must die and the evidence for that decision. If Rep. Kucinich is right—drone strikes pose significant threats to national security because they promote widespread, powerful anti-American sentiment—then the court's decision in Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta could do more to protect the US and its citizens than was accomplished by the targeted killing of Al-Aulaqi and other alleged terrorists. The case could sober the American public enough to reckon with the reality that, although drones seem a costless substitute for boots on the ground, our intoxication with them threatens our national security and our most cherished values.
Andy Lee Roth, PhD, is associate director of Project Censored and co-editor of Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, which includes the study on which this analysis is based.
Become a Project Censored Subscription Member for $5 a month and get the newest Project Censored Book for Free!
Be a sustaining member of Project Censored and become a Media Freedom Fighter by subscribing for as little as $5 a month. This important contribution helps us keep our research going, keep our websites updated with the most current validated news stories, and will come with a special thank you gift, the most recent edition of Censored, our annual sourcebook for the media revolution. We appreciate any support you can give, and we welcome you all in the struggle to achieve and maintain a truly free press of, by, and for We the People.
Check out Project Censored Radio!
Project Censored is now on the Radio! Check out the archive here:
http://www.projectcensored.org/videos/radio-archive/
Copyright © 2012 Media Freedom foundation, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Media Freedom foundation
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Monday, January 30, 2012
A Sourcebook on Media Censorship in America
Book Review of Project Censored's Censored 2012
Dr. Paul W. Rea
Global Research, January 20, 2012
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28769
Huff, Mickey and Project Censored, Eds. Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution. New York: Seven Stories Press, October 2011. $19.95.
For ordering details: ProjectCensored.org
Even more than its predecessors, Censored 2012 makes for highly engaging and informative reading. This collection is a well mixed bag containing much that we need to know but typically don’t.
In part, this deficit occurs because many Americans are, in Neil Postman’s memorable phrase, “amusing ourselves to death” and also because many exhibit an aversion to discussing issues. But above all this deficit results from increased media malpractice and censorship. When a study shows that regular viewers of Fox News are less informed—and likely more misinformed—than those who don’t follow the news, something is seriously amiss.
According to the project director Mickey Huff, the corporate media are serving up a diet of “junk-food news to avoid telling the public what is really going on at home and abroad” (p. 12). If this strikes many readers as obvious, fewer seem fully aware of just how pervasive this censorship has become—how very little coverage many significant issues receive.
As a result, even Americans who consider themselves informed don’t understand how their government attempts to minimize or even eliminate public awareness. On the climactic final day of the Durban Conference on Climate Change, NPR’s “Science Friday” featured a long segment on bedbugs (12/9/11). Censored 2012 reveals that even less coverage—none at all, in fact—is afforded to ongoing federal preparations to use a (real or contrived) state of emergency as a pretext to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law, and herd “dissidents” into mass holding camps (p. 85).
Both the book and the process that produces it are highly educational: as former director Peter Phillips observes, the democratized and educational nature of Project Censored invites faculty and students “to speak the truth to power with news and stories of the abuses of empire and the successes of our resistance” (p. 30). Under the guidance of present director Mickey Huff, this year’s volume delivers exceptional contributions, especially from students and faculty at San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, and Diablo Valley College in California. In all, close to twenty universities participated this year, with over 100 professors and several hundred students.
As in previous volumes, this one includes the twenty-five Top Censored Stories of the year. Topping this year’s list is “More US Soldiers Committed Suicide than Died in Combat;” the shocking significance, however, hardly declines at the other end: the massive disposal of toxic waste in Afghanistan and the use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Libya (pp. 52-53). Since the early 1990s, the US press has paid some attention to Gulf War Syndrome among American veterans exposed to the “toxic soup” but much less attention to the medical fallout within Iraq, where the population lives amid carcinogenic radioactivity.
This year’s volume is organized around “clusters,” key areas of related issues. These include “Health and the Environment,” “Media Distortion of Nonviolent Struggles,” and Peter Phillips and Craig Cekala’s “Human Cost of War and Violence”; all present readable, concise treatments of topics that are, of course, the subjects of many current books.
As its title suggests, Censored 2012 features two essential topics: the mechanisms of media censorship and the key issues they’ve censored. Censorship, defined as one type of propaganda, itself takes many forms: skewed “framing, slight of content, and appealing to emotion over logic, among other tactics of media manipulation . . . .” These methods involve de facto “conspiracies to manipulate or withhold information” (p. 37). Canadian scholar Randal Marlin presents an excellent overview of traditional propaganda techniques, including the more recent (and most useful) concept of State Crimes Against Democracy, or SCADs.
Equally insightful is Jacob Van Vleet’s reprise of French sociologist Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1964). In it, Prof. Van Vleet notes that “propagandists often use a combination of true and false statements in their appeals,” thereby creating “the illusion of objectivity when in fact only one side of the issue at hand is being presented.”
In addition, Van Vleet indicates that much propaganda is “social,” aiming to influence a society’s lifestyle. Such propaganda, often in the form of advertising, not only promotes consumption and an uncritical belief in technology; it also encourages “individuals to believe that their society . . . holds the best way of life.” This leads to what Marx described as “false consciousness.” Van Vleet also rightly points to “Conditioned Reflex and Myth,” paying particular attention to the societal rituals such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. These, according to Ellul, reinforce conditioned reflexes that impart excessive and exclusive “pride, patriotism, and even awe” (pp. 316-19).
Representing the category of censored issues, Ann Garrison’s “US in Africa: Velvet Glove on a Military Fist” is especially revealing. Garrison makes points that will surprise many readers: that US foreign aid to Africa, like that to Israel and Pakistan, is based on power projection: that conventional media claims not withstanding, it often involves “covering a military fist with a velvet glove of humanitarian and development aid” (p. 388).
Citing well-known interventions, Garrison shows how UN peacekeepers paid by the Security Council are often combatants dispatched at the behest of the US. In Somalia, under the guise of fighting terrorism, these African “peacekeepers” actually expanded areas of armed conflict. In addition to having Africans do the dying, these “peacekeepers” have commonly consumed funds previously been used for humanitarian aid, aggravating problems with agricultural production, famine, and refugees. Garrison also reveals how, especially in Congo, the UN enabled the World Bank to facilitate massive plunder of natural resources by neighboring Uganda and Rwanda (pp. 389-403).
But the real clincher is her disclosure about pilotless drones, which are fast becoming the dominant means of delivering explosives from the air. It’s well known that since 2000 the CIA has made extensive use of Predator drones over Pakistan. In 2008, however, General Atomic unveiled its new Reaper drones, which can carry far more missiles than its Predators. Since the company makes both planes, it needed new markets for the Predator. Its marketing campaign, abetted by WIRED magazine, proposed using the older drones to “stop the genocide” in “the next Darfur.” Following this script, Obama’s “humanitarian hawk” Samantha Power persuaded the president that Predators could be deployed to fire Hellfire missiles at Libyans (pp. 397-399).
Other outstanding chapters include Mickey Huff, Abby Martin, and Adam Bessie’s feisty “Framing the Messengers: Junk Food News and News Abuse for Dummies” and Kenn Burrows and Tom Altee’s meditative “Collaboration and the Common Good.”
Despite this diversity, the book does present unifying themes. Much as Occupiers unite around the idea that “the capital of government has succumbed to government by capital,” Censored 2012 shows us that, to an increasingly shocking degree, freedom of information has succumbed to the corporatocracy.
Fortunately, this book goes a long way toward telling us what we need to know.
Paul W. Rea, PhD, is the author of Mounting Evidence: Why We Need a New Investigation into 9/11 (2011).
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Censored 2012: The Sourcebook for the Media Revolution
For Immediate Release:
October 12, 2011
Contact:
Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, 707.874.2695
Dr. Peter Phillips, President; Prof. Mickey Huff, Director
peter@projectcensored.org; mickey@projectcensored.org
Interviews: Contact Mickey Huff at email above.
Order the new book online at http://projectcensored.org or send check for $22.95 to:
Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, P.O. Box 571 Cotati, CA 94931
“Most journalists in the United States believe the press here is free. That grand illusion only helps obscure the fact that, by and large, the US corporate press does not report what’s really going on, while tuning out, or laughing off, all those who try to do just that. Americans—now more than ever—need those outlets that do labor to report some truth. Project Censored is not just among the bravest, smartest, and most rigorous of those outlets, but the only one that's wholly focused on those stories that the corporate press ignores, downplays and/or distorts. This latest book is therefore a must-read for anyone who cares about this country, its tottering economy, and—most important—what’s now left of its democracy.”
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media ecology, NYU
Our new book has arrived!
Censored 2012: The Sourcebook for the Media Revolution, The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2010-2011 by Mickey Huff and Project Censored. In this volume, there are 500 pages of real news you can use, plus ample analysis that eradicates civil paralysis, and antidotes to our current Truth Emergency that will strengthen societal media literacy. Help celebrate the 35th year of the oldest media research organization in the US by donating $35 for a signed copy of Censored 2012, or simply pick up a copy for yourself, friends, or a local library or school for only $19.95 each ($22.95 w/shipping).
Former Project director Dr. Peter Phillips kicks off this year’s work with a dynamic introduction to understanding the NATO/US/military industrial media complex matrix of managed news and propaganda. Censored 2012 also once again proudly showcases the poignant and timely cartoons of Khalil Bendib. The Top 25 Censored Stories of the past year are not only announced, but this year, they are housed in Censored News Clusters that analyze the architecture of censorship in America by looking at the topical connections of the most commonly underreported stories. We go down memory lane with PC interns in Censored Déjà vu looking at past censored stories; endure the ubiquity of Junk Food News and News Abuse with professor Adam Bessie and Abby Martin of Media Roots; and highlight solutions for our many interconnected global problems with professor Kenn Burrows and the students of San Francisco State University in hopes to provide people with positive and proactive stories of change that are at the core of the media revolution. Media Democracy in Action is something Project Censored strives to achieve and we endorse and support many organizations with the same goals. This year, we proudly feature some of the best and brightest in that vein, both veterans and new comers to the scene.
This year’s TRUTH EMERGENCY section looks at Understanding Propaganda in Theory and Practice. Censorship, framing, and spin are all tactics that act to shape the public mind in democratic cultures. Understanding these requires context. A Brief History of Propaganda is offered by Dr. Randal Marlin and provides a solid foundation for the following chapters; professor Jacob Van Vleet writes on Mass Psychological Manipulation and the theories of Jacque Ellul; Dr. Robert Abele pulls the veil off the US Propaganda Machine; The Impending Demise of Net Neutrality is explored by Dr. Elliot D. Cohen; and Dr. Anthony Dimaggio deconstructs the Tea Party and Manufactured Dissent.
The final section of this year’s book, PROJECT CENSORED INTERNATIONAL, focuses on Human Rights and the Right to Know and introduces the collaboration between Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored and the Fair Share of the Common Heritage, explained by Mary Lia. This section includes the Media Distortion of Nonviolent Struggles by Dr. Cynthia Boaz; journalist Ann Garrison on the US in Africa; Establishing Ghetto Palestine with journalist Jon Elmer; professor Robin Andersen looks at HBO’s Treme, and the Fractured Press Coverage of Post-Katrina New Orleans; Margaret Flowers, M.D., illustrates the Corporate Control of the Message in US Health Care Reform; and renowned midwife and author Ina May Gaskin shows Censorship of the True State of Maternity Care in the US.
Here is a list of the top censored stories from chapter one this year:
Censored 2012: Stories of 2010-2011
1. More US Soldiers Committed Suicide Than Died in Combat
2. US Military Manipulates the Social Media
3. Obama Authorizes International Assassination Campaign
4. Global Food Crisis Expands
5. Private Prison Companies Fund Anti–Immigrant Legislation
6. Google Spying?
7. U.S. Army and Psychology’s Largest Experiment–Ever
8. The Fairytale of Clean and Safe Nuclear Power
9. Government Sponsored Technologies for Weather Modification
10. Censored # 10: Real Unemployment: One Out of Five in US
11. Trafficking of Iraqi Women Rampant
12. Pacific Garbage Dump — Did You Really Think Your Plastic Was Being Recycled?
13. Will a State of Emergency Be Used to Supersede Our Constitution?
14. Family Pressure on Young Girls for Genitalia Mutilation Continues in Kenya
15. Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight
16. Sweatshops in China Are Making Your iPods While Workers Suffer
17. Superbug Bacteria Spreading Worldwide
18. Monsanto Tries to Benefit from Haiti’s Earthquake
19. Oxfam Exposes How Aid Is Used for Political Purposes
20. US Agencies Trying to Outlaw GMO Food Labelling
21. Lyme Disease: An Emerging Epidemic
22. Participatory Budgeting – A Method to Empower Local Citizens & Communities
23. Worldwide Movement To Ban or Charge Fees For Plastic Bags
24. South Dakota Takes Extreme Measures to Be the Top Anti–Abortion State
25. Extension of DU to Libya
To preview the top censored stories online see:
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/category/top-stories/
Additionally, here are some recent videos about our work taken by Media Freedom Foundation board member Abby Martin of MediaRoots.org.
Project Censored celebrates its 35 years at Moe's Books in Berkeley, CA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yge4kJaNfR0&feature=relmfu
Exclusive interview with Ralph Nader about Project Censored and current events:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMobQqiYKI4&feature=channel_video_title
Censored 2012 is one of our greatest collaborative efforts consisting of 105 professors, hundreds of students, community members, and people from all around the world. We aim to expose media censorship and provide ways to be catalysts of the media revolution we need to restore the commons of human knowledge and education, establish and protect the right of the public to know what is going on in society, and work to maintain our democratic institutions– our culture of liberty. We hope you join us in these vital endeavors in critical times. Thank you for your support.
Mickey Huff
Director, Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation
Associate Professor of History, Diablo Valley College
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Gwen Stefani's tattoos
(or: The media is as liberal as the corporations that own it)
Mickey Z.
"They control the minds of the masses."
- Malcolm X (on American media power)
Perhaps my favorite illustration of life in a corporate propaganda state is the daily New York Times corrections box. Each morning, the newspaper of record comes clean about what it got wrong the day before.
For example, I remember a Times article that referred incorrectly to the status of Gwen Stefani’s tattoos. The next day, in the corrections box, came a dose of reality: Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos.
We can all sleep better knowing that Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoosand secure in the knowledge that the media readily admits its mistakes. It’s all there in black and white—every single day—right?
Of course, the tacit message behind the daily New York Times corrections box is this: Besides a few minor typographical errors, everything else in yesterday’s paper was correct. It was accurate. It was, to use their phrase, fit to print... and has now passed on to become part of our official history. This is typical of life within a society dominated by a corporate-run press.
Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outletsare large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common goal: to make a profit by selling a product (an affluent audience) to a given market: advertisers.
Therefore, we shouldn’t find it too shocking that the image of the world being presented by a corporate-owned press very much reflects the biased interests of the elite players involved in this sordid little love triangle.
That’s why every major daily newspaper has a business section, but not a labor section. Why at least once a week, those same newspapers run an automobile section, but no bicycle section.
This is why when the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops, it makes headlines. But if the global extinction rate rises, it’s questionable if it'll even make the papers (and if it does, it’ll be buried in a small item on page 23).
If you created a blueprint for an apparatus that utterly erased critical thought, you could make none more efficient than the American corporate media.
Kill someone while wearing a uniform and you're a hero... do it in gang colors and you're a criminal. Hire a lawyer to help you find tax loopholes and you're a good businessman... make a few bucks off the books and you're a tax cheat. Sell cigarettes, alcohol and lottery tickets and you're an entrepreneur... smoke a joint and bet with a bookie: you're a menace to society.
Of all the beguiling propaganda tactics Corporate America has cultivated, the usurping of language is the greatest victory of all. Have you ever considered that also right after World War II the "Department of War" was renamed the "Defense Department"? Almost 70 years later, thanks to legions of pinstriped mountebanks, we exist in an age where helicopters named Apache are unselfconsciously used to quell (often alleged) ethnic cleansing.
It's all about setting standards and defining the accepted parameters. Yes, we can "have it our way," as long as we stay well within the range of choices being offered. We can “just do it” any time we damn well please. All we need is a $120 pair of sneakers. We've strayed so far from reality that even the most elementary truths have become obscured.
Show some flesh in a particular magazine and you're a pornographer…flash some skin on a public bus and you're a Calvin Klein ad. Collect food stamps and you're a welfare queen... hire a lobbyist to win government subsidies, tax breaks, and protectionist tariffs and you're a corporation.
Let's say you're a big city mayor and you want to institute a regressive tax on your city's poor residents. Easy, call it a "transit fare hike." Rich people don't ride the subway.
What if your company wants to dump toxic sludge on farmers to be used as fertilizer? Hire a massive public relations firm to give it a new image by renaming it "biosolids.”
There’s really nothing to it: Cars aren’t used, they’re pre-owned. Invasions aren’t invasions when they’re pre-emptive wars. Missiles aren't weapons, they're peacekeepers.
Claim that the Messiah regularly visits your suburban home and Mel Gibson’s faithful will beat a path to your door…claim to be the Messiah in Waco and they'll drive a tank through your living room. Serve the charred flesh of tortured animals and you're a gourmet…choose a lifestyle of compassion and logic and you're a zealot.
Since today's words have developed an uncanny knack for altering their meaning from situation to situation until they have no meaning at all, perhaps it's time for Americans to hold a mass dictionary burning. What good are definitions when they give peace prizes to men like to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama—and so many of us believe these war criminals deserve such accolades?
As South African activist Steven Biko once said: “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Reprint State Department press releases verbatim and you're a respected investigative journalist... dig up the truth and you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to earn money as a writer.
With a nod to Guy Debord, I say it’s time we reinvent everyday life—steal it back from corporate propagandists and reintroduce the joy of living. Stop settling for less pain and start demanding more pleasure. Today’s progressives can provoke dramatic changes simply by refusing to submit to the societal formula they’re presented with.
We know what we feel…so no longer should we allow Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the government, or Corporate America to define us. We must trust our own instincts and break free from manufactured needs and illusory goals in order to cultivate new American Dreams (yes, plural):
Dreams not for sale
Dreams not based on celebrity
Dreams not based on material consumption
Dreams not based on physical beauty
Dreams not based on military conquest
Dreams that promote unity and collective action while maintaining individuality and independence
Dreams that challenge us to think for ourselves and about others
Breaking away from the omnipresent message of “work, consume, and obey authority without question” can be this generation’s way of challenging—and smashing—a culture that has us programmed to be more concerned with Gwen Stefani's tattoos than the corporate pirates raping the planet and controlling our minds.
Comrades, it’s time to rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for ourselves…
Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
Project Censored
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, 94931
United States
Mickey Z.
"They control the minds of the masses."
- Malcolm X (on American media power)
Perhaps my favorite illustration of life in a corporate propaganda state is the daily New York Times corrections box. Each morning, the newspaper of record comes clean about what it got wrong the day before.
For example, I remember a Times article that referred incorrectly to the status of Gwen Stefani’s tattoos. The next day, in the corrections box, came a dose of reality: Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoos.
We can all sleep better knowing that Gwen Stefani has no permanent tattoosand secure in the knowledge that the media readily admits its mistakes. It’s all there in black and white—every single day—right?
Of course, the tacit message behind the daily New York Times corrections box is this: Besides a few minor typographical errors, everything else in yesterday’s paper was correct. It was accurate. It was, to use their phrase, fit to print... and has now passed on to become part of our official history. This is typical of life within a society dominated by a corporate-run press.
Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outletsare large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common goal: to make a profit by selling a product (an affluent audience) to a given market: advertisers.
Therefore, we shouldn’t find it too shocking that the image of the world being presented by a corporate-owned press very much reflects the biased interests of the elite players involved in this sordid little love triangle.
That’s why every major daily newspaper has a business section, but not a labor section. Why at least once a week, those same newspapers run an automobile section, but no bicycle section.
This is why when the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops, it makes headlines. But if the global extinction rate rises, it’s questionable if it'll even make the papers (and if it does, it’ll be buried in a small item on page 23).
If you created a blueprint for an apparatus that utterly erased critical thought, you could make none more efficient than the American corporate media.
Kill someone while wearing a uniform and you're a hero... do it in gang colors and you're a criminal. Hire a lawyer to help you find tax loopholes and you're a good businessman... make a few bucks off the books and you're a tax cheat. Sell cigarettes, alcohol and lottery tickets and you're an entrepreneur... smoke a joint and bet with a bookie: you're a menace to society.
Of all the beguiling propaganda tactics Corporate America has cultivated, the usurping of language is the greatest victory of all. Have you ever considered that also right after World War II the "Department of War" was renamed the "Defense Department"? Almost 70 years later, thanks to legions of pinstriped mountebanks, we exist in an age where helicopters named Apache are unselfconsciously used to quell (often alleged) ethnic cleansing.
It's all about setting standards and defining the accepted parameters. Yes, we can "have it our way," as long as we stay well within the range of choices being offered. We can “just do it” any time we damn well please. All we need is a $120 pair of sneakers. We've strayed so far from reality that even the most elementary truths have become obscured.
Show some flesh in a particular magazine and you're a pornographer…flash some skin on a public bus and you're a Calvin Klein ad. Collect food stamps and you're a welfare queen... hire a lobbyist to win government subsidies, tax breaks, and protectionist tariffs and you're a corporation.
Let's say you're a big city mayor and you want to institute a regressive tax on your city's poor residents. Easy, call it a "transit fare hike." Rich people don't ride the subway.
What if your company wants to dump toxic sludge on farmers to be used as fertilizer? Hire a massive public relations firm to give it a new image by renaming it "biosolids.”
There’s really nothing to it: Cars aren’t used, they’re pre-owned. Invasions aren’t invasions when they’re pre-emptive wars. Missiles aren't weapons, they're peacekeepers.
Claim that the Messiah regularly visits your suburban home and Mel Gibson’s faithful will beat a path to your door…claim to be the Messiah in Waco and they'll drive a tank through your living room. Serve the charred flesh of tortured animals and you're a gourmet…choose a lifestyle of compassion and logic and you're a zealot.
Since today's words have developed an uncanny knack for altering their meaning from situation to situation until they have no meaning at all, perhaps it's time for Americans to hold a mass dictionary burning. What good are definitions when they give peace prizes to men like to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama—and so many of us believe these war criminals deserve such accolades?
As South African activist Steven Biko once said: “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Reprint State Department press releases verbatim and you're a respected investigative journalist... dig up the truth and you're gonna have a hell of a time trying to earn money as a writer.
With a nod to Guy Debord, I say it’s time we reinvent everyday life—steal it back from corporate propagandists and reintroduce the joy of living. Stop settling for less pain and start demanding more pleasure. Today’s progressives can provoke dramatic changes simply by refusing to submit to the societal formula they’re presented with.
We know what we feel…so no longer should we allow Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the government, or Corporate America to define us. We must trust our own instincts and break free from manufactured needs and illusory goals in order to cultivate new American Dreams (yes, plural):
Dreams not for sale
Dreams not based on celebrity
Dreams not based on material consumption
Dreams not based on physical beauty
Dreams not based on military conquest
Dreams that promote unity and collective action while maintaining individuality and independence
Dreams that challenge us to think for ourselves and about others
Breaking away from the omnipresent message of “work, consume, and obey authority without question” can be this generation’s way of challenging—and smashing—a culture that has us programmed to be more concerned with Gwen Stefani's tattoos than the corporate pirates raping the planet and controlling our minds.
Comrades, it’s time to rediscover the subversive pleasure of thinking for ourselves…
Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
Project Censored
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, 94931
United States
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
35 Years of Project Censored
The Release of Censored 2012 in September Celebrates 35 Years of Project Censored
In the last 35 years, the so-called mainstream media have been co-opted into a propaganda machine for the transnational corporate power structure, which serves a US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire instead of We the People.
Project Censored resists the goals of global empire at the expense of human rights, we resist top down managed news in favor of a truly free press, and we resist censorship in all its guises.
Media Democracy in Action is our belief and we will firmly continue to build media from the bottom up by supporting independent news sources and validating content with our expanding number of affiliate colleges and universities worldwide. Functioning democracies are the result of an informed and participatory public and we need an informed electorate now more than ever to protect our civil liberties, our economy, and our Constitution.
Please Support this effort by making an Anniversary Gift to Project Censored. Gifts of $35 or more will be shown our gratitude with a copy of Censored 2012 upon release in September, with an introduction by former director Dr. Peter Phillips, and signed to you personally by current Project Censored director Mickey Huff.
Select a level of giving that best fits your capabilities:
o $35.00 o $135.00 o $350.00 o $3,500.00
Send in Checks to:
Project Censored
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Or Donate Securely Online - www.projectcensored.org/support
Preview of Censored 2012 (Available in September 2011)
For Censored 2012, we continue to divide our annual publication into three sections as we broaden, grow, and diversify efforts to illuminate examples of censorship in the corporate mainstream US press. Further, we continue to promote ways to improve our systems of reporting and communicating to the public at large about the most crucial issues we face as a society.
The first section of this year’s book, on the News that Didn’t Make the News and Why, houses the traditional top censored news stories from the past year, which are now analyzed in what we call Censored News Clusters. Within these Clusters, Project Censored’s team of media experts and their student interns analyze and connect the dots between stories based on similar themes or topics rather than simply list the top stories as ranked in importance by Project Censored judges. For the first time, we focus on the connections between censored stories as the structure of this chapter, flushing out why some topics are prone to such underreporting, and what we might do about this problem, rather than simply list and summarize top censored stories.
In the second chapter, Censored Déjà vu, we check for any new or increased coverage of previously underreported top stories. Most receive little if any coverage in the corporate mainstream press, but if they do, we monitor and remark upon it here, ever in hopes that the corporate media may be improved, but not waiting for such to take place as we advocate for the coming media revolution.
In chapter three, Adam Bessie joins the Project Censored director, Abby Martin of Media Roots and student interns to analyze the ubiquity of Junk Food News and the growing problem of News Abuse, including framing and propaganda in US media. This year we include a case study in how pubic workers (teachers especially) have been negatively portrayed in the corporate press as a major example of News Abuse.
Chapter four, with San Francisco State University professor of Holistic Studies Kenn Burrows, brings out the best in underreported news as we look at the positive, the signs of health and community building as published in the independent press, which the corporate media tend to deride, downplay, or outright ignore. The problems we face do not merely include the sordid things that are going on around us that the corporate media do not report, they also include the many positive things that are going on often right in front of us that the corporate media do not recognize, hence contributing to a sense of disconnection among many in society.
Chapter five brings back our media activism showcase which includes examples of media democracy in action, highlighting what other activists, scholars, and organizations are doing to achieve the media revolution, supporting the First Amendment, in maintenance of self governance and democracy. This year we welcome the Park Center for Independent Media, PR Watch, Media Alliance, Media Roots, Courage to Resist and more.
Section two focuses on what we call the Truth Emergency. This Truth Emergency we face is a result of the lack of factual reporting by the so-called mainstream media over the past decade. Americans are subjected to mass amounts of propaganda, from misinformation to disinformation, on a daily basis about some of the most significant issues of the day. Whether this involves the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, the health care debate, election fraud or economic collapse, most Americans are unaware of all the facts of how we got where we now are as a society. It is the duty of the constitutionally protected free press to report factually to the public on these matters. However, as our work shows dating back to 1976, that is not happening. One way of combating this Truth Emergency is by understanding the nature of propaganda. This year, our Truth Emergency section is a primer on Propaganda Studies, which includes a brief history, theory, application, and case studies all presented to enhance media literacy among the general public. We are pleased to bring some of the best and brightest in the field to offer insight on this ever-important area of study. Randal Marlin gives a brief history of propaganda; Jacob Van Vleet looks at one of the key theorists of propaganda, Jacques Ellul. Robert Abele offer a philosophical and structural analysis of propaganda for readers while Elliot D. Cohen and Anthony DiMaggio look at specific areas, like the importance of Net Neutrality and astroturf activism in the so-called Tea Party, where understanding communication politics and media literacy really matter if a society is to be truly democratically functional, able to operate outside the propaganda matrix of the corporate media and establishment public relations machine.
The final section of the book is Project Censored International, which is a collection of various studies and media commentary that not only look at problems of global media censorship, but also examine how these important issues are handled, or ignored here in the US corporate press. This section brings us a diverse group of scholars and activists, including Cynthia Boaz, Ann Garrison, Jon Elmer with Nora Barrows-Friedman, Robin Andersen, Margaret Flowers, and Ina May Gaskin. The significant issues in this section include the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage, introduced by Mary Lia, on moving toward an embrace of the human commons; understanding non-violence and how media depict such movements for peace and social justice; and the deconstruction of various myths-- from the incredibly biased reporting on Africa to distorted views of recent disaster coverage, plus the ongoing skewed coverage concerning Israel/Palestine. This section continues on issues of health with an analysis of the top down denial of mass public support for single payer healthcare, and we round out Censored 2012 by looking at how corporate media distort life itself, from birth, by examining how corporate media have either ignored or demonized the efficacy of natural childbirth and midwifery in the US, despite that the facts surrounding homebirth culture clearly refute the mainstream coverage.
All in all, this is a work in progress and it involves hundreds of dedicated scholars, and students at over two dozen college and universities all over the world. These are people from all walks of life across the globe who have at least one thing in common: the belief in democracy and the role a free press plays in creation, protection, and maintenance of it. Thanks to all who made this work possible, to all the tireless and selfless contributors, to all the readers and supporters of a free and vibrant people’s press, one that is always and only uncensored.
Your support is greatly appreciated:
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored Board of Directors
Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, Elaine Wellin, Mary Lia, Carl Jensen, Cynthia Boaz, Bill Simon, Derrick West, Dave Mathison, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Andy Roth, Miguel Molina, Dennis Bernstein, Kenn Burrows, and Noel Byrne
In the last 35 years, the so-called mainstream media have been co-opted into a propaganda machine for the transnational corporate power structure, which serves a US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire instead of We the People.
Project Censored resists the goals of global empire at the expense of human rights, we resist top down managed news in favor of a truly free press, and we resist censorship in all its guises.
Media Democracy in Action is our belief and we will firmly continue to build media from the bottom up by supporting independent news sources and validating content with our expanding number of affiliate colleges and universities worldwide. Functioning democracies are the result of an informed and participatory public and we need an informed electorate now more than ever to protect our civil liberties, our economy, and our Constitution.
Please Support this effort by making an Anniversary Gift to Project Censored. Gifts of $35 or more will be shown our gratitude with a copy of Censored 2012 upon release in September, with an introduction by former director Dr. Peter Phillips, and signed to you personally by current Project Censored director Mickey Huff.
Select a level of giving that best fits your capabilities:
o $35.00 o $135.00 o $350.00 o $3,500.00
Send in Checks to:
Project Censored
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Or Donate Securely Online - www.projectcensored.org/support
Preview of Censored 2012 (Available in September 2011)
For Censored 2012, we continue to divide our annual publication into three sections as we broaden, grow, and diversify efforts to illuminate examples of censorship in the corporate mainstream US press. Further, we continue to promote ways to improve our systems of reporting and communicating to the public at large about the most crucial issues we face as a society.
The first section of this year’s book, on the News that Didn’t Make the News and Why, houses the traditional top censored news stories from the past year, which are now analyzed in what we call Censored News Clusters. Within these Clusters, Project Censored’s team of media experts and their student interns analyze and connect the dots between stories based on similar themes or topics rather than simply list the top stories as ranked in importance by Project Censored judges. For the first time, we focus on the connections between censored stories as the structure of this chapter, flushing out why some topics are prone to such underreporting, and what we might do about this problem, rather than simply list and summarize top censored stories.
In the second chapter, Censored Déjà vu, we check for any new or increased coverage of previously underreported top stories. Most receive little if any coverage in the corporate mainstream press, but if they do, we monitor and remark upon it here, ever in hopes that the corporate media may be improved, but not waiting for such to take place as we advocate for the coming media revolution.
In chapter three, Adam Bessie joins the Project Censored director, Abby Martin of Media Roots and student interns to analyze the ubiquity of Junk Food News and the growing problem of News Abuse, including framing and propaganda in US media. This year we include a case study in how pubic workers (teachers especially) have been negatively portrayed in the corporate press as a major example of News Abuse.
Chapter four, with San Francisco State University professor of Holistic Studies Kenn Burrows, brings out the best in underreported news as we look at the positive, the signs of health and community building as published in the independent press, which the corporate media tend to deride, downplay, or outright ignore. The problems we face do not merely include the sordid things that are going on around us that the corporate media do not report, they also include the many positive things that are going on often right in front of us that the corporate media do not recognize, hence contributing to a sense of disconnection among many in society.
Chapter five brings back our media activism showcase which includes examples of media democracy in action, highlighting what other activists, scholars, and organizations are doing to achieve the media revolution, supporting the First Amendment, in maintenance of self governance and democracy. This year we welcome the Park Center for Independent Media, PR Watch, Media Alliance, Media Roots, Courage to Resist and more.
Section two focuses on what we call the Truth Emergency. This Truth Emergency we face is a result of the lack of factual reporting by the so-called mainstream media over the past decade. Americans are subjected to mass amounts of propaganda, from misinformation to disinformation, on a daily basis about some of the most significant issues of the day. Whether this involves the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, the health care debate, election fraud or economic collapse, most Americans are unaware of all the facts of how we got where we now are as a society. It is the duty of the constitutionally protected free press to report factually to the public on these matters. However, as our work shows dating back to 1976, that is not happening. One way of combating this Truth Emergency is by understanding the nature of propaganda. This year, our Truth Emergency section is a primer on Propaganda Studies, which includes a brief history, theory, application, and case studies all presented to enhance media literacy among the general public. We are pleased to bring some of the best and brightest in the field to offer insight on this ever-important area of study. Randal Marlin gives a brief history of propaganda; Jacob Van Vleet looks at one of the key theorists of propaganda, Jacques Ellul. Robert Abele offer a philosophical and structural analysis of propaganda for readers while Elliot D. Cohen and Anthony DiMaggio look at specific areas, like the importance of Net Neutrality and astroturf activism in the so-called Tea Party, where understanding communication politics and media literacy really matter if a society is to be truly democratically functional, able to operate outside the propaganda matrix of the corporate media and establishment public relations machine.
The final section of the book is Project Censored International, which is a collection of various studies and media commentary that not only look at problems of global media censorship, but also examine how these important issues are handled, or ignored here in the US corporate press. This section brings us a diverse group of scholars and activists, including Cynthia Boaz, Ann Garrison, Jon Elmer with Nora Barrows-Friedman, Robin Andersen, Margaret Flowers, and Ina May Gaskin. The significant issues in this section include the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage, introduced by Mary Lia, on moving toward an embrace of the human commons; understanding non-violence and how media depict such movements for peace and social justice; and the deconstruction of various myths-- from the incredibly biased reporting on Africa to distorted views of recent disaster coverage, plus the ongoing skewed coverage concerning Israel/Palestine. This section continues on issues of health with an analysis of the top down denial of mass public support for single payer healthcare, and we round out Censored 2012 by looking at how corporate media distort life itself, from birth, by examining how corporate media have either ignored or demonized the efficacy of natural childbirth and midwifery in the US, despite that the facts surrounding homebirth culture clearly refute the mainstream coverage.
All in all, this is a work in progress and it involves hundreds of dedicated scholars, and students at over two dozen college and universities all over the world. These are people from all walks of life across the globe who have at least one thing in common: the belief in democracy and the role a free press plays in creation, protection, and maintenance of it. Thanks to all who made this work possible, to all the tireless and selfless contributors, to all the readers and supporters of a free and vibrant people’s press, one that is always and only uncensored.
Your support is greatly appreciated:
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored Board of Directors
Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, Elaine Wellin, Mary Lia, Carl Jensen, Cynthia Boaz, Bill Simon, Derrick West, Dave Mathison, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Andy Roth, Miguel Molina, Dennis Bernstein, Kenn Burrows, and Noel Byrne
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Project Censored Celebrates 35 Years
In 1976 Dr. Carl Jensen Founded Project Censored. We are the longest running media research news group in the country.
We are stiill at it and the top Censored News stories from 1976 are still important today.
1: Trilateral Commission & Jimmy Carter
2: DNA Corporate Control
3: Banned Pesticides & Drugs To Third World
4: Oil Price Conspiracy
5: Mobil Oil/Rhodesian Connection Embargo
6: Nuclear Reactor Safeguards/Plutonium Missing
7: Osha – Workers Die For American Industry
8: Arms Data Manipulation/Kissinger-SALT-CIA
9: Non-Prescription Drugs Useless & Hazardous
10: Natural Gas Shortage Conspiracy.
In the last 35 years, the so-called mainstream media have been ultimately co-opted into a propaganda machine for the transnational corporate power structure which serves a US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire instead of We the People.
Project Cenosred resists the goals of global empire at the expense of human rights, we resist top down managed news in favor of a truly free press, and we resist censorship in all its guises.
Media Democracy in Action is our belief and we will firmly continue to build media from the bottom up by supporting independent news sources and validating content with our expanding number of affiliate colleges and universities worldwide. Functioning democracies are the result of an informed and participatory public and we need an informed electorate now more than ever to protect our civil liberities, our economy, and our Constitution.
Please Support this effort by making an Anniversary Gift to Project Censored. Gifts of $135 or more will receive a free copy of Censored 2012 upon release in September, with an introduction by former director Dr. Peter Phillips, and signed to you personally by current Project Censored director Mickey Huff. Follow our progress on line at http://www.projectcensored.org/.
Send in Checks to:
Project Censored Or Donate Securly Online
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Your support is greatly appreciated:
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored Board of Directors
Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, Elaine Wellin, Mary Lia, Carl Jensen, Cynthia Boaz, Bill Simon, Derrick West, Dave Mathison, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Andy Roth, Miguel Molina, Dennis Bernstein, Kenn Burrows, Frances Capell, and Noel Byrne
Sponsored by SSU Sociology Club, Campus Allies for Racial Responsibility—CARR, Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
Information at: 707-664-2588
We are stiill at it and the top Censored News stories from 1976 are still important today.
1: Trilateral Commission & Jimmy Carter
2: DNA Corporate Control
3: Banned Pesticides & Drugs To Third World
4: Oil Price Conspiracy
5: Mobil Oil/Rhodesian Connection Embargo
6: Nuclear Reactor Safeguards/Plutonium Missing
7: Osha – Workers Die For American Industry
8: Arms Data Manipulation/Kissinger-SALT-CIA
9: Non-Prescription Drugs Useless & Hazardous
10: Natural Gas Shortage Conspiracy.
In the last 35 years, the so-called mainstream media have been ultimately co-opted into a propaganda machine for the transnational corporate power structure which serves a US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire instead of We the People.
Project Cenosred resists the goals of global empire at the expense of human rights, we resist top down managed news in favor of a truly free press, and we resist censorship in all its guises.
Media Democracy in Action is our belief and we will firmly continue to build media from the bottom up by supporting independent news sources and validating content with our expanding number of affiliate colleges and universities worldwide. Functioning democracies are the result of an informed and participatory public and we need an informed electorate now more than ever to protect our civil liberities, our economy, and our Constitution.
Please Support this effort by making an Anniversary Gift to Project Censored. Gifts of $135 or more will receive a free copy of Censored 2012 upon release in September, with an introduction by former director Dr. Peter Phillips, and signed to you personally by current Project Censored director Mickey Huff. Follow our progress on line at http://www.projectcensored.org/.
Send in Checks to:
Project Censored Or Donate Securly Online
P.O. Box 571
Cotati, CA 94931
Your support is greatly appreciated:
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored Board of Directors
Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, Elaine Wellin, Mary Lia, Carl Jensen, Cynthia Boaz, Bill Simon, Derrick West, Dave Mathison, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Andy Roth, Miguel Molina, Dennis Bernstein, Kenn Burrows, Frances Capell, and Noel Byrne
Sponsored by SSU Sociology Club, Campus Allies for Racial Responsibility—CARR, Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
Information at: 707-664-2588
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
The Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award
Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored Announces
The Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award
Nominations are being accepted for the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award. These submissions can be published or unpublished articles, or works in progress that express the ideas behind the original economic and social theories of Alfred Frederick Andersen. Andersen believed that every sentient being – human and non-human – has a right to the fair share of the material and economic benefits of the Common Heritage Wealth. Included in this Common Heritage are all earth’s natural resources: such as land surfaces, sub-surface minerals and fuels; water and air, as well as cyberspace; indeed the entire physical environment.
The Common Heritage Award articles should propose and describe ways in which such sharing could be accomplished. Andersen’s work is recognized by the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored as an annual award to be given to the person that best reflects how the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage can work in our culture. An example of such sharing would be the promotion of an idea that natural resource extractors would be required to pay the value of the resources into a Common Heritage fund for all living things.
First place winner will receive $3,500 award
Second place winner will receive $1,500 award
Winners will receive their award at the annual Media Freedom Foundation/ Project Censored Awards Ceremony in Berkeley, California, February 5, 2011. Transportation costs to Berkeley will be available to the winners.
To submit a nomination send no more than a one-page summary of completed articles and specific URL to the original article to: commonheritageaward@gmail.com. For unpublished articles, submit full copies to:
MEDIA FREEDOM FOUNDATION
The Common Heritage Award
P.O. BOX 571
COTATI, CA 94931
All nominations must be received by January 5, 2011. Winners will be announced and notified by January 10, 2011. Winning articles will be linked to the Project Censored website and published online. Dorothy N. Andersen and family have provided funding for this award. Judges are comprised of family members and board directors of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored (www.projectcensored.org). The decision of the judges is final and appeals will not be accepted. No late entries will be considered.
We look forward to the process of honoring the values of Alfred and Dorothy Andersen. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Alfred Frederick Andersen: 1919—2010
Biography
Alfred Frederick Andersen dedicated his life to the philosophical pursuit of ideas that became manifest as the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage which is a principle, which states that income from land, resources and the inventions of past and current generations be fairly shared. His overall concern was the creation of “sustained justice for all sentient beings.” His ideas are as compelling and revolutionary as when Alfred first began developing them.
Alfred was born on June 27, 1919 in Bridgeport Connecticut. Al’s studies in nuclear physics ignited a profound passion to study philosophy and holistic thinking regarding community and global challenges. He received a degree in civil engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and studied philosophy at Harvard, Columbia, Ohio State and Lincoln University. He is the author of, Liberating the Early American Dream and Challenging Newt Gingrich Chapter by Chapter. He taught math at the junior and senior high school levels and philosophy of science at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and philosophy of education Simon Fraser University in Canada. And he believed with a great passion that everyone should have a fair share of the Common Heritage.
He was convicted of refusing induction into military service during WWII. He was sentenced to two years in prison and released after eight months for “good behavior.” After his release from prison, he began attending meetings with the Yellow Spring Ohio Friends and other subsequent Friends Meetings. He and his family joined a community of thirty other families at the Tanguy Homesteads in Pennsylvania. He was an avid supporter and participant of intentional community living. He did not pay federal income tax on the basis of his deeply felt philosophical values.
Alfred demonstrated unusual creativity, resourcefulness and inventiness in his approach towards supporting himself and his family. He was a professor, teacher, salesman, inventor, and philosopher. He managed his father’s machine shop, worked as a groundskeeper, ran a bakery, was a lecturer, and Dean at Oakwood Friends School. He invented and patented a ratchet wrench the rapid grip. Alfred also designed, manufactured and sold a kitchen flourmill. He was a man of vision who created wealth for his family but whose conscience was also invested in ideas which would create wealth for all sentient beings.
Alfred authored two books and several pamplets. Howard Zinn commented on his work, Challenging Newt Gingrich Chapter by Chapter stating, “Alfred Andersen has performed a valuable task for all of us. In this timely, thoughtful dissection of the right wing agenda, he not only takes on Newt Gingrich with painstaking clarity, but suggests an alternative agenda for achieving justice in America.” This alternative agenda for justice was not only addressed in books but in the public forum as well.
In 1976 Alfred traveled to Vancouver, Canada to participate in a forum of non-governmental organizations associated with the United Nations Special Sessions on Habitat and Human Settlements. He helped compose a concluding statement proclaiming that housing, basic services, energy, land use, participation, and financing problems can only be solved by a global and integral approach which has to go to the heart of the matter and transform the economic, social and political structures which cause them.
Al’s life was a reflection of his values. A friend said, “I have never seen (or imagined) such devotion as his to the principles of justice and community. They were woven into the fabric of his soul; he spoke of them with the upmost depth and centrality of feeling, I know he lived by them and it was always touching to hear him voice how vital and seriously urgent they were for him.”
The Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award
Nominations are being accepted for the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage Award. These submissions can be published or unpublished articles, or works in progress that express the ideas behind the original economic and social theories of Alfred Frederick Andersen. Andersen believed that every sentient being – human and non-human – has a right to the fair share of the material and economic benefits of the Common Heritage Wealth. Included in this Common Heritage are all earth’s natural resources: such as land surfaces, sub-surface minerals and fuels; water and air, as well as cyberspace; indeed the entire physical environment.
The Common Heritage Award articles should propose and describe ways in which such sharing could be accomplished. Andersen’s work is recognized by the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored as an annual award to be given to the person that best reflects how the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage can work in our culture. An example of such sharing would be the promotion of an idea that natural resource extractors would be required to pay the value of the resources into a Common Heritage fund for all living things.
First place winner will receive $3,500 award
Second place winner will receive $1,500 award
Winners will receive their award at the annual Media Freedom Foundation/ Project Censored Awards Ceremony in Berkeley, California, February 5, 2011. Transportation costs to Berkeley will be available to the winners.
To submit a nomination send no more than a one-page summary of completed articles and specific URL to the original article to: commonheritageaward@gmail.com. For unpublished articles, submit full copies to:
MEDIA FREEDOM FOUNDATION
The Common Heritage Award
P.O. BOX 571
COTATI, CA 94931
All nominations must be received by January 5, 2011. Winners will be announced and notified by January 10, 2011. Winning articles will be linked to the Project Censored website and published online. Dorothy N. Andersen and family have provided funding for this award. Judges are comprised of family members and board directors of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored (www.projectcensored.org). The decision of the judges is final and appeals will not be accepted. No late entries will be considered.
We look forward to the process of honoring the values of Alfred and Dorothy Andersen. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Alfred Frederick Andersen: 1919—2010
Biography
Alfred Frederick Andersen dedicated his life to the philosophical pursuit of ideas that became manifest as the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage which is a principle, which states that income from land, resources and the inventions of past and current generations be fairly shared. His overall concern was the creation of “sustained justice for all sentient beings.” His ideas are as compelling and revolutionary as when Alfred first began developing them.
Alfred was born on June 27, 1919 in Bridgeport Connecticut. Al’s studies in nuclear physics ignited a profound passion to study philosophy and holistic thinking regarding community and global challenges. He received a degree in civil engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and studied philosophy at Harvard, Columbia, Ohio State and Lincoln University. He is the author of, Liberating the Early American Dream and Challenging Newt Gingrich Chapter by Chapter. He taught math at the junior and senior high school levels and philosophy of science at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and philosophy of education Simon Fraser University in Canada. And he believed with a great passion that everyone should have a fair share of the Common Heritage.
He was convicted of refusing induction into military service during WWII. He was sentenced to two years in prison and released after eight months for “good behavior.” After his release from prison, he began attending meetings with the Yellow Spring Ohio Friends and other subsequent Friends Meetings. He and his family joined a community of thirty other families at the Tanguy Homesteads in Pennsylvania. He was an avid supporter and participant of intentional community living. He did not pay federal income tax on the basis of his deeply felt philosophical values.
Alfred demonstrated unusual creativity, resourcefulness and inventiness in his approach towards supporting himself and his family. He was a professor, teacher, salesman, inventor, and philosopher. He managed his father’s machine shop, worked as a groundskeeper, ran a bakery, was a lecturer, and Dean at Oakwood Friends School. He invented and patented a ratchet wrench the rapid grip. Alfred also designed, manufactured and sold a kitchen flourmill. He was a man of vision who created wealth for his family but whose conscience was also invested in ideas which would create wealth for all sentient beings.
Alfred authored two books and several pamplets. Howard Zinn commented on his work, Challenging Newt Gingrich Chapter by Chapter stating, “Alfred Andersen has performed a valuable task for all of us. In this timely, thoughtful dissection of the right wing agenda, he not only takes on Newt Gingrich with painstaking clarity, but suggests an alternative agenda for achieving justice in America.” This alternative agenda for justice was not only addressed in books but in the public forum as well.
In 1976 Alfred traveled to Vancouver, Canada to participate in a forum of non-governmental organizations associated with the United Nations Special Sessions on Habitat and Human Settlements. He helped compose a concluding statement proclaiming that housing, basic services, energy, land use, participation, and financing problems can only be solved by a global and integral approach which has to go to the heart of the matter and transform the economic, social and political structures which cause them.
Al’s life was a reflection of his values. A friend said, “I have never seen (or imagined) such devotion as his to the principles of justice and community. They were woven into the fabric of his soul; he spoke of them with the upmost depth and centrality of feeling, I know he lived by them and it was always touching to hear him voice how vital and seriously urgent they were for him.”
Monday, August 16, 2010
Support Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
For 34 years Project Censored has been committed to bringing the most vital stories to public awareness with the belief that genuine democracy depends on freedom of the press. The new Censored 2011 yearbook has been written and will be released from Seven Stories Press in September of this year. Please help us with the promotion of this year's important book by making a financial donation towards our summer fund drive.
Independent media, both on the local, national, and international level is at risk and we believe that it is vital to support the expansion of news from independent sources worldwide. Project Censored is not only working on new underreported stories but spreading the word via our new Daily Censored website, Facebook page and our Media Freedom Foundations Daily News Feed site which aggregates independent news from many of the most reliable sources around the world.
Some of the top most important censored stories of the year include:
Global Plans to Replace the Dollar Threaten US Economy
Defense Department is the Worst Polluter on the Planet
Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Operates Secret Detention Centers and Violates Due Process Rights for Immigrants
Blackwater (Xe): The Secret US War in Pakistan and Other Illegal Activities
Checks to: Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, P.O. Box 571, Cotati, CA 94931
Project Censored, Sonoma, CA
Independent media, both on the local, national, and international level is at risk and we believe that it is vital to support the expansion of news from independent sources worldwide. Project Censored is not only working on new underreported stories but spreading the word via our new Daily Censored website, Facebook page and our Media Freedom Foundations Daily News Feed site which aggregates independent news from many of the most reliable sources around the world.
Some of the top most important censored stories of the year include:
Global Plans to Replace the Dollar Threaten US Economy
Defense Department is the Worst Polluter on the Planet
Internet Privacy and Personal Access at Risk
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Operates Secret Detention Centers and Violates Due Process Rights for Immigrants
Blackwater (Xe): The Secret US War in Pakistan and Other Illegal Activities
Checks to: Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, P.O. Box 571, Cotati, CA 94931
Project Censored, Sonoma, CA
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Managed News: Inside The US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire
By Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff
“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
–– Charles Dickens
We face what appears to be a military industrial media empire so powerful and complex that truth is mostly absent or reported in disconnected segments with little historical context. A case in point: The London Times reported on June 5, 2010, that American troops are now operating in 75 countries. Has President Obama secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US Special Forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world? If so, this increase is far in excess of special-forces operations under the Bush administration and reflects how aggressively Obama is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy. Somehow this information didn’t make it into the US media.
The US, in cooperation with NATO, is building global occupation forces for the control of international resources in support of Trilaterialist—US, Europe, Japan— corporate profits. A New York Times report on the availability of a trillion dollars in mineral wealth in Afghanistan, on top of the need for an oil/gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, suggests other reasons for U.S objectives in the region.
Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service writes on June 15, 2010, “The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan's soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon…Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, says that the US Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan's non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.”
Given the previous reports, there is nothing new about resources in Afghanistan that the Pentagon and US multinational corporations didn’t already know. On the contrary, the public should consider whether the surfacing of this resource story is a managed-news press release being done at a time of sensitive concerns regarding NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. A deliberate news insertion such as the mineral wealth story is designed to create support for a US/NATO global empire agenda.
Managed news includes both the release of specific stories intended to build public support as well as the deliberate non-coverage of news stories that may undermine US goals. Have you been told about the continuing privatization of this global war? Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, wrote in The Nation magazine November 23, 2009, how Blackwater (Xe) operatives in the Pakistani port city of Karachi are gathering intelligence and helping to direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign in that country.
There has not been much coverage of the report in Global Research, May 27, 2010, regarding new US capabilities for cyber warfare, announced recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as the activation of the Pentagon's first computer command and the world's first comprehensive, multi-service military cyber operation. CYBERCOM is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, which also is home to the National Security Agency (NSA).
The US’s Israeli partner in the Middle East demonstrated a skilled manipulation of the global media’s coverage of the May 31 attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Israel controlled the news and images that emerged from the attack on the ships, asserting that the invading Israeli paratroopers were viciously attacked by crewmembers—resulting in the killing of several in “self defense.” Israel sought to divert the focus of public discussion away from the illegitimate use of excessive force against a group of humanitarians– of diverse religious and national affiliations– to the blaming of the victims for causing their own deaths.
Managed news creates a Truth Emergency for the public inside the US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire. Deliberate news management undermines the freedom of information on the doings of the powerful military/corporate entities though overt censorship, mass distractions, and artificial news— including stories timed for release to influence public opinion (i.e., propaganda).
A Truth Emergency is the lack of purity in news brought about by this propaganda and distraction. It is the state in which people, despite potentially being awash in a sea of information, lack the power of discernment resulting in a knowinglessness about what is going on in the world. In short, we are living in a time where people do not know whom to trust for accurate information and yearn for the truth.
One antidote to the ongoing Truth Emergency is the creation of validated independent news by colleges and universities around the globe where students and professors use research skills and databases to fact check and verify information that is reported to the public. For more about this, and what we can all do to counter managed news, see Project Censored International's new website at http//:mediafreedominternational.org. Together, we can build accountability in our media and breathe life back into our withering republic.
_______________________
Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
–– Charles Dickens
We face what appears to be a military industrial media empire so powerful and complex that truth is mostly absent or reported in disconnected segments with little historical context. A case in point: The London Times reported on June 5, 2010, that American troops are now operating in 75 countries. Has President Obama secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US Special Forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world? If so, this increase is far in excess of special-forces operations under the Bush administration and reflects how aggressively Obama is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy. Somehow this information didn’t make it into the US media.
The US, in cooperation with NATO, is building global occupation forces for the control of international resources in support of Trilaterialist—US, Europe, Japan— corporate profits. A New York Times report on the availability of a trillion dollars in mineral wealth in Afghanistan, on top of the need for an oil/gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea, suggests other reasons for U.S objectives in the region.
Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service writes on June 15, 2010, “The timing of the publication of a major New York Times story on the vast untapped mineral wealth that lies beneath Afghanistan's soil is raising major questions about the intent of the Pentagon…Blake Hounshell, managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, says that the US Geological Service (USGS) already published a comprehensive inventory of Afghanistan's non-oil mineral resources on the Internet in 2007, as did the British Geological Survey. Much of their work was based on explorations and surveys undertaken by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.”
Given the previous reports, there is nothing new about resources in Afghanistan that the Pentagon and US multinational corporations didn’t already know. On the contrary, the public should consider whether the surfacing of this resource story is a managed-news press release being done at a time of sensitive concerns regarding NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. A deliberate news insertion such as the mineral wealth story is designed to create support for a US/NATO global empire agenda.
Managed news includes both the release of specific stories intended to build public support as well as the deliberate non-coverage of news stories that may undermine US goals. Have you been told about the continuing privatization of this global war? Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, wrote in The Nation magazine November 23, 2009, how Blackwater (Xe) operatives in the Pakistani port city of Karachi are gathering intelligence and helping to direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign in that country.
There has not been much coverage of the report in Global Research, May 27, 2010, regarding new US capabilities for cyber warfare, announced recently by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as the activation of the Pentagon's first computer command and the world's first comprehensive, multi-service military cyber operation. CYBERCOM is based at Fort Meade, Maryland, which also is home to the National Security Agency (NSA).
The US’s Israeli partner in the Middle East demonstrated a skilled manipulation of the global media’s coverage of the May 31 attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Israel controlled the news and images that emerged from the attack on the ships, asserting that the invading Israeli paratroopers were viciously attacked by crewmembers—resulting in the killing of several in “self defense.” Israel sought to divert the focus of public discussion away from the illegitimate use of excessive force against a group of humanitarians– of diverse religious and national affiliations– to the blaming of the victims for causing their own deaths.
Managed news creates a Truth Emergency for the public inside the US/NATO Military Industrial Media Empire. Deliberate news management undermines the freedom of information on the doings of the powerful military/corporate entities though overt censorship, mass distractions, and artificial news— including stories timed for release to influence public opinion (i.e., propaganda).
A Truth Emergency is the lack of purity in news brought about by this propaganda and distraction. It is the state in which people, despite potentially being awash in a sea of information, lack the power of discernment resulting in a knowinglessness about what is going on in the world. In short, we are living in a time where people do not know whom to trust for accurate information and yearn for the truth.
One antidote to the ongoing Truth Emergency is the creation of validated independent news by colleges and universities around the globe where students and professors use research skills and databases to fact check and verify information that is reported to the public. For more about this, and what we can all do to counter managed news, see Project Censored International's new website at http//:mediafreedominternational.org. Together, we can build accountability in our media and breathe life back into our withering republic.
_______________________
Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
State Crimes Against Democracy
Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff
New research in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (Sage publications, February 2010) addresses the concept of “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD). Professor Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University writes that SCADs involve highlevel government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, the Watergate break-in, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election (felon disenfranchisement program), and fixed intelligence on WMDs to justify the Iraq War.1
Other suspected SCADs include the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooting of George Wallace, the October Surprise near the end of the Carter presidency, military grade anthrax mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001. The proven SCADs have a long trail of congressional hearings, public records, and academic research establishing the truth of the activities. The suspected SCADs listed above have substantial evidence of covert actions with countervailing deniability that tend to leave the facts in dispute.2
The term “conspiracy theory” is often used to denigrate and discredit inquiry into the veracity of suspected SCADs. Labeling SCAD research as “conspiracy theory” is an effective method of preventing ongoing investigations from being reported in the corporate media and keep them outside of broader public scrutiny. Psychologist Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph, addresses the psychological advantage that SCAD actors hold in the public sphere. Manwell, writing in American Behavioral Scientist (Sage 2010) states, “research shows that people are far less willing to examine information that disputes, rather than confirms, their beliefs . . . pre-existing beliefs can interfere with SCADs inquiry, especially in regards to September 11, 2001.”3
Professor Steven Hoffman, visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo, recently acknowledged this phenomenon in a study “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification.” Hoffman concluded, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. In fact, for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.”4
Sometimes even new academic research goes largely unreported when the work contradicts prevailing understandings of recent historical events. A specific case of unreported academic research is the peer reviewed journal article from Open Chemical Physics Journal (Volume 2, 2009), entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust for the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.” In the abstract the authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.5
National Medal of Science recipient (1999) Professor Lynn Margulis from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is one of many academics who supports further open investigative research in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Margulis recently wrote in Rock Creek Free Press, “all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition.”6
Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), announced a decisive milestone February 19, 2010 at a press conference in San Francisco, CA. More than 1,000 architects and engineers worldwide now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001.7
Credible scientific evidence brings into question the possibility that some aspects of the events of 9/11 involved State Crimes Against Democracy. Psychologically this is a very hard concept for Americans to even consider. However, ignoring the issue in the context of multiple proven SCADs since World War II seems far more dangerous for democracy than the consequences of future scientific inquiry and transparent, fact-based investigative reporting. Anything short of complete, open discourse based on all the evidence about these critical issues in our society relating to the possible continuation of SCADs is simply a matter of censorship.8
________________________________________________________________________
Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and coeditor of Censored 2010.
Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
________________________________________________________________________
1 Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010): pp. 795-825. For more studies on SCADs and related issues see all articles for American Behavioral Scientist, Sage publications, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010), online at http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/.
For more background reading on this subject with specifics on the controversial cases mentioned in this paragraph, see the following scholarly works: Robert Abele, The Anatomy of a Deception: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: University Press of America, 2010); Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009); Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking Adult, 2002); Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (New York: Olive Branch press, 2008); Mark Crispin Miller, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (New York: Ig Publishing, 2008); Kenneth O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1993); William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Marin Luther King (Updated) (New York: Verso, 2008); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (New York: Tarcher and Penguin, 2003); selected works of Peter Dale Scott, including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008); Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005); Lawrence Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997); Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd Edition, 2003);
2 Ibid.
3 American Behavioral Scientist, Sage publications, February, 2010, Vol. 53, No. 6, online at http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/. Specifically, see Laurie A. Manwell, “In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post-9/11,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010): pp. 848-884.
4 “How We Support Our False Beliefs,” Science Daily (Aug. 23, 2009) online at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090821135020.htm. For the full study see Steven Hoffman, Ph.D., et al, "There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification," Sociological Inquiry, Volume 79 Issue 2, (2009): pp. 142-162.
5 Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol. 2 (April 3, 2009): 7-31, online at http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm.
6 Lynn Margulis, “Two Hit, Three Down, the Biggest Lie,” Rock Creek Press, February 2010, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 6, and online at http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/353434420/two-hit-three-down-the-biggest-lie
7 Richard Gage, AIA, Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, Press Conference, February 19th, 2010, SF, CA, online at http://www.ae911truth.org/info/160. See the Conference announcement video online at http://www.youtube.com/ae911truth#p/c/891B0945A34D98F7/0/R35O_QQP8Vw
8 For more on issues of media censorship see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, eds., Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009).
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New research in the journal American Behavioral Scientist (Sage publications, February 2010) addresses the concept of “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD). Professor Lance deHaven-Smith from Florida State University writes that SCADs involve highlevel government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power. Proven SCADs since World War II include McCarthyism (fabrication of evidence of a communist infiltration), Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (President Johnson and Robert McNamara falsely claimed North Vietnam attacked a US ship), burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in effort to discredit Ellsberg, the Watergate break-in, Iran-Contra, Florida’s 2000 Election (felon disenfranchisement program), and fixed intelligence on WMDs to justify the Iraq War.1
Other suspected SCADs include the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooting of George Wallace, the October Surprise near the end of the Carter presidency, military grade anthrax mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001. The proven SCADs have a long trail of congressional hearings, public records, and academic research establishing the truth of the activities. The suspected SCADs listed above have substantial evidence of covert actions with countervailing deniability that tend to leave the facts in dispute.2
The term “conspiracy theory” is often used to denigrate and discredit inquiry into the veracity of suspected SCADs. Labeling SCAD research as “conspiracy theory” is an effective method of preventing ongoing investigations from being reported in the corporate media and keep them outside of broader public scrutiny. Psychologist Laurie Manwell, University of Guelph, addresses the psychological advantage that SCAD actors hold in the public sphere. Manwell, writing in American Behavioral Scientist (Sage 2010) states, “research shows that people are far less willing to examine information that disputes, rather than confirms, their beliefs . . . pre-existing beliefs can interfere with SCADs inquiry, especially in regards to September 11, 2001.”3
Professor Steven Hoffman, visiting scholar at the University of Buffalo, recently acknowledged this phenomenon in a study “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification.” Hoffman concluded, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe. In fact, for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.”4
Sometimes even new academic research goes largely unreported when the work contradicts prevailing understandings of recent historical events. A specific case of unreported academic research is the peer reviewed journal article from Open Chemical Physics Journal (Volume 2, 2009), entitled “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust for the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe.” In the abstract the authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.5
National Medal of Science recipient (1999) Professor Lynn Margulis from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is one of many academics who supports further open investigative research in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Margulis recently wrote in Rock Creek Free Press, “all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition.”6
Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), announced a decisive milestone February 19, 2010 at a press conference in San Francisco, CA. More than 1,000 architects and engineers worldwide now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001.7
Credible scientific evidence brings into question the possibility that some aspects of the events of 9/11 involved State Crimes Against Democracy. Psychologically this is a very hard concept for Americans to even consider. However, ignoring the issue in the context of multiple proven SCADs since World War II seems far more dangerous for democracy than the consequences of future scientific inquiry and transparent, fact-based investigative reporting. Anything short of complete, open discourse based on all the evidence about these critical issues in our society relating to the possible continuation of SCADs is simply a matter of censorship.8
________________________________________________________________________
Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, President of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored, former director of Project Censored, and coeditor of Censored 2010.
Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, Director of Project Censored/Media Freedom Foundation, and co-editor of Censored 2010.
________________________________________________________________________
1 Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010): pp. 795-825. For more studies on SCADs and related issues see all articles for American Behavioral Scientist, Sage publications, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010), online at http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/.
For more background reading on this subject with specifics on the controversial cases mentioned in this paragraph, see the following scholarly works: Robert Abele, The Anatomy of a Deception: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: University Press of America, 2010); Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009); Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking Adult, 2002); Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); David Ray Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (New York: Olive Branch press, 2008); Mark Crispin Miller, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 (New York: Ig Publishing, 2008); Kenneth O'Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Robert Parry, Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1993); William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Marin Luther King (Updated) (New York: Verso, 2008); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (New York: Tarcher and Penguin, 2003); selected works of Peter Dale Scott, including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008); Norman Solomon, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning us to Death (New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005); Lawrence Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997); Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd Edition, 2003);
2 Ibid.
3 American Behavioral Scientist, Sage publications, February, 2010, Vol. 53, No. 6, online at http://abs.sagepub.com/content/vol53/issue6/. Specifically, see Laurie A. Manwell, “In Denial of Democracy: Social Psychological Implications for Public Discourse on State Crimes Against Democracy Post-9/11,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, No. 6, (February, 2010): pp. 848-884.
4 “How We Support Our False Beliefs,” Science Daily (Aug. 23, 2009) online at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090821135020.htm. For the full study see Steven Hoffman, Ph.D., et al, "There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification," Sociological Inquiry, Volume 79 Issue 2, (2009): pp. 142-162.
5 Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe," Open Chemical Physics Journal, Vol. 2 (April 3, 2009): 7-31, online at http://www.bentham.org/open/tocpj/openaccess2.htm.
6 Lynn Margulis, “Two Hit, Three Down, the Biggest Lie,” Rock Creek Press, February 2010, Vol. 4, No. 2, p. 6, and online at http://rockcreekfreepress.tumblr.com/post/353434420/two-hit-three-down-the-biggest-lie
7 Richard Gage, AIA, Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, Press Conference, February 19th, 2010, SF, CA, online at http://www.ae911truth.org/info/160. See the Conference announcement video online at http://www.youtube.com/ae911truth#p/c/891B0945A34D98F7/0/R35O_QQP8Vw
8 For more on issues of media censorship see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, eds., Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009).
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
Media Democracy in Action
Media Democracy in Action: The Importance of Including Truth Emergency Inside the Progressive Media Reform Movement
By: Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips
“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
– Charles Dickens
The Corporate News Media: Not in the Business of News
The late New York University media scholar Neil Postman once said about America, “We are the best entertained least informed society in the world.” That was twenty-five years ago and after two-plus decades of more deregulation and the growth of conglomerates in the media, that trend has continued. From Tyra Banks’ shifting figure and the Balloon Boy hoax, to the celebrity death of Michael Jackson and the Obama Beer Summit, Americans are fed a steady “news” diet of tabloidized, trivialized, and outright useless information laden with personal anecdotes, scandals, and gossip.
Topics and in-depth reports that matter little to most people in any meaningful way are given massive amounts of attention in the corporate media. In recent years, this has only become more obvious. For instance, CNN’s coverage of celebrity Anna Nicole Smith’s untimely death in early 2007 is arguably one of the most egregious examples of an over abused news story. The magnitude of corporate media attention paid to Smith’s death were clearly out of synch with the coverage the story deserved, which was at most a simple passing mention. Instead, CNN broadcast “breaking” stories of Smith’s death uninterrupted, without commercials, for almost two hours, with commentary by lead anchors and journalists. This marked among the longest uninterrupted “news” broadcasts at CNN since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Anna Nicole Smith and 9/11 are now strange bedfellows, milestone bookends of a deranged corporate news culture.[1]
While news outlets were obsessing over Smith’s death, most big media giants were missing a far more important story. The US ambassador to Iraq misplaced $12 billion in shrink-wrapped one hundred dollar bills that were flown to Baghdad. This garnered little attention due to the media’s morbid infatuation with Smith’s passing. This is clearly news judgment gone terribly awry if not an outright retreat from journalistic standards. The once trivial and absurd are now mainstreamed as “news.” More young people turn to late night comics’ fake news to learn the truth or tune out to so-called reality shows often scripted as Roman Holiday spectacles of the surreal. This hyper-reality creation of corporate media in the 21st century has led to what Postman presciently warned about: an infotainment society.[2]
The trend of mass coverage of trivial events in corporate media continued in 2009. British tabloid News of the World published an exclusive photo of Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps smoking marijuana from a bong on Sunday, February 1, 2009, with the headline, “What a Dope.” The picture was allegedly taken during a November house party while Phelps was visiting the University of South Carolina. The incident occurred nearly three months after the swimmer won eight gold medals for America at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China. Phelps quickly apologized to the public for his “regrettable behavior. ” The bong’s owner reportedly tried to sell it on eBay for $100,000. In the weeks following, Phelps lost his sponsorship from Kellogg’s cereal. Did anyone ask: is this really a newsworthy issue? Or, why is this a news story? Why instead was there not a discussion about the almost one-and-a-half million marijuana user arrests in 2006 and 2007?[3]
Photos of Jessica Simpson performing at a Florida Chili Cook-off looking a bit heavier than usual surfaced during the week of January 26, 2009. The purportedly unflattering shots of a curvier looking Simpson in an outfit that included “a muffin-top-inducing leopard belt” immediately made news headlines. Was she pregnant? Was she picking up eating habits from her NFL star quarterback boyfriend? Or was she simply hungry for publicity? During a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama even noted that Simpson was “in a weight battle.” Again, why is this a news story and why is the leader of the free world commenting on it? Why does this get coverage by hard news outlets at all? Why was there not a discussion about the worsening problems of hunger, homelessness, and poverty in America?[4]
The US is not only becoming a nation of obese people, but is on the verge of another phenomenon the equivalent of cultural and mental obesity. We, in America, are a nation awash in a sea of information yet we have a paucity of understanding. We are a country where over a quarter of the population know the names of all five members of the fictitious family from The Simpsons yet only one in a thousand can name all the rights protected under the first amendment to the US Constitution. Journalistic values have been sold out to commercial interests and not even our core, national and constitutionally protected values are sacred. Far too often, important news stories are underreported or ignored entirely by corporate news outlets, especially on television, where over seventy percent of Americans get their news, even though only an astounding twenty-nine percent say it is accurate. In short, Americans are living in a state of Truth Emergency.[5]
Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
“The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.[6]
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.[7]
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.[8]
For a family on the bottom rung of poverty a small price increase is the difference between life and death, yet no US presidents have declared a war on starvation. Instead they talk about national security and the continuation of the war on terror as if these were the primary issues for their terms in office. Given that ten times as many innocent people died of starvation than those in the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001, why is there no war on starvation as there was a so-called War on Terror? Is not starvation, especially if preventable, a form of inflicted terror by those who profit from it or even stand by and do nothing? Where is the Manhattan Project for global hunger? Where is the commitment to national security though unilateral starvation relief? Where is the outrage in the corporate news media with pictures of dying children and an analysis of those that benefit from hunger? Could the same not be said for those that die due to lack of healthcare coverage, to the tune of 45,000 a year? While news stories on realities of global hunger remain under-covered in the US, topics closer to home are often ignored as well. For example, racial inequality remains problematic in the US. People of color continue to experience disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, police profiling, repressive incarceration and school segregation.
According to a recent civil rights report from UCLA, “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,” by Gary Orfield, schools in the US are currently forty-four percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students. Latinos and Blacks are the two largest minority groups. However, Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Over fifty years after the US Supreme Court case: Brown VS Board of Education, schools remain separate and not equal. Orfield’s study shows that public schools in the Western states, including California, suffer from the most severe segregation in the US, rather than schools in the southern states as many people believe.[9]
This new form of segregation is primarily based on how urban areas are geographically organized—as Cornel West so passionately describes— into vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities.[10] Schools remain highly unequal, both in terms of money, and qualified teachers and curriculum. Unequal education leads to diminishing access to colleges and future jobs for the afflicted demographics. Non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. These “chocolate” low-income public schools are where most of the nation’s drop-outs occur, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color struggling to survive in a troubled economy.
Diminished opportunity for students of color invariably creates greater privileges for whites. White privilege is a concept that is challenging for many whites to accept. Whites like to think of themselves as hard working individuals whose achievements are due to deserved personal efforts. In many cases this is partly true; hard work in college often pays off in many ways. Nonetheless many whites find it difficult to accept that geographically and structurally based racism remains a significant barrier for many students of color. Whites often say racism is in the past, that Americans need not think about it today. Yet, inequality stares back at society daily from the barrios, ghettos, and from behind prisons walls.
For these factual stories to not be reported upon by major media outlets is clearly a matter of censorship and top down information control. The aforementioned are two riveting examples of a failure of the free press to accurately inform the public about critical issues facing our global and national society. Sadly, there are many more examples.
Fourth Estate Sale: Censorship, the “Free” Press, and Truth Emergency
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
– A.J. Liebling
The corporate media in the US like to think of themselves as the official, most accurate source for news reporting of the day. The New York Times motto of “all the news that’s fit to print” is a clear example of this perspective as is CNN’s “most trusted name in news” and at Fox News they go so far as to remind news consumers “we report, you decide” and that they are “fair and balanced.” However, with corporate media coverage dependent on fewer reporters as a result of downsizing that increasingly focus on a narrow range of celebrity updates, news from official government and institutional sources (almost three quarters of cited sources), and sensationalized crimes and disasters, the self-justification of being the most fit or trusted is no longer valid for American journalism. This shift away from fact-based, socially relevant reporting constitutes a principle form censorship at the base of this ongoing truth emergency. However, this is not the only form of censorship.
There is a growing need to broaden understanding of censorship in the US. The dictionary definition of direct government control of news as censorship is no longer adequate. The private corporate media in the US significantly under covers and/or deliberately censors numerous important news stories every year. The corporate media in the United States are ignoring valid news stories, even when based on university quality research. It appears that certain topics are simply forbidden inside the mainstream corporate media today. To openly cover these news stories would stir up questions regarding “inconvenient truths” that many in the US power structure would rather avoid. An example of one group that is doing this is Project Censored, and the Project has done so every year since 1976. They cover the inconvenient truths, expose the junk news patterns, and call for a more independent, research driven, transparent and fact-based system of reporting on all relevant topics for our democratic society.
Some of these inconvenient truths that remain taboo for corporate media include civilian death rates in Iraq, post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties, levels of violence by side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the coup in Haiti, election fraud in the US, and questions concerning the very events and subsequent official investigations of 9/11. Here are some more details of the ongoing truth emergency.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB) report that the United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, ORB reported that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003 . . . We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000.” A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million. John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies writes in The Nation, January 28, 2009, “we have, at present between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excessive Deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.[11]
Some common themes of the most censored stories from 2006-2008 were the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties in both the US and the world at large. The corporate media ignored the fact that habeas corpus can now be suspended for anyone by order of the President. With the approval of Congress, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, allows for the suspension of habeas corpus for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in The New York Times, October 19, 2006, have given false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims of the measures legalized by this Act, the law is quite clear that ‘any person’ can be targeted. The text in the MCA allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for all people living in the US deemed by the president to be enemy combatants.[12] In September 2009, President Obama quietly pledged to continue the program as it was instituted by the Bush administration with little fanfare.[13]
A law enacted allowing the government to more easily institute martial law was another civil liberties story ignored by the corporate media in 2007. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.” The law in effect repealed the Posse Comitatus Act from 1878, which had placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement in the US marking an end to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.[14]
Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. By 2008, the number grew to 54,000. Unfortunately, most of those arrested were not, in fact, violent criminals according to the government’s own statistics. The operations, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and are the first time in US history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. As of July 2009, the sixth effort of the FALCON raids has increased the number of “dangerous fugitive felons” arrested to more than 91,000 (of which only 991 were murder suspects, and only 2,269 were gang members despite that these were the very groups they were claiming to round up).[15] Finally, the term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include any acts that interfere, or promotes interference, with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on November 27, 2006, expands the definition of an “animal enterprise” to any business that “uses or sells animals or animal products.” The law essentially defines protesters, boycotters or picketers of businesses in the US as terrorists. This is a clear infringement of first amendment rights.[16]
Most people in the US believe in the Bill of Rights and value personal freedoms. Yet, the corporate media in the recent past have failed to adequately inform the public about important changes concerning civil rights and liberties. Despite the busy lives people lead, they want to be informed about serious decisions made by the powerful, and rely on the corporate media to keep us abreast of significant changes. When corporate media fail to cover these issues, what else can it be called it but censorship? These are issues are of considerable concern for the public at large. Conclusions on such matters can only be arrived upon after scrupulous analysis of all known facts. Given that all the facts about these stories are not widely reported, if at all, this leads to a significant crisis for any democracy.
On October 25, 2005 the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) posted to their website forty-four autopsy reports, acquired from American military sources, covering the deaths of civilians who died while in US military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002-2004. The autopsy reports provided proof of widespread torture by US forces. A press release by ACLU announcing the deaths was immediately picked up by Associate Press (AP) wire service making the story available to US corporate media nationwide. A thorough check of Nexis-Lexis and Proquest library data bases showed that at least ninety-nine percent of the daily papers in the US did not pick up the story, nor did AP ever conduct follow up coverage on the issue.[17]
Not only do daily newspapers fail to cover the inconvenient truths presented by their own wire service, as illustrated in the aforementioned AP example, but the wire service itself is filled with internal bias. AP is a non-profit cooperative news wire service. The AP, with 3,700 employees, has 242 bureaus worldwide that deliver news reports twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to 121 countries in five languages including English, German, Dutch, French, and Spanish. In the US alone, AP reaches 1,700 daily, weekly, non-English, college newspapers, and 5,000 radio and television stations. AP reaches over a billion people every day via print, radio, or television.
Bias and censorship is also evident in stories concerning the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Alison Weir, Joy Ellison, and Peter Weir of the organization If Americans Knew conducted research on the AP’s reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The study was a statistical analysis of the AP newswire in the year 2004, looking comparatively at the numbers of Israeli and Palestinian deaths reported. In 2004 there were 141 reports of Israeli deaths in AP headlines and lead paragraphs, while in reality there were 108 Israeli deaths. During this same period, AP reported 543 Palestinian deaths, while 821 Palestinians had actually been killed. The ratio of actual number of Israeli conflict deaths to Palestinian deaths in 2004 was 1:7, yet AP reported deaths of Israelis to Palestinians at a 2:1 ratio.
The same could be said of AP’s reporting of children’s deaths. Nine reports of Israeli children’s deaths were reported in AP headlines and leading paragraphs in 2004, while eight actually occurred. The AP reported only twenty-seven Palestinian children deaths when 179 children actually died. While there were twenty-two times more Palestinian children’s deaths than Israeli children’s deaths, the AP reported 113 percent of Israeli children’s deaths and fifteen percent of Palestinian children’s deaths. In fact, the actual deaths ratios for the three week bombings of Gaza January 2009 were over a hundred Palestinians killed per single Israel death.[18]
Looking to Haiti for yet another example, on February 29, 2004, AP widely reported that Haitian rebels ousted President Aristide and that the United States provided an escort to take him out of the country to a safe asylum. Within 24 hours an entirely different story emerged through independent radio. Instead of the US being the supportive facilitator of Aristide’s safety, Pacifica Radio News reported that Aristide was actually kidnapped by US forces. AP quickly changed their story. On March 1, 2004, an AP report by Deb Riechman said, “White House officials said Aristide left willingly and that the United States aided his safe departure. But in a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Aristide said: “No. I was forced to leave.”
The last AP report of Aristide’s claiming that he had been kidnapped by the US in a State Department coup was on June 27, 2004. Since then there have been more than sixty news articles by AP including Aristide’s name. Of these stories none mentioned Aristide’s claim that he was kidnapped by the United States military. None mention the US backing of the coup. AP’s bias in favor of the State Department’s version of the Aristide’s removal seems to be a deliberate case of AP-sanctioned forgetting. AP is a massive institutionalized bureaucracy that feeds news stories to nearly every newspaper and radio/TV station in the United States. They are so large that top-down control of single news stories is practically impossible. However, research clearly indicates a built-in bias favoring official US government positions.[19]
Reform Media Reform: Pursuit and Reporting of Truth Emergency Issues
“Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
There is a literal truth emergency in the United States, not only regarding distant wars, torture camps, and doctored intelligence, but also around issues that most intimately impact our lives at home. For example, few Americans know that there has been a thirty-five year decline in real wages for most workers in the country, while the top ten percent now enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens.
George Seldes once said, “Journalism’s job is not impartial ‘balanced’ reporting. Journalism’s job is to tell the people what is really going on.” Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of telling the people what is really going on. Health care activists know that US health insurance is an extremely large and lucrative industry with the top nine companies “earning” $30 billion in profits in 2006 alone. The health-care industry represents the country’s third-largest economic sector, trailing only energy and retail among the 1,000 largest US firms.
Nevertheless, at least sixteen percent of Americans still have no health insurance whatsoever and that number will not soon decline, as insurance costs continue to rise two to three times faster than inflation. The consequences are immediate and tragic. Unpaid medical bills are now the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country, and a recent Harvard Medical School study estimates that nearly forty-five thousand Americans die prematurely each year because they lack coverage and access to adequate care. That’s fifteen times the number of people killed on 9/11. In fact, 2,266 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health coverage. For a nation awash in “Support the Troops” rhetoric, bumper stickers, magnets, and other paraphernalia, it seems odd the US press largely ignored the Harvard Medical School study that discovered this troubling statistic. Yet, despite these scholarly findings, the US Congress cannot seem to pass a public option or single payer bill even though a majority of the public and health practitioners support these policies. Corporate media has largely shut these approaches out of the discussion, often even when dealing with veteran’s affairs.[20]
US private health care services differ markedly from other industrialized countries where single payer systems provide everyone with medical care as a basic human right. Unfortunately, objective media coverage and comparisons of single payer public health care with our current profit-driven corporate system are almost non-existent at this time. To protect their bloated bottom lines, private insurance companies and HMOs invest heavily in lobbyists and corporate-friendly political candidates that promote their “indispensable” role in any future health care reforms. Besides their insider political influence, these firms deploy massive advertising budgets to discourage media investigations of the economic interests shaping health policies today. Political analysts have long counted on exit polls to be a reliable predictor of actual vote counts. The unusual discrepancy between exit poll data and the actual vote count in the 2004 election challenges that reliability. However, despite evidence of technological vulnerabilities in the voting system and a higher incidence of irregularities in swing states, this discrepancy was not scrutinized in the corporate media. They simply parroted the partisan declarations of “sour grapes” and “let’s move on” instead of providing any meaningful analysis of a highly controversial election.
The official vote count for the 2004 election showed that George W. Bush won by three million votes. But exit polls projected a victory margin of five million votes for John Kerry. This eight-million-vote discrepancy is much greater than the error margin. The overall margin of error should statistically have been under one percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than five percent—a statistical impossibility.(12)
Tens of thousands of American engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on exposing issues like 9/11 truth, election fraud, impeachable offenses, war propaganda, civil liberties abuses, torture, and many corporate-caused economic and environmental crises have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the national conversation leading to a genuine truth emergency in the country as a whole.
A growing number of media activists are finally joining forces to address this truth emergency by developing new journalistic systems and practices of their own. They are working to reveal the common corporate denominators behind the diverse crises we face and to develop networks of trustworthy news sources that tell the people what is really going on. These activists know we need a journalism that moves beyond forensic inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider patterns of corruption, propaganda and illicit political control to rouse the nation to reject a malignant corporate status quo.
An international truth emergency, now in evidence, is the result of a lack of fact based, transparent, and truthful reporting on fraudulent elections, compromised 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, compounded by top down corporate media propaganda across the spectrum on public issues. Glenn Beck was able to say on national Fox News television in June of 2009 that the 9/11 Truth movement openly supported the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Beck claimed that 9/11 Truth proponents saw shooter James von Brunn as a “hero.” Beck’s statement is completely without factual merit and represents a hyperrealist slamming of a group already slanderously pre-labeled by the corporate and much of the progressive media as “conspiracy theorists.” These ad hominem attacks are no substitute for factual reporting and fair coverage. In fact, they are simply lies. Further, journalists are supposed to be trained to ferret out conspiracies against the public, not shy away from them for fear of being attacked. Conspiracies tend to be actions by small groups of individuals rather than massive collective plots by entire governments. However, small groups can be dangerous, especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private bureaucracies. Corporate boards of directors meet in closed rooms to plan to how best to maximize profit. If they knowingly make plans that hurt others, violate laws, undermine ethics, or show favoritism to friends, they are involved in a conspiracy. In addition to attacking, labeling, and the reporting of falsehoods, another method of critics of unofficial investigations into 9/11, election fraud, and other controversial issues is to lump together all the questions and/or lines of inquiry as if they all have equal validity. Obviously, they do not. This, however, allows critics to dismiss fact-based, transparent inquiries into major problems with official explanations of these crucial matters by focusing on the most absurd claims only. These are fallacies including overgeneralizations, straw persons, appeals to questionable authority, and red herrings that provide distractions from actual fact-based, scientific investigations (or ones based on actual journalist principles). These tactics avoid the debates about truth entirely. We the people must not be afraid to openly discuss, research, and validate these issues. Here is yet another case in point: former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones and almost 1,000 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics. Especially troubling is the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” at nearly freefall speed in the same manner as a controlled demolition.
To support his theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal. The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings. This data raises significant critical questions about the events of 9/11, regardless of what one believes. This should be a part of our political discourse given how much of the policy in the past eight years has been based on assumptions about 9/11. In a free society, this type of inquiry would be a matter of civic principle, not national ridicule, which it what it has largely been when it has not been totally ignored by corporate media. To challenge the official narrative of 9/11 in the US is akin to denying the existence of god, the ultimate blasphemy or heresy, in a theocratic culture.[22]
These are some of the reasons we are in a truth emergency, which is predicated on the inability of many to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Corporate media, Fox in particular, offers “news” that creates a hyper-reality of real world problems and issues. Consumers of corporate news media—especially those whose understandings are framed primarily from that medium alone—are embedded in a state of excited delirium of knowinglessness. This lack of factual awareness of issues like election fraud in 2000 and 2004, and the increasing evidence of 9/11 Commission Report inaccuracies and omissions, leaves people politically paralyzed. The real free press is supposed to inform and embolden citizen action, not distract and misinform to the point of a dysfunctional democracy.
To counter knowinglessness, media activists need to include truth emergency issues as important elements of radical-progressive media reform efforts. We must not be afraid of corporate media labeling, or any other, and instead build truth from the bottom up, with all available facts. Critical thinking and fact-finding are the basis of democracy, and we must stand for the maximization of informed participatory democracy at the lowest possible level in society.
The truth movement is seeking to discover, in this moment of Constitutional crisis, ecological peril and widening war, ways in which top investigative journalists whistleblowers and independent media activists can transform how Americans perceive and protect their world. In order to maintain democracy, the free press must thrive. We the people must become the media. Our survival as a free society depends upon it.[23]
In Conclusion: Words from our Revolutionary Sponsors
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
The purpose of the free press, as enunciated by key founders of America, was to keep the citizenry informed, engaged, and in dialogue with one another about the crucial issues of the day. The health of any democracy can be diagnosed by the degree to which information flows freely in the culture. Anything that interferes with that free flow of information is a form of censorship, which acts to derail, distort, and deny the efficacy of any true democratic experiment.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison supported a vigorous public arena of discourse, debate, and competing ideas. In short, they wanted to encourage the process of dialogue and free expression as vehicles to achieve the best of democratic possibilities. Jefferson opined that newspapers would better serve the country, by reporting the facts of matters at hand, than any form of government. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Now imagine Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly advocating honest, open dialogue on their corporate media programs.
Madison warned, “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” Now envision that Americans demand that the truth be spoken across the so-called public airwaves. The sharing of knowledge becomes a dialogue that leads to informed opinions and choices, ones that measure up to the national values and principles in the founding documents.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are not just words on parchment. They are the very concepts that make us humane in the modern world. The media, the supposed free press, should be encouraging robust dialogues while fighting for the future of all Americans, not just for the insurance companies, banks, big pharma, and the military industrial complex. In keeping with the founders’ notions of natural rights and intent in providing for the general welfare, we would do well to note that healthcare is a human right, workers have the right to the fruits of their labor, environmental degradation is a crime against humanity, and war is terrorism. These positions should all be part of national discourse in a truly free press. Where are these voices in the corporate media cacophony?
Instead, the privileged institutions of corporate media are daily miring the public in cynicism (reports of personal scandals, rumors of rampant corruption, and Congressional stagnation), rationalizing the populace into deep denial (falsely claiming the recession is over while key public indicators on unemployment, wage losses, and foreclosures refute this), and leaving taxpayers footing a multi-trillion dollar tab for Wall Street bailouts and illegal wars (TARP, Iraq, Afghanistan, but nothing left for the public at home). A truly free press would herald these vile decrees and deeds as those of charlatans and demagogues. We must be the change we wish to see and we must not rely on spoon-fed, top down, corporate media propaganda. We must become the media in the process of sharing knowledge with each other on the road to a better world. Since the corporate media are not in the business of news and are not beholden to empirical truths, rather, only to shareholder profits and their own bottom line, they should not be trusted.
If a failing corporate media system ensconced in hyper-reality creates an excited delirium of knowinglessness, that system must be declared incapable of accurately informing the citizenry. The public must turn to independent journalism based in muckraking traditions, with transparent fact-based reporting that asks the tough and critical questions of itself and its leaders. An actual free press would provide factual knowledge and encourage us to engage with each other in our local communities on a daily basis in the quest to solve societal problems.[24]
This is possible with our collective efforts, so long as we simultaneously reject the projected imaginings of the corporate media profiteers and their industry of illusion. This must be the crucial focal point of media reform, which actually is more of a media revolution. The health and meaningfulness of our cultural dialogue, as well as the future of our republic, may well depend upon how swiftly and significantly we address the current Truth Emergency and what we do about it.
Mickey Huff is Associate Professor of History, Diablo Valley College; former associate director of Project Censored; Executive Committee, Media Freedom Foundation and Media Freedom International
Peter Phillips is Professor of Sociology, Sonoma State University; former director of Project Censored; President, Media Freedom Foundation and Media Freedom International
The authors would like to give thanks to former Project Censored interns Frances A. Capell and Andrew Hobbs for their research assistance and contributions.
1 The Neil Postman quote is from his work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). For reports about skewed corporate media coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death see http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/09/anna-nicole-media-embarassment/ and http://www.ryersonline.ca/blogs/83/Anna-Nicole-Smith-coverage-becoming-too-much.html. For more on Junk Food News, see the most recent research by Mickey Huff and Frances A. Capell on the Project Censored website at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/infotainment-society-junk-food-news-and-news-abuse-for-2008-2009/.
2 For more on under-covered stories of the time, see chapter one, stories one and two, from Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2008, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2007) and Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2008); or see Censored 2008 and Censored 2009 stories online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2008/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009/ respectively.
3 Georgina Dickenson, “14-times Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps caught with cannabis pipe,” News of the World, February 1, 2009, online at http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/150832/14-times-Olympic-gold-medal-winner-Michael-Phelps-caught-with-bong-cannabis-pipe.html; “Phelps acknowledges photo of him smoking a bong,” FOXSports.com, February 2nd, 2009, http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/9160136/Report:-Picture-shows-Phelps-using-bong; “Michael Phelps escapes pot charges,” The Vancouver Sun, February 16, 2009, http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Michael+Phelps+escapes+charges/1295645/story.html; for marijuana arrests see http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-marijuana-arrests-set-new-record/.
[4] “Please Stop Calling Jessica Simpson Fat,” http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around_town/the_scene/Stop-Calling-Jessica-Simpson-Fat.html, February 6, 2009; “Jessica Simpson Shocks Fans with Noticeably Fuller Figure,” FOXNews, January 27, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483204,00.html; Marcus Baram, “Obama Talks Football, Troop Withdrawal, Malia and Sasha’s School, and Jessica Simpson,” Huffington Post, February 1, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/01/obama-talks-football-troo_n_162971.html.
[5] For further reading on some of the themes here, see Rick Shenkman. Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (New York: Basic Books, 2008); For data in this paragraph from the on what Americans know, see pp. 13-14. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study, “Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low Public Evaluations of the News Media: 1985-2009,” September 13, 2009. Online at http://people-press.org/report/543/; For more on the Truth Emergency concept and movement, see http://truthemergency.us which is the website for the conference co-organized by the authors of this piece in January of 2008.
[6] From the Share the Wolrd’s Resources website at http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures-what-do-they-mean.html.
[7] See http://www.starvation.net/
[8] See the report at http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39 and for more details see http://www.grain.org/foodcrisis/ .
[9] See the UCLA study from the Civil Rights Project “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge” by Gary Orfield at http://www.scribd.com/doc/11021700/Reviving-the-Goal-of-an-Integrated-Society. Also online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-in-the-1950s-source/.
[10] Professor Cornell West quoted from a talk at USC, November 16, 2006, http://www.blackvoicesonline.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=c6224b88-e419-47f9-bb1b-dc76dadb60e5.
[11] Phillips, Censored 2009, pp. 19-25. This story is the number one censored story for Project Censored in this volume, archived online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/ and for the earlier casualty numbers see http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya070207.htm. John Tirman, “Bush’s War Totals,” The Nation, January 28, 2009, online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090216/tirman.
[12] Phillips, Censored 2008, pp. 35-44. Online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/;
13 For President Obama’s continuation of this policy at Guantanamo Bay see http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2342276720090924?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
14 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, stories one and two; See these top Project Censored Stories for 2007 and 2008 online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/.
15 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, story six; see the story online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/6-operation-falcon-raids/; for updates see the official government site for the operation at http://www.usmarshals.gov/falcon09/index.html.
16 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, story twenty; online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-terror-act-against-animal-activists/, or see the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, March 9, 2007, http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/factsheet:-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act-%28aeta%29; also see the Center for Constitutional Rights at http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/factsheet:-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act-%28aeta%29.
[17] For more on the ACLU study “U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq” from 10/24/2005, see http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/21236prs20051024.html; and for more on the bias of the Associated Press see Project Censored’s study online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/a-study-of-bias-in-the-associated-press/.
[18] For more on Allison Weir’s data at If Americans Knew see http://www.ifamericansknew.org/.
[19] See Project Censored’s previously cited study of AP bias for details on Haiti and more online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/a-study-of-bias-in-the-associated-press/.
[20] Reuters, “Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance,” September 17, 2009, online http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE58G6W520090917. Though this was reported, it seems to have had little impact on the political policy discussion on healthcare reform. For the Veteran’s study, see Democracy Now!, “Study: Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance,” November, 11, 2009, online at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/11/study_over_2_200_us_veterans.
[21] Peter Phillips, Censored 2006, “Another Year of distorted Election Coverage,” (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005, p.48).
[22] The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009, ISSN: 1874-4125, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe pp.7-31, Authors: Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, online http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM. For more on architects and engineers supporting new 9/11 investigations see the research of Richard Gage, AIA, and other scientific professionals challenging the official reports on the events of 9/11 online http://ae911truth.org, and for broader analysis and questions surrounding 9/11 itself, see Professor David Ray Griffin’s work at http://davidraygriffin.com/ and research scientist Jim Hoffman’s work at http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html. For more on 9/11, American mythology, and the role corporate media play in the propaganda of historical construction see Mickey Huff and Paul Rea, “Deconstructing Deceit: 9/11, the Media, and Myth Information,” online at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090309170952776 or in Phillips, Censored 2009, chapter fourteen.
[23] For more on how to Be the Media, see David Mathison’s website http://bethemedia.org. For more on Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation see http://projectcensored.org and http://mediafreedominternational.org. For more on the themes developed in this article, see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009).
[24] For more on the concept of hyper-reality, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 166-184); also see John Tiffin and Nobuyoshi Terashima, eds., Hyperreality: Paradigm For The Third Millennium, (New York: Routledge, 2001).
This piece was written as a chapter to the forthcoming book “Media and Social Justice” edited by Sue Curry Jansen, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, and Jeff Pooley of Muhlenberg College.
For 34 years Project Censored has been committed to bringing the most vital stories to public awareness with the belief that genuine democracy depends on freedom of the press. The new Censored 2010 yearbook has drawn international attention to some of the most important underreported stories of our times and we are researching many stories for our next book already. We continue to need your vital support of Project Censored as we transition and expand our work to bring forth the most important news stories of the year both in print and online.
Project Censored is also involved in an ongoing and growing collaboration with the college and university affiliates program through Media Freedom International. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff not only continue to pursue censored media with this effort, but in addition there are also now over 30 affiliates with more on the way, including some from Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The 2010 book contains work from nine of the affiliates, with a few placing stories in the top ten. The MFI website will be a home base for affiliate work and continue to publish Validated Independent News stories and more detailed academic, investigative reports year round in the effort to combat censorship and the ongoing Truth Emergency in the United States and around the world.
By: Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips
“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”
– Charles Dickens
The Corporate News Media: Not in the Business of News
The late New York University media scholar Neil Postman once said about America, “We are the best entertained least informed society in the world.” That was twenty-five years ago and after two-plus decades of more deregulation and the growth of conglomerates in the media, that trend has continued. From Tyra Banks’ shifting figure and the Balloon Boy hoax, to the celebrity death of Michael Jackson and the Obama Beer Summit, Americans are fed a steady “news” diet of tabloidized, trivialized, and outright useless information laden with personal anecdotes, scandals, and gossip.
Topics and in-depth reports that matter little to most people in any meaningful way are given massive amounts of attention in the corporate media. In recent years, this has only become more obvious. For instance, CNN’s coverage of celebrity Anna Nicole Smith’s untimely death in early 2007 is arguably one of the most egregious examples of an over abused news story. The magnitude of corporate media attention paid to Smith’s death were clearly out of synch with the coverage the story deserved, which was at most a simple passing mention. Instead, CNN broadcast “breaking” stories of Smith’s death uninterrupted, without commercials, for almost two hours, with commentary by lead anchors and journalists. This marked among the longest uninterrupted “news” broadcasts at CNN since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Anna Nicole Smith and 9/11 are now strange bedfellows, milestone bookends of a deranged corporate news culture.[1]
While news outlets were obsessing over Smith’s death, most big media giants were missing a far more important story. The US ambassador to Iraq misplaced $12 billion in shrink-wrapped one hundred dollar bills that were flown to Baghdad. This garnered little attention due to the media’s morbid infatuation with Smith’s passing. This is clearly news judgment gone terribly awry if not an outright retreat from journalistic standards. The once trivial and absurd are now mainstreamed as “news.” More young people turn to late night comics’ fake news to learn the truth or tune out to so-called reality shows often scripted as Roman Holiday spectacles of the surreal. This hyper-reality creation of corporate media in the 21st century has led to what Postman presciently warned about: an infotainment society.[2]
The trend of mass coverage of trivial events in corporate media continued in 2009. British tabloid News of the World published an exclusive photo of Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps smoking marijuana from a bong on Sunday, February 1, 2009, with the headline, “What a Dope.” The picture was allegedly taken during a November house party while Phelps was visiting the University of South Carolina. The incident occurred nearly three months after the swimmer won eight gold medals for America at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China. Phelps quickly apologized to the public for his “regrettable behavior. ” The bong’s owner reportedly tried to sell it on eBay for $100,000. In the weeks following, Phelps lost his sponsorship from Kellogg’s cereal. Did anyone ask: is this really a newsworthy issue? Or, why is this a news story? Why instead was there not a discussion about the almost one-and-a-half million marijuana user arrests in 2006 and 2007?[3]
Photos of Jessica Simpson performing at a Florida Chili Cook-off looking a bit heavier than usual surfaced during the week of January 26, 2009. The purportedly unflattering shots of a curvier looking Simpson in an outfit that included “a muffin-top-inducing leopard belt” immediately made news headlines. Was she pregnant? Was she picking up eating habits from her NFL star quarterback boyfriend? Or was she simply hungry for publicity? During a pre-Super Bowl interview, President Obama even noted that Simpson was “in a weight battle.” Again, why is this a news story and why is the leader of the free world commenting on it? Why does this get coverage by hard news outlets at all? Why was there not a discussion about the worsening problems of hunger, homelessness, and poverty in America?[4]
The US is not only becoming a nation of obese people, but is on the verge of another phenomenon the equivalent of cultural and mental obesity. We, in America, are a nation awash in a sea of information yet we have a paucity of understanding. We are a country where over a quarter of the population know the names of all five members of the fictitious family from The Simpsons yet only one in a thousand can name all the rights protected under the first amendment to the US Constitution. Journalistic values have been sold out to commercial interests and not even our core, national and constitutionally protected values are sacred. Far too often, important news stories are underreported or ignored entirely by corporate news outlets, especially on television, where over seventy percent of Americans get their news, even though only an astounding twenty-nine percent say it is accurate. In short, Americans are living in a state of Truth Emergency.[5]
Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
“The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.[6]
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.[7]
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.[8]
For a family on the bottom rung of poverty a small price increase is the difference between life and death, yet no US presidents have declared a war on starvation. Instead they talk about national security and the continuation of the war on terror as if these were the primary issues for their terms in office. Given that ten times as many innocent people died of starvation than those in the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001, why is there no war on starvation as there was a so-called War on Terror? Is not starvation, especially if preventable, a form of inflicted terror by those who profit from it or even stand by and do nothing? Where is the Manhattan Project for global hunger? Where is the commitment to national security though unilateral starvation relief? Where is the outrage in the corporate news media with pictures of dying children and an analysis of those that benefit from hunger? Could the same not be said for those that die due to lack of healthcare coverage, to the tune of 45,000 a year? While news stories on realities of global hunger remain under-covered in the US, topics closer to home are often ignored as well. For example, racial inequality remains problematic in the US. People of color continue to experience disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, police profiling, repressive incarceration and school segregation.
According to a recent civil rights report from UCLA, “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,” by Gary Orfield, schools in the US are currently forty-four percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school students. Latinos and Blacks are the two largest minority groups. However, Black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights era. Over fifty years after the US Supreme Court case: Brown VS Board of Education, schools remain separate and not equal. Orfield’s study shows that public schools in the Western states, including California, suffer from the most severe segregation in the US, rather than schools in the southern states as many people believe.[9]
This new form of segregation is primarily based on how urban areas are geographically organized—as Cornel West so passionately describes— into vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities.[10] Schools remain highly unequal, both in terms of money, and qualified teachers and curriculum. Unequal education leads to diminishing access to colleges and future jobs for the afflicted demographics. Non-white schools are segregated by poverty as well as race. These “chocolate” low-income public schools are where most of the nation’s drop-outs occur, leading to large numbers of virtually unemployable young people of color struggling to survive in a troubled economy.
Diminished opportunity for students of color invariably creates greater privileges for whites. White privilege is a concept that is challenging for many whites to accept. Whites like to think of themselves as hard working individuals whose achievements are due to deserved personal efforts. In many cases this is partly true; hard work in college often pays off in many ways. Nonetheless many whites find it difficult to accept that geographically and structurally based racism remains a significant barrier for many students of color. Whites often say racism is in the past, that Americans need not think about it today. Yet, inequality stares back at society daily from the barrios, ghettos, and from behind prisons walls.
For these factual stories to not be reported upon by major media outlets is clearly a matter of censorship and top down information control. The aforementioned are two riveting examples of a failure of the free press to accurately inform the public about critical issues facing our global and national society. Sadly, there are many more examples.
Fourth Estate Sale: Censorship, the “Free” Press, and Truth Emergency
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
– A.J. Liebling
The corporate media in the US like to think of themselves as the official, most accurate source for news reporting of the day. The New York Times motto of “all the news that’s fit to print” is a clear example of this perspective as is CNN’s “most trusted name in news” and at Fox News they go so far as to remind news consumers “we report, you decide” and that they are “fair and balanced.” However, with corporate media coverage dependent on fewer reporters as a result of downsizing that increasingly focus on a narrow range of celebrity updates, news from official government and institutional sources (almost three quarters of cited sources), and sensationalized crimes and disasters, the self-justification of being the most fit or trusted is no longer valid for American journalism. This shift away from fact-based, socially relevant reporting constitutes a principle form censorship at the base of this ongoing truth emergency. However, this is not the only form of censorship.
There is a growing need to broaden understanding of censorship in the US. The dictionary definition of direct government control of news as censorship is no longer adequate. The private corporate media in the US significantly under covers and/or deliberately censors numerous important news stories every year. The corporate media in the United States are ignoring valid news stories, even when based on university quality research. It appears that certain topics are simply forbidden inside the mainstream corporate media today. To openly cover these news stories would stir up questions regarding “inconvenient truths” that many in the US power structure would rather avoid. An example of one group that is doing this is Project Censored, and the Project has done so every year since 1976. They cover the inconvenient truths, expose the junk news patterns, and call for a more independent, research driven, transparent and fact-based system of reporting on all relevant topics for our democratic society.
Some of these inconvenient truths that remain taboo for corporate media include civilian death rates in Iraq, post-9/11 erosion of civil liberties, levels of violence by side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the coup in Haiti, election fraud in the US, and questions concerning the very events and subsequent official investigations of 9/11. Here are some more details of the ongoing truth emergency.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB) report that the United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, ORB reported that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003 . . . We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000.” A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million. John Tirman, executive director and principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies writes in The Nation, January 28, 2009, “we have, at present between 800,000 and 1.3 million “excessive Deaths” as we approach the six-year anniversary of this war.[11]
Some common themes of the most censored stories from 2006-2008 were the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties in both the US and the world at large. The corporate media ignored the fact that habeas corpus can now be suspended for anyone by order of the President. With the approval of Congress, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006, signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, allows for the suspension of habeas corpus for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in The New York Times, October 19, 2006, have given false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims of the measures legalized by this Act, the law is quite clear that ‘any person’ can be targeted. The text in the MCA allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for all people living in the US deemed by the president to be enemy combatants.[12] In September 2009, President Obama quietly pledged to continue the program as it was instituted by the Bush administration with little fanfare.[13]
A law enacted allowing the government to more easily institute martial law was another civil liberties story ignored by the corporate media in 2007. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.” The law in effect repealed the Posse Comitatus Act from 1878, which had placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement in the US marking an end to the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.[14]
Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. By 2008, the number grew to 54,000. Unfortunately, most of those arrested were not, in fact, violent criminals according to the government’s own statistics. The operations, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and are the first time in US history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. As of July 2009, the sixth effort of the FALCON raids has increased the number of “dangerous fugitive felons” arrested to more than 91,000 (of which only 991 were murder suspects, and only 2,269 were gang members despite that these were the very groups they were claiming to round up).[15] Finally, the term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include any acts that interfere, or promotes interference, with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on November 27, 2006, expands the definition of an “animal enterprise” to any business that “uses or sells animals or animal products.” The law essentially defines protesters, boycotters or picketers of businesses in the US as terrorists. This is a clear infringement of first amendment rights.[16]
Most people in the US believe in the Bill of Rights and value personal freedoms. Yet, the corporate media in the recent past have failed to adequately inform the public about important changes concerning civil rights and liberties. Despite the busy lives people lead, they want to be informed about serious decisions made by the powerful, and rely on the corporate media to keep us abreast of significant changes. When corporate media fail to cover these issues, what else can it be called it but censorship? These are issues are of considerable concern for the public at large. Conclusions on such matters can only be arrived upon after scrupulous analysis of all known facts. Given that all the facts about these stories are not widely reported, if at all, this leads to a significant crisis for any democracy.
On October 25, 2005 the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) posted to their website forty-four autopsy reports, acquired from American military sources, covering the deaths of civilians who died while in US military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002-2004. The autopsy reports provided proof of widespread torture by US forces. A press release by ACLU announcing the deaths was immediately picked up by Associate Press (AP) wire service making the story available to US corporate media nationwide. A thorough check of Nexis-Lexis and Proquest library data bases showed that at least ninety-nine percent of the daily papers in the US did not pick up the story, nor did AP ever conduct follow up coverage on the issue.[17]
Not only do daily newspapers fail to cover the inconvenient truths presented by their own wire service, as illustrated in the aforementioned AP example, but the wire service itself is filled with internal bias. AP is a non-profit cooperative news wire service. The AP, with 3,700 employees, has 242 bureaus worldwide that deliver news reports twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to 121 countries in five languages including English, German, Dutch, French, and Spanish. In the US alone, AP reaches 1,700 daily, weekly, non-English, college newspapers, and 5,000 radio and television stations. AP reaches over a billion people every day via print, radio, or television.
Bias and censorship is also evident in stories concerning the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Alison Weir, Joy Ellison, and Peter Weir of the organization If Americans Knew conducted research on the AP’s reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The study was a statistical analysis of the AP newswire in the year 2004, looking comparatively at the numbers of Israeli and Palestinian deaths reported. In 2004 there were 141 reports of Israeli deaths in AP headlines and lead paragraphs, while in reality there were 108 Israeli deaths. During this same period, AP reported 543 Palestinian deaths, while 821 Palestinians had actually been killed. The ratio of actual number of Israeli conflict deaths to Palestinian deaths in 2004 was 1:7, yet AP reported deaths of Israelis to Palestinians at a 2:1 ratio.
The same could be said of AP’s reporting of children’s deaths. Nine reports of Israeli children’s deaths were reported in AP headlines and leading paragraphs in 2004, while eight actually occurred. The AP reported only twenty-seven Palestinian children deaths when 179 children actually died. While there were twenty-two times more Palestinian children’s deaths than Israeli children’s deaths, the AP reported 113 percent of Israeli children’s deaths and fifteen percent of Palestinian children’s deaths. In fact, the actual deaths ratios for the three week bombings of Gaza January 2009 were over a hundred Palestinians killed per single Israel death.[18]
Looking to Haiti for yet another example, on February 29, 2004, AP widely reported that Haitian rebels ousted President Aristide and that the United States provided an escort to take him out of the country to a safe asylum. Within 24 hours an entirely different story emerged through independent radio. Instead of the US being the supportive facilitator of Aristide’s safety, Pacifica Radio News reported that Aristide was actually kidnapped by US forces. AP quickly changed their story. On March 1, 2004, an AP report by Deb Riechman said, “White House officials said Aristide left willingly and that the United States aided his safe departure. But in a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Aristide said: “No. I was forced to leave.”
The last AP report of Aristide’s claiming that he had been kidnapped by the US in a State Department coup was on June 27, 2004. Since then there have been more than sixty news articles by AP including Aristide’s name. Of these stories none mentioned Aristide’s claim that he was kidnapped by the United States military. None mention the US backing of the coup. AP’s bias in favor of the State Department’s version of the Aristide’s removal seems to be a deliberate case of AP-sanctioned forgetting. AP is a massive institutionalized bureaucracy that feeds news stories to nearly every newspaper and radio/TV station in the United States. They are so large that top-down control of single news stories is practically impossible. However, research clearly indicates a built-in bias favoring official US government positions.[19]
Reform Media Reform: Pursuit and Reporting of Truth Emergency Issues
“Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”
– Elizabeth Cady Stanton
There is a literal truth emergency in the United States, not only regarding distant wars, torture camps, and doctored intelligence, but also around issues that most intimately impact our lives at home. For example, few Americans know that there has been a thirty-five year decline in real wages for most workers in the country, while the top ten percent now enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens.
George Seldes once said, “Journalism’s job is not impartial ‘balanced’ reporting. Journalism’s job is to tell the people what is really going on.” Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one example of telling the people what is really going on. Health care activists know that US health insurance is an extremely large and lucrative industry with the top nine companies “earning” $30 billion in profits in 2006 alone. The health-care industry represents the country’s third-largest economic sector, trailing only energy and retail among the 1,000 largest US firms.
Nevertheless, at least sixteen percent of Americans still have no health insurance whatsoever and that number will not soon decline, as insurance costs continue to rise two to three times faster than inflation. The consequences are immediate and tragic. Unpaid medical bills are now the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country, and a recent Harvard Medical School study estimates that nearly forty-five thousand Americans die prematurely each year because they lack coverage and access to adequate care. That’s fifteen times the number of people killed on 9/11. In fact, 2,266 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health coverage. For a nation awash in “Support the Troops” rhetoric, bumper stickers, magnets, and other paraphernalia, it seems odd the US press largely ignored the Harvard Medical School study that discovered this troubling statistic. Yet, despite these scholarly findings, the US Congress cannot seem to pass a public option or single payer bill even though a majority of the public and health practitioners support these policies. Corporate media has largely shut these approaches out of the discussion, often even when dealing with veteran’s affairs.[20]
US private health care services differ markedly from other industrialized countries where single payer systems provide everyone with medical care as a basic human right. Unfortunately, objective media coverage and comparisons of single payer public health care with our current profit-driven corporate system are almost non-existent at this time. To protect their bloated bottom lines, private insurance companies and HMOs invest heavily in lobbyists and corporate-friendly political candidates that promote their “indispensable” role in any future health care reforms. Besides their insider political influence, these firms deploy massive advertising budgets to discourage media investigations of the economic interests shaping health policies today. Political analysts have long counted on exit polls to be a reliable predictor of actual vote counts. The unusual discrepancy between exit poll data and the actual vote count in the 2004 election challenges that reliability. However, despite evidence of technological vulnerabilities in the voting system and a higher incidence of irregularities in swing states, this discrepancy was not scrutinized in the corporate media. They simply parroted the partisan declarations of “sour grapes” and “let’s move on” instead of providing any meaningful analysis of a highly controversial election.
The official vote count for the 2004 election showed that George W. Bush won by three million votes. But exit polls projected a victory margin of five million votes for John Kerry. This eight-million-vote discrepancy is much greater than the error margin. The overall margin of error should statistically have been under one percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than five percent—a statistical impossibility.(12)
Tens of thousands of American engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on exposing issues like 9/11 truth, election fraud, impeachable offenses, war propaganda, civil liberties abuses, torture, and many corporate-caused economic and environmental crises have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the national conversation leading to a genuine truth emergency in the country as a whole.
A growing number of media activists are finally joining forces to address this truth emergency by developing new journalistic systems and practices of their own. They are working to reveal the common corporate denominators behind the diverse crises we face and to develop networks of trustworthy news sources that tell the people what is really going on. These activists know we need a journalism that moves beyond forensic inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider patterns of corruption, propaganda and illicit political control to rouse the nation to reject a malignant corporate status quo.
An international truth emergency, now in evidence, is the result of a lack of fact based, transparent, and truthful reporting on fraudulent elections, compromised 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, compounded by top down corporate media propaganda across the spectrum on public issues. Glenn Beck was able to say on national Fox News television in June of 2009 that the 9/11 Truth movement openly supported the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. Beck claimed that 9/11 Truth proponents saw shooter James von Brunn as a “hero.” Beck’s statement is completely without factual merit and represents a hyperrealist slamming of a group already slanderously pre-labeled by the corporate and much of the progressive media as “conspiracy theorists.” These ad hominem attacks are no substitute for factual reporting and fair coverage. In fact, they are simply lies. Further, journalists are supposed to be trained to ferret out conspiracies against the public, not shy away from them for fear of being attacked. Conspiracies tend to be actions by small groups of individuals rather than massive collective plots by entire governments. However, small groups can be dangerous, especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private bureaucracies. Corporate boards of directors meet in closed rooms to plan to how best to maximize profit. If they knowingly make plans that hurt others, violate laws, undermine ethics, or show favoritism to friends, they are involved in a conspiracy. In addition to attacking, labeling, and the reporting of falsehoods, another method of critics of unofficial investigations into 9/11, election fraud, and other controversial issues is to lump together all the questions and/or lines of inquiry as if they all have equal validity. Obviously, they do not. This, however, allows critics to dismiss fact-based, transparent inquiries into major problems with official explanations of these crucial matters by focusing on the most absurd claims only. These are fallacies including overgeneralizations, straw persons, appeals to questionable authority, and red herrings that provide distractions from actual fact-based, scientific investigations (or ones based on actual journalist principles). These tactics avoid the debates about truth entirely. We the people must not be afraid to openly discuss, research, and validate these issues. Here is yet another case in point: former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones and almost 1,000 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings is implausible according to laws of physics. Especially troubling is the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” at nearly freefall speed in the same manner as a controlled demolition.
To support his theory, Jones and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal. The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and is used in controlled demolitions of buildings. This data raises significant critical questions about the events of 9/11, regardless of what one believes. This should be a part of our political discourse given how much of the policy in the past eight years has been based on assumptions about 9/11. In a free society, this type of inquiry would be a matter of civic principle, not national ridicule, which it what it has largely been when it has not been totally ignored by corporate media. To challenge the official narrative of 9/11 in the US is akin to denying the existence of god, the ultimate blasphemy or heresy, in a theocratic culture.[22]
These are some of the reasons we are in a truth emergency, which is predicated on the inability of many to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Corporate media, Fox in particular, offers “news” that creates a hyper-reality of real world problems and issues. Consumers of corporate news media—especially those whose understandings are framed primarily from that medium alone—are embedded in a state of excited delirium of knowinglessness. This lack of factual awareness of issues like election fraud in 2000 and 2004, and the increasing evidence of 9/11 Commission Report inaccuracies and omissions, leaves people politically paralyzed. The real free press is supposed to inform and embolden citizen action, not distract and misinform to the point of a dysfunctional democracy.
To counter knowinglessness, media activists need to include truth emergency issues as important elements of radical-progressive media reform efforts. We must not be afraid of corporate media labeling, or any other, and instead build truth from the bottom up, with all available facts. Critical thinking and fact-finding are the basis of democracy, and we must stand for the maximization of informed participatory democracy at the lowest possible level in society.
The truth movement is seeking to discover, in this moment of Constitutional crisis, ecological peril and widening war, ways in which top investigative journalists whistleblowers and independent media activists can transform how Americans perceive and protect their world. In order to maintain democracy, the free press must thrive. We the people must become the media. Our survival as a free society depends upon it.[23]
In Conclusion: Words from our Revolutionary Sponsors
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
– George Orwell
The purpose of the free press, as enunciated by key founders of America, was to keep the citizenry informed, engaged, and in dialogue with one another about the crucial issues of the day. The health of any democracy can be diagnosed by the degree to which information flows freely in the culture. Anything that interferes with that free flow of information is a form of censorship, which acts to derail, distort, and deny the efficacy of any true democratic experiment.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison supported a vigorous public arena of discourse, debate, and competing ideas. In short, they wanted to encourage the process of dialogue and free expression as vehicles to achieve the best of democratic possibilities. Jefferson opined that newspapers would better serve the country, by reporting the facts of matters at hand, than any form of government. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Now imagine Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly advocating honest, open dialogue on their corporate media programs.
Madison warned, “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” Now envision that Americans demand that the truth be spoken across the so-called public airwaves. The sharing of knowledge becomes a dialogue that leads to informed opinions and choices, ones that measure up to the national values and principles in the founding documents.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are not just words on parchment. They are the very concepts that make us humane in the modern world. The media, the supposed free press, should be encouraging robust dialogues while fighting for the future of all Americans, not just for the insurance companies, banks, big pharma, and the military industrial complex. In keeping with the founders’ notions of natural rights and intent in providing for the general welfare, we would do well to note that healthcare is a human right, workers have the right to the fruits of their labor, environmental degradation is a crime against humanity, and war is terrorism. These positions should all be part of national discourse in a truly free press. Where are these voices in the corporate media cacophony?
Instead, the privileged institutions of corporate media are daily miring the public in cynicism (reports of personal scandals, rumors of rampant corruption, and Congressional stagnation), rationalizing the populace into deep denial (falsely claiming the recession is over while key public indicators on unemployment, wage losses, and foreclosures refute this), and leaving taxpayers footing a multi-trillion dollar tab for Wall Street bailouts and illegal wars (TARP, Iraq, Afghanistan, but nothing left for the public at home). A truly free press would herald these vile decrees and deeds as those of charlatans and demagogues. We must be the change we wish to see and we must not rely on spoon-fed, top down, corporate media propaganda. We must become the media in the process of sharing knowledge with each other on the road to a better world. Since the corporate media are not in the business of news and are not beholden to empirical truths, rather, only to shareholder profits and their own bottom line, they should not be trusted.
If a failing corporate media system ensconced in hyper-reality creates an excited delirium of knowinglessness, that system must be declared incapable of accurately informing the citizenry. The public must turn to independent journalism based in muckraking traditions, with transparent fact-based reporting that asks the tough and critical questions of itself and its leaders. An actual free press would provide factual knowledge and encourage us to engage with each other in our local communities on a daily basis in the quest to solve societal problems.[24]
This is possible with our collective efforts, so long as we simultaneously reject the projected imaginings of the corporate media profiteers and their industry of illusion. This must be the crucial focal point of media reform, which actually is more of a media revolution. The health and meaningfulness of our cultural dialogue, as well as the future of our republic, may well depend upon how swiftly and significantly we address the current Truth Emergency and what we do about it.
Mickey Huff is Associate Professor of History, Diablo Valley College; former associate director of Project Censored; Executive Committee, Media Freedom Foundation and Media Freedom International
Peter Phillips is Professor of Sociology, Sonoma State University; former director of Project Censored; President, Media Freedom Foundation and Media Freedom International
The authors would like to give thanks to former Project Censored interns Frances A. Capell and Andrew Hobbs for their research assistance and contributions.
1 The Neil Postman quote is from his work Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985). For reports about skewed corporate media coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death see http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/09/anna-nicole-media-embarassment/ and http://www.ryersonline.ca/blogs/83/Anna-Nicole-Smith-coverage-becoming-too-much.html. For more on Junk Food News, see the most recent research by Mickey Huff and Frances A. Capell on the Project Censored website at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/infotainment-society-junk-food-news-and-news-abuse-for-2008-2009/.
2 For more on under-covered stories of the time, see chapter one, stories one and two, from Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2008, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2007) and Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2008); or see Censored 2008 and Censored 2009 stories online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2008/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009/ respectively.
3 Georgina Dickenson, “14-times Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps caught with cannabis pipe,” News of the World, February 1, 2009, online at http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/150832/14-times-Olympic-gold-medal-winner-Michael-Phelps-caught-with-bong-cannabis-pipe.html; “Phelps acknowledges photo of him smoking a bong,” FOXSports.com, February 2nd, 2009, http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/9160136/Report:-Picture-shows-Phelps-using-bong; “Michael Phelps escapes pot charges,” The Vancouver Sun, February 16, 2009, http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Michael+Phelps+escapes+charges/1295645/story.html; for marijuana arrests see http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-marijuana-arrests-set-new-record/.
[4] “Please Stop Calling Jessica Simpson Fat,” http://www.nbcbayarea.com/around_town/the_scene/Stop-Calling-Jessica-Simpson-Fat.html, February 6, 2009; “Jessica Simpson Shocks Fans with Noticeably Fuller Figure,” FOXNews, January 27, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483204,00.html; Marcus Baram, “Obama Talks Football, Troop Withdrawal, Malia and Sasha’s School, and Jessica Simpson,” Huffington Post, February 1, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/01/obama-talks-football-troo_n_162971.html.
[5] For further reading on some of the themes here, see Rick Shenkman. Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (New York: Basic Books, 2008); For data in this paragraph from the on what Americans know, see pp. 13-14. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press study, “Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low Public Evaluations of the News Media: 1985-2009,” September 13, 2009. Online at http://people-press.org/report/543/; For more on the Truth Emergency concept and movement, see http://truthemergency.us which is the website for the conference co-organized by the authors of this piece in January of 2008.
[6] From the Share the Wolrd’s Resources website at http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures-what-do-they-mean.html.
[7] See http://www.starvation.net/
[8] See the report at http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39 and for more details see http://www.grain.org/foodcrisis/ .
[9] See the UCLA study from the Civil Rights Project “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge” by Gary Orfield at http://www.scribd.com/doc/11021700/Reviving-the-Goal-of-an-Integrated-Society. Also online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-us-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-in-the-1950s-source/.
[10] Professor Cornell West quoted from a talk at USC, November 16, 2006, http://www.blackvoicesonline.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=c6224b88-e419-47f9-bb1b-dc76dadb60e5.
[11] Phillips, Censored 2009, pp. 19-25. This story is the number one censored story for Project Censored in this volume, archived online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/ and for the earlier casualty numbers see http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-polya070207.htm. John Tirman, “Bush’s War Totals,” The Nation, January 28, 2009, online at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090216/tirman.
[12] Phillips, Censored 2008, pp. 35-44. Online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/;
13 For President Obama’s continuation of this policy at Guantanamo Bay see http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN2342276720090924?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
14 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, stories one and two; See these top Project Censored Stories for 2007 and 2008 online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-no-habeas-corpus-for-any-person/ and http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/2-bush-moves-toward-martial-law/.
15 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, story six; see the story online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/6-operation-falcon-raids/; for updates see the official government site for the operation at http://www.usmarshals.gov/falcon09/index.html.
16 Phillips, Censored 2008, chapter one, story twenty; online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-terror-act-against-animal-activists/, or see the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, March 9, 2007, http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/factsheet:-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act-%28aeta%29; also see the Center for Constitutional Rights at http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/factsheet:-animal-enterprise-terrorism-act-%28aeta%29.
[17] For more on the ACLU study “U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq” from 10/24/2005, see http://www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/21236prs20051024.html; and for more on the bias of the Associated Press see Project Censored’s study online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/a-study-of-bias-in-the-associated-press/.
[18] For more on Allison Weir’s data at If Americans Knew see http://www.ifamericansknew.org/.
[19] See Project Censored’s previously cited study of AP bias for details on Haiti and more online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/a-study-of-bias-in-the-associated-press/.
[20] Reuters, “Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance,” September 17, 2009, online http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE58G6W520090917. Though this was reported, it seems to have had little impact on the political policy discussion on healthcare reform. For the Veteran’s study, see Democracy Now!, “Study: Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance,” November, 11, 2009, online at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/11/study_over_2_200_us_veterans.
[21] Peter Phillips, Censored 2006, “Another Year of distorted Election Coverage,” (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005, p.48).
[22] The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009, ISSN: 1874-4125, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe pp.7-31, Authors: Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, online http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM. For more on architects and engineers supporting new 9/11 investigations see the research of Richard Gage, AIA, and other scientific professionals challenging the official reports on the events of 9/11 online http://ae911truth.org, and for broader analysis and questions surrounding 9/11 itself, see Professor David Ray Griffin’s work at http://davidraygriffin.com/ and research scientist Jim Hoffman’s work at http://911research.wtc7.net/index.html. For more on 9/11, American mythology, and the role corporate media play in the propaganda of historical construction see Mickey Huff and Paul Rea, “Deconstructing Deceit: 9/11, the Media, and Myth Information,” online at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090309170952776 or in Phillips, Censored 2009, chapter fourteen.
[23] For more on how to Be the Media, see David Mathison’s website http://bethemedia.org. For more on Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation see http://projectcensored.org and http://mediafreedominternational.org. For more on the themes developed in this article, see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, Censored 2010 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009).
[24] For more on the concept of hyper-reality, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. 166-184); also see John Tiffin and Nobuyoshi Terashima, eds., Hyperreality: Paradigm For The Third Millennium, (New York: Routledge, 2001).
This piece was written as a chapter to the forthcoming book “Media and Social Justice” edited by Sue Curry Jansen, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, and Jeff Pooley of Muhlenberg College.
For 34 years Project Censored has been committed to bringing the most vital stories to public awareness with the belief that genuine democracy depends on freedom of the press. The new Censored 2010 yearbook has drawn international attention to some of the most important underreported stories of our times and we are researching many stories for our next book already. We continue to need your vital support of Project Censored as we transition and expand our work to bring forth the most important news stories of the year both in print and online.
Project Censored is also involved in an ongoing and growing collaboration with the college and university affiliates program through Media Freedom International. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff not only continue to pursue censored media with this effort, but in addition there are also now over 30 affiliates with more on the way, including some from Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The 2010 book contains work from nine of the affiliates, with a few placing stories in the top ten. The MFI website will be a home base for affiliate work and continue to publish Validated Independent News stories and more detailed academic, investigative reports year round in the effort to combat censorship and the ongoing Truth Emergency in the United States and around the world.
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