Sonoma State's Project Censored takes the media to task for missing big stories
- Jim Doyle, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, September 24, 2004
America prides itself on its free press, yet critics argue that
American citizens are increasingly ill-informed. It's the sort of
enigma that intrigues the media watchdogs at Project Censored.
"The general public knows more about Winona Ryder's shoplifting trial
and the Peterson murder case than they do about the history of U.S.
involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Peter Phillips, a
sociology professor at Sonoma State University and the director of
Project Censored.
Earlier this month, Sonoma State students, professors and journalism
experts announced Project Censored's list of the 25 most significant
news stories of 2003-2004 that were overlooked or under-reported by
major U.S. newspapers as well as radio and television networks. Its
list is published as an annual review ("Project Censored 2005: The
Top 25 Censored Stories," Seven Stories Press, $17.95). And this
yearbook is used in college classrooms.
In a recent interview, Phillips defined censorship as "any
interference with the free flow of information in a society." He says
that entertainment has become the key marketing strategy of major
media outlets "at the cost of important news stories that would keep
the American public more informed."
The project, founded in 1976 by Carl Jensen, a Sonoma State professor
of communications studies, has become a showcase for the alternative
press. Some of the stories identified by Project Censored go on
eventually to receive national attention at major U.S. newspapers and
television networks.
Last year, Project Censored sold about 25,000 copies of its yearbook.
About 10,000 copies of an Italian-language version were sold in Italy.
Project Censored's No. 1 neglected story this year involves the
widening gap between the rich and the poor in America and the global
impacts of this disparity.
"Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality, while stabilizing or
increasing slightly in other industrialized nations, has increased
sharply and dramatically in the United States," according to the
yearbook's authors. "While it is no secret that such a trend is
taking place, it is rare to see a TV news program announce that the
top 1 percent of the U.S. population now owns about a third of the
wealth in the country. Discussion of this trend takes place, for the
most part, behind closed doors. ... The top 5 percent is capturing an
increasingly greater portion of the pie while the bottom 95 percent
is clearly losing ground, and the highly touted American middle class
is fast disappearing."
Other top-ranked stories include: published reports that U.S. troops
and Iraqi citizens have high uranium levels in their bodies from the
tons of U.S. munitions containing depleted uranium that have been
deployed in Iraq; Attorney General John Ashcroft's efforts to strike
down a human rights law that permits foreigners to sue U.S.
government leaders, corporations and senior military officials liable
for human rights abuses abroad; and new efforts by law-enforcement
agencies to spy on peace activists.
Authors of the 25 selected stories will be honored at Project
Censored's annual awards ceremony on Oct. 23 in Berkeley. The project
also runs a Web site and publishes a quarterly newsletter.
Project Censored is not directly funded by the university although it
receives about $21,000 from student activity fees. It raises a total
of about $85,000 a year, mostly from private donors who send small
amounts (an average of $25) through the mail or buy books from the
project. It has also received occasional grants from nonprofit funds
and foundations, including Working Assets.
Phillips acknowledges that bits and pieces of the project's top 25
stories have appeared in the national media, but argues that the
stories are often buried in the back pages of newspapers, and the
central issues are not sufficiently detailed or told in a broader
context.
Some praise the project...
"Mainstream media tend to operate in a fairly narrow ground, and
voices outside this narrow ground have a hard time being heard," said
Geneva Overholser, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism,
a former ombudsman for the Washington Post, a former editorial board
member of the New York Times, and a former chairwoman of the Pulitzer
Prize Board. "So any effort to bring more stories to light I would
welcome.
"We do wear all kinds of blinders, and lists like these remind of us
of our blinders," she said. "I'm not sure that I would necessarily
agree with their list, but I welcome that sort of questioning and
challenge. The good news is that we now have many alternatives to
mainstream media. You can find things on the Web ... the Internet, in
smaller publications and on the radio. The bad news is that there's a
certain loss of editor verification ... in many of the new media
those safeguards are just not there."
More than 200 students and faculty at Sonoma State University worked
on "Censored 2005," as well as dozens of community volunteers
including doctors, lawyers, a rabbi and other experts in their fields
who review potential stories for their credibility, national
importance and relevance. It's a step- by-step process involving the
preliminary screening of thousands of print articles and transcripts
from radio and TV broadcasts and a more thorough review of several
hundred of these stories.
In the fall, students in Phillips' Sociology of Media class search
for potential material for the yearbook. They monitor about 800 Web
sites, ranging from national newspapers to trade journals, technical
journals and scarcely read political magazines. They study about 200
publications received in hard- copy form, identifying hundreds of
stories for consideration in publications ranging from In These Times
to the Environmental Health Weekly. They also review hundreds of
submissions by journalists, scholars and concerned citizens.
At a recent class, two dozen of Phillips' students began to hone
their skills by discussing and ranking the importance of potential
stories whose issues ranged from political conflicts of interest to
American Indian casinos.
In the spring, students in Phillips' Sociology of Censorship class
examine the coverage levels of 200 stories chosen for further review.
Faculty and students working on the project vote on potential
stories, and the top 25 are sent to a national panel of judges who
rank the stories in order of importance. Judges have included media
critic Noam Chomsky, author Susan Faludi and longtime CBS "60
Minutes" reporter Mike Wallace.
The students write summaries of neglected or underplayed news stories
for the book's first chapter, and guest authors provide updates on
their stories.
"It's really exciting for the students because all of them get
published in the process," said Phillips, who has overseen the
project since 1996.
Carl Jensen, who now is retired, oversaw the project for two decades.
"Unfortunately, high technology and a free press do not guarantee a
well- informed society," he said. "The problem is not the quantity of
information that we receive but the quality. And without full
information about the affairs of our society, we cannot function as
good citizens."
Phillips argues that more thorough news coverage by mass media
outlets would reduce voter apathy.
"We have a big problem today in that half the people don't vote," he
said. "We need stories about the issues that face us, whether it's
the spiraling decline of wages in the country, or the 40 million
people without health insurance, or the accelerated gap between rich
and poor in the Bush administration. This is new information. It's
just assumed that growth is good for everybody, and it's not. There's
an assumption that private enterprise is the most effective means of
organizing society, and it's rarely challenged in American society."
...Some criticize it
Brooke Shelby Biggs, while a columnist at Mother Jones magazine,
blasted the project's annual list as "predictable and boring" and "a
thinly veiled excuse for an alternative press self-love fest, an
opportunity for us to give ourselves awards..." She and others have
challenged the project's use of the word censorship, especially
considering that many of its top 25 picks have previously appeared in
reputable and reasonably well-known publications.
Although the project's 2005 yearbook reflects election-year politics,
Phillips insists that Project Censored is not biased toward the
liberal left.
"It's not the ideology, it's the content," he said. "So we've given
awards to right-wing stories. We really believe in the diversity of
news sources."
Phillips says that investigative reporting about powerful interests
is declining and that publishers and broadcasters are reluctant to
produce expos�s about the environmental and human rights records of
major U.S. companies.
He questions whether any of the nation's leading newspapers would be
willing in today's cautious climate to uncover a scandal similar to
Watergate, to producing a series of hard-hitting investigative
reports about a president's dirty-tricks campaign and his aides'
election crimes. Reflecting on the Pentagon Papers case of 1971, he
asks whether U.S. newspapers would dare today to publish a
presidential administration's most closely held wartime secrets. He
argues that the media was slow to pursue investigative stories about
the Pentagon's prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq.
"Freedom of information and citizen access to objective news is
fading in the United States," Phillips wrote in the latest yearbook.
"In its place is a complex, entertainment-oriented news system which
protects its own bottom-line by servicing the most powerful
military-industrial complex in the world.
"... Governmental spin transmitted by a willing U.S. media
establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs. evil, often leaving
out historical context, special transnational corporate interests,
and prior strategic relationships with the dreaded ones."
Phillips says that media censorship in America often involves self-
censorship. "It is not yet the deliberate killing of stories by
official censors, but a rather subtle system of information
suppression in the name of corporate profit and self-interest," he
wrote. "Media owners and managers are economically motivated to
please advertisers and upper middle class reviewers and viewers."
Phillips' views echo the theories of Chomsky, an MIT linguistics
professor and author who has written extensively about the U.S.
media. According to Chomsky, the mass media is predominantly a
mouthpiece for the powers that be. Phillips argues that new
technology, media mergers and 24-hour television news networks (with
a relentless appetite for content) have intensified the ties between
TV networks, government agencies and major corporations.
"CNN needs the cooperation of the Pentagon and State Department to
keep its content full," he said. "So it becomes a business decision
not to push this story or that story too hard."
The days are gone when most every major city had two or three daily
newspapers in competition with one another. Today, about 98 percent
of U.S. cities have only one newspaper, and most of them are owned by
huge chains. The Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corp., a New
York-based media company whose holdings include newspapers, magazines
and television and radio stations. Government agencies have
green-lighted media mergers such as the colossal deal that combined
AOL-Time Warner, which owns CNN. And readership among adults of daily
newspapers has declined.
"The Justice Department should be breaking up media monopolies and
engaging, building and supporting real democratic news with multiple
sources," Phillips said.
He and other critics argue that the concentration of wealth and power
in the media results in a homogeneity of news agencies that tends to
disregard stories that affect working people who are living paycheck
to paycheck.
They say profits are largely to blame. Media chains are pressed to
increase or maintain their quarterly profits to shareholders. In an
economic downturn, when advertising revenues tumble, newspapers
typically cut the number of pages devoted to news and might also
reduce the newsgathering staff.
Phillips also complains that publishers and broadcasters often resort
to sensationalism -- hyping stories that contain sex, violence,
celebrities and ordinary people as if they were soap operas.
"Following the Peterson case (the Laci Peterson murder trial) is
cheaper than going out and doing great work on stories about poverty,
race, inequality, government corruption and war profiteering. There's
something to the notion that American society is the best
entertained, least informed society in the world."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROJECT CENSORED'S TOP 10
Here are 10 of the most significant news stories of 2003-04
overlooked or under-reported by major media, according to Project
Censored.
1. Wealth inequality in 21st century threatens economy and democracy.
2. Ashcroft vs. the human rights law that holds corporations accountable.
3. Bush administration censors science.
4. High levels of uranium found in troops and civilians.
5. The wholesale giveaway of our natural resources.
6. The sale of electoral politics.
7. Conservative organization drives judicial appointments.
8. Cheney's energy task force and the energy policy.
9. Widow brings RICO case against U.S. government for Sept. 11.
10. New nuke plants: Taxpayers support, industry profits.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uncensored celebration
A release party for "Censored 2005" is scheduled at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 23
at King Middle School, 1781 Rose St. in Berkeley. Keynote speaker is
Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and president of Solari and
whistle-blowing former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development. Reporters to be honored include Amy Goodman, Greg
Palast, Dennis Bernstein, Michele Chossudovsky, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Reception includes awards, a video art performance, live music, book
signing, hors d'oeuvres and a no-host wine bar. $15/sliding scale.
(707) 664-2500; www.projectcensored.org.
--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/
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