When Sonoma State University professor Carl Jensen started looking into the news media’s practice of self-censorship in 1976, the Internet was only a dream and most computers were still big mainframes with whirling tape reels and vacuum tubes.
Back then, the vast majority of Americans got all of their news from one daily newspaper and one of the three big TV networks. If a story wasn’t on ABC, NBC or CBS, it might as well not have happened.
Forty years later, the media world is a radically different place. Today, Americans are more likely to get their news from several different sources through Facebook than they would from the “CBS Evening News.” Daily newspapers all over the country are struggling and, in some cases, dying. A story that appears on one obscure outlet can suddenly become a viral sensation reaching millions of readers at the speed of light.
And yet, as Jensen’s Project Censored found, there are still numerous big, important news stories that receive very little exposure.
As Project Censored staffers Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth note, 90% of U.S. news media—the traditional outlets that employ full-time reporters—are controlled by six corporations. “The corporate media hardly represent the mainstream,” the staffers wrote in the current edition’s introduction.
“By contrast, the independent journalists that Project Censored has celebrated since its inception are now understood as vital components of what experts have identified as the newly developing ‘networked fourth estate.’”
Jensen set out to frame a new definition of censorship. He put out an annual list of the 10 biggest stories that the mainstream media ignored, arguing that it was a failure of the corporate press to pursue and promote these stories that represented censorship—not by the government—but by the media itself.
Jensen died in April 2015, but his project was inherited and carried on by Sonoma State sociology professor Peter Phillips and Huff.
Huff, who is now project director, and Roth, associate director, have expanded and tightened up the process of selecting stories. Project staffers and volunteers first fact-check nominations that come in to make sure they are “valid” news reports. Then a panel of 28 judges, mostly academics with a few journalists and media critics, finalize the top 10 and the 15 runners-up.
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The complete results are published in a book that was released in October by Seven Stories Press.
Below are eight of the top stories the corporate media ignored.
Who Dies at the Hands of Police—And How Often
High-profile police killings, particularly of African American men, have made big news over the past few years. But there’s been much less attention paid to the overall numbers—and to the difference between how many people are shot by cops in the United States and in other countries.
In the January 2015 edition of Liberation, Richard Becker, relying on public records, concluded that the rate of U.S. police killing was 100 times that of England, 40 times that of Germany and 20 times the rate in Canada.
In June 2015, a team of reporters from the Guardian concluded that 102 unarmed people were killed by U.S. police in the first five months of that year—twice the rate reported by the government.
Furthermore, the Guardian wrote, “Black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed when killed during encounters with police as white people.” The paper concluded that, “Thirty-two percent of black people killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, as were 25% of Hispanic and Latino people, compared with 15% of white people killed.”
And as far as accountability goes, the Washington Post noted that in 385 cases of police killings, only three officers faced charges.
Half of Global Wealth Owned by the 1%
We hear plenty of talk about the wealth and power of the top 1% of people in the United States, but the global wealth gap is, if anything, even worse. And it has profound human consequences.
Oxfam International, which has been working for decades to fight global poverty, released a January 2015 report showing that, if current trends continue, the wealthiest 1%, by the end of this year, will control more wealth than everyone else in the world put together.
As reported in Project Censored, “The Oxfam report provided evidence that extreme inequality is not inevitable, but is, in fact, the result of political choices and economic policies established and maintained by the power elite, wealthy individuals whose strong influence keeps the status quo rigged in their own favor.”
Another stunning fact: The wealth of 85 of the richest people in the world combined is equal to the wealth of half the world’s poor combined.
Oil Industry Illegally Dumps Fracking Wastewater
Fracking, which involves pumping high-pressure water and chemicals into rock formations to free up oil and natural gas, has been a huge issue nationwide. But there’s been little discussion of one of the side effects: the contamination of aquifers.
The Center for Biological Diversity reported in 2014 that oil companies had dumped almost 3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater into California’s underground water supply. Since the companies refuse to say what chemicals they use in the process, nobody knows exactly what the level of contamination is. But wells that supply drinking water near where the fracking waste was dumped tested high in arsenic, thallium and nitrates.
According to Project Censored, “Although corporate media have covered debate over fracking regulations, the Center for Biological Diversity study regarding the dumping of wastewater into California’s aquifers went all but ignored at first. There appears to have been a lag of more than three months between the initial independent news coverage of the Center for Biological Diversity revelations and corporate coverage.”
89% of Pakistani Drone Victims Not Identifiable as Militants
The United States sends drone aircraft into combat on a regular basis, particularly in Pakistan. The Obama administration says the drones fire missiles only when there is clear evidence that the targets are Al Qaeda bases. Secretary of State John Kerry insists, “The only people we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest levels.”
But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which keeps track of all the strikes, reported that only 4% of those killed by drones were Al Qaeda members and only 11% were confirmed militants of any sort.
That means 89% of the 2,464 people killed by U.S. drones could not be identified as terrorists.
In fact, 30% of the dead could not be identified at all.
The New York Times has covered the fact that, as one story noted, “Most individuals killed are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” But overall, the mainstream news media ignored the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s reporting.
Popular Resistance to Corporate Water Grabbing
For decades, private companies have been trying to take over and control water supplies, particularly in the developing world. Now, as journalist Ellen Brown reported in March 2015, corporate water barons, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, the Carlyle Group and other investment firms “are purchasing water rights from around the world at an unprecedented pace.”
However, over the past 15 years, more than 180 communities have fought back and re-municipalized their water systems. “From Spain to Buenos Aires, Cochabamba to Kazakhstan, Berlin to Malaysia, water privatization is being aggressively rejected,” Victoria Collier reported in Counterpunch.
Meanwhile, in the United States, some cities—in what may be a move toward privatization—are radically raising water rates and cutting off service to low-income communities.
The mainstream media response to the privatization of water has been largely silence.
Fear of Government Spying Is Chilling Writers’ Freedom of Expression
Writers in Western liberal democracies may not face the type of censorship seen in some parts of the world, but their fear of government surveillance is still causing many to think twice about what they can say.
Lauren McCauley, writing in Common Dreams, quoted one of the conclusions from a report by the writers’ group PEN America: “If writers avoid exploring topics for fear of possible retribution, the material available to readers—particularly those seeking to understand the most controversial and challenging issues facing the world today—may be greatly impoverished.”
According to Project Censored, a PEN America survey showed that “34% of writers in liberal democracies reported some degree of self-censorship (compared with 61% of writers living in authoritarian countries, and 44% in semi-democratic countries). Almost 60% of the writers from Western Europe, the United States … indicated that U.S. credibility ‘has been significantly damaged for the long term’ by revelations of the U.S. government surveillance programs.”
Millions in Poverty Get Less Media Coverage than Billionaires Do
The news media in the United States don’t like to talk about poverty, but they love to report on the lives and glory of the super-rich.
The advocacy group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting analyzed the three major television news networks and found that 482 billionaires got more attention than the 50 million people who live in poverty.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who follows the mainstream media, or pays much attention to the world of social media and the blogosphere. The top rung of society gets vast amounts of attention, for good and for ill—but the huge numbers of people who are homeless, hungry and often lacking in hope just aren’t news.
“The notion that the wealthiest nation on Earth has one in every six of its citizens living at or below the poverty threshold reflects not a lack of resources, but a lack of policy focus and attention—and this is due to a lack of public awareness to the issue,” Frederick Reese of MintPress News wrote.
From Project Censored: “The FAIR study showed that between January 2013 and February 2014, an average of only 2.7 seconds per every 22-minute episode discussed poverty in some format. During the 14-month study, FAIR found just 23 news segments that addressed poverty.”
Costa Rica Is Setting the Standard on Renewable Energy
Is it possible to meet a modern nation’s energy needs without any fossil-fuel consumption? Yes.
To be fair, that country’s main industries—tourism and agriculture—are not energy-intensive, and heavy rainfall in the first part of the year made it possible for the country to rely heavily on its hydropower resources.
But even in normal years, Costa Rica generates 90% of its energy without burning any fossil fuels.
Iceland also produces the vast majority of its energy from renewable sources.
The transition to 100% renewables will be harder for larger countries, but as the limited reporting on Costa Rica notes, it’s possible to take large steps in that direction.
Tim Redmond, a longtime editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, is the founding member of the San Francisco Progressive Media Center and editor of that nonprofit organization’s publication, 48 Hills.
