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Censorship/Restricted Speech Illustration
Freedom of speech, press and protest against dictatorship. Censorship and restricted social dialogue. Discriminatory actions.
Half a century ago, Peter Jensen launched Project Censored, in part as a response to how the Watergate break-in was covered. Richard Nixon didn’t censor the initial reporting, but he didn’t have to. The press simply didn’t cover it with any serious scrutiny until well after Nixon was elected. The story didn’t reach the American people when it mattered most—when they could have done something about it directly themselves, before they went to the polls in November 1972.
Reflecting this, Jensen saw censorship as working differently in a democracy than in a dictatorship. He defined it as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, under-reporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.”
That happened with Watergate, though the truth belatedly came out. And an echo of the same sort of thing happened just as I was writing this half a century later. Six members of Congress who had served in the military or the CIA released a video accurately informing those serving, as they had, that they have the right—and in some cases the duty—to refuse unlawful or unconstitutional orders. President Trump responded on social media by falsely claiming their video message was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” but the New York Times relegated the story to page 16, with a headline that didn’t mention Trump’s call for their execution.
“No wonder Trump thinks he can get away with anything,” said Mark Jacob, a former top editor at both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.
This was only a faint echo of what happened with Watergate—especially given the Times’ diminished gate-keeping role. But those echoes are everywhere around us, every day. That same dynamic of suppression of information by under-reporting and self-censorship is constantly at play, with the same consequence of preventing the public from fully knowing what’s happening in society—particularly in time to do something about it.
For half a century now, Project Censored has been bringing these omissions to light, and while each story highlights a particular omission, they are often complex and interrelated to each other. There's a perfect example in this year's top censored story: “ICE Solicits Social Media Surveillance Contracts to Identify Critics.”
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Government spying on, suppressing, and even criminalizing its critics goes back at least to World War I as a systematic endeavor, but new elements have intertwined with it over time. Racial targeting, private contracting and omnipresent surveillance technology are all present in this most recent example and are routinely censored in other settings as well.
It’s also an example of systemic abusive policing, which shows up again in stories seven and eight, targeting the homeless for private profit in the first story, and killing four people a day in the second one, mostly in response to 9/11 calls, the majority of which involved a non-violent offense, or no offense at all. Racial targeting is also involved in this story (with Black people and Native Americans far more likely to be killed), as well as in stories number three and four, regarding systemic exploitation of Native Americans and targeting of pro-Palestinian activists, respectively.
Stories four through six involve tech surveillance in different ways, not just targeting activists but also systematically blocking data privacy protections for everyone, and using surveillance technology to harm workers and disrupt unionization at Amazon and Walmart, the largest private employers in America.
In turn, the class exploitation and oppression involved in this last example appears in two others as well, number seven, about private companies reaping over $100 million to sweep homeless camps in California (doing nothing to solve the problem), and number 10 about the extreme under-representation of working-class Americans in state legislatures—a censored story about censored voices that fittingly rounds out the list.
This is the deeper point of Project Censored’s list: That it’s not just about this or that suppressed and under-reported story, it’s about a whole different way of seeing the world if that systemic censoring were stripped away. Here, then, is Project Censored’s half-century anniversary list, so you can see for yourself what that means.
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Look for This Year’s Censored Stories Each Monday, December 11-January 12.
