“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 21^st 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 21^st 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, societially 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 Other iinconvenient 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.[11]

.[12] 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-nineeight 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 in January of 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” $3093 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.

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] Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2008), pp. 19-25.  This story is the number one censored story of the year at Project Censored for this year, 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.

[12] Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York, Seven Stories, Press, 2008), pp. 19-25.  This story is the number one censored story of the year at Project Censored for this year, 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.

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.

Among the most important corporate media censored news stories of the past decade, one must be that over one million people have died because of the United States military invasion and occupation of Iraq.  This, of course, does not include the number of deaths from the first Gulf War nor the ensuing sanctions placed upon the country of Iraq that, combined, caused close to an additional one million Iraqi deaths. In the Iraq War, which began in March of 2003, over a million people have died violently primarily from US bombings and neighborhood patrols.  These were deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government.  Among US military leaders and policy elites, the issue of counting the dead was dismissed before the Iraqi invasion even began.  In an interview with reporters in late March of 2002 US General Tommy Franks stated, “You know we don’t do body counts.”[i] Fortunately, for those concerned about humanitarian costs of war and empire, others do.

In a January 2008 report, the British polling group Opinion Research Business (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.  If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.”[ii]

The ORB report came on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Dr. Les Roberts and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and published in the Lancet medical journal. The first study done from January 1, 2002 to March 18, 2003 confirmed civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. The second study published in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion and confirmed that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths. Over half the deaths were directly attributable to US forces. The now estimated 1.2 million dead six years into the war/occupation, included children, parents, grandparents, cab drivers, clerics and schoolteachers. All manner of ordinary Iraqis have died because the United States decided to invade their country under false pretences of undiscovered weapons of mass destruction and in violation of international law. An additional four to five million Iraqi refugees have fled their homes            The magnitude of these million-plus deaths and creation of such a vast refugee crisis is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces has guaranteed a monthly mass death rate of thousands of people a carnage that ranks among the most heinous mass killings in world history. More tons of bombs have been dropped in Iraq than in all of World War II.[iii] Six years later the casualties continue but the story, barely reported from the start, has vanished.

The American people face a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in their name. Yet most Americans have no idea of the magnitude of deaths and tend to believe that they number in the thousands and are primarily Iraqis killing Iraqis.  Corporate mainstream media are in large part to blame. The question then becomes how can this mass ignorance and corporate media deception exist in the United States and what impact does this have on peace and social justice movements in the country?[iv]

Truth Emergency and Media Reform

In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has peaked. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literalTruth Emergency in which the most important information affecting people is concealed from view. Many Americans, relying on the mainstream corporate media, have serious difficulty accessing the truth while still believing that the information they receive is the reality. A Truth Emergency reflects cumulative failures of the fourth estate to act as a truly free press. This truth emergency is seen in inadequate coverage of fraudulent elections, pseudo 9/11 investigations, illegal preemptive wars, torture camps, doctored intelligence, and  domestic surveillance.   Reliable information on these issues is systematically missing in corporate media outlets, where the vast majority of the American people continue to turn for news and information.

Consider these items of noteworthy conditions. US workers have been faced with a thirty-five year decline in real wages while the top few percent enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens. US schools, particularly in the west, are more segregated now than half a century ago. The US has the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations, is falling behind in scientific research and education, leads the world as a debtor nation, and is seriously lacking in healthcare quality and coverage, which results in the deaths of 18,000 people a year. America has entered another Gilded Age. Someone should alert the media.[v]

The Free Press or Media Reform Movement is a national effort to address mainstream media failures and the government policies that sanction them. During the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) in Minneapolis, Project Censored interns and faculty conducted a survey, completed by 376 randomly selected NCMR attendees out of the 3,500 people registered for the conference. This survey was designed to gauge participants’ views on the state of the corporate news media and the  effectiveness of the media reform movement. The survey also sought to determine the level of belief in a truth emergency, a systematic hiding of critical information in the US. Not surprisingly, for a sample of independent media reform activists, majorities in the 90% plus range agreed on most criticisms of mainstream media, that corporate media failed to keep the American people informed on important issues facing the nation and that a truth emergency does indeed exist in the US. Regarding the reasons, 87% of the participants believed that a military-industrial-media complex exists in the US for the promotion of the US military domination of the world and most agreed with research conclusions by Project Censored, and others, that a continuing powerful global dominance groupinside the US government, the US media, and the national policy structure is responsible. What was clear from our survey is that media democracy activists strongly support not only aggressive reform efforts and policy changes but also the continuing development of independent, grassroots media as part of an overall media democracy movement.

While most progressive media activists do not believe in some omnipotent conspiracy, an overwhelming portion of NCMR participants do believe the leadership class in the US is dominated by a neo-conservative group of some several hundred people who share a goal of asserting US military power worldwide. This Global Dominance Group (GDM) continues under both Republican and Democratic rule.  In cooperation with major military contractors, the corporate media, and conservative foundations, the GDM has become a powerful long-term force in military unilateralism and US political processes.

The Global Dominance Group and Information Control

A long thread of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the US, which sets policy and determines national political priorities. C. Wright Mills, in his 1956 book The Power Elite, documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military and government elites in a centralized power structure working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement.[vi] This power has grown through the Cold War and, after 9/11, the Global War on Terror.

At present, the global dominance agenda includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. Only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top 10 media corporations share board director positions with the major defense contractors including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.

Given an interlocked media network of connections with defense and other economic sectors, big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. Media critic and historian Norman Solomon described the close financial and social links between the boards of large media-related corporations and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment: “One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media.”[vii] The Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) provides an example of the interlocked military-industrial-media complex. This Act specifically asks the directorate to “develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key resources and critical infrastructure of the United States including information technology and telecommunications systems (including satellites) emergency preparedness communications systems.”

The media elite, a key component of the Higher Circle Policy Elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources. Their goal is to create symbiotic global news distribution in a deliberate attempt to control the news and information available to society. The two most prominent methods used to accomplish this task are censorship and propaganda.

Sometimes the sensationalist and narrow media coverage of news is blamed upon the need to meet a low level of public taste and thereby capture the eyes of a sufficient market to lure advertisers and to make a profit. But another goal of cornering the marketplace on what news and views will be aired is also prominent. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times. The losses in supporting conservative media are part of a strategy of ideological control. They also buy bulk quantities of ultra-conservative books bringing them to the top of the NY Times bestseller list and then give away copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications. They fund conservative “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. All this buys them respectability and a megaphone. Even though William Kristol’s publication, theStandard, is a money-loser, his association with it has often gotten him on TV talk shows and a column with The New York Times. Sponsorships of groups like Grover Norquist’s anti-tax “Americans for Tax Reform” regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States. This has contributed to extensive tax cuts for the wealthy and the most unfair tax laws of any industrialized country – all found acceptable by a public relying upon sound-bites about the dangers of ‘big government.’ Hence media corporation officials and others in the health care, energy and weapons industries remain wealthier than ordinary people can imagine. Their expenditures for molding opinion are better understood as investments in a conservative public ideology[viii]

Modern Media Censorship and Propaganda

A broader definition of contemporary censorship needs to include any interference, deliberate or not, with the free flow of vital news information to the public. Modern censorship can be seen as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions). or threats to reduce future access to governmental and corporate sources of news. Following are a few examples of censorship and propaganda.

1. Omitted or Undercovered Stories- The failure of the corporate media to cover human consequences, like one million , mostly civilian deaths of Iraqis, reduces public response to the wars being conducted by the US. Even when activists do mobilize, the media coverage of anti-war demonstrations has been negligible and denigrating from the start.   When journalists of the so-called free press ignore the anti-war movement, they serve the interests of their masters in the military media industrial complex.[ix]

Further, the corporate mainstream press continues to ignore the human cost of the US war in Iraq with America’s own veterans. Veteran care, wounded rates, mental disabilities, VA claims, first hand accounts of soldier experiences, and pictures of dead or limbless soldiers are rare. One of the most important stories missed by the corporate press concerned the Winter Soldier Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C.  The hearings, with eyewitness testimony of US soldiers relating their experiences on the battlefield and beyond, were only covered by a scant number of major media, and then only in passing. In contrast to the virtual corporate media blackout concerning American soldiers’ views of the war, the independent, listener sponsored, community Pacifica Radio network covered the hearings at length.[x]

A common theme among the most censored stories over the past few years has been the systemic erosion of human rights and civil liberties in both the US and the world at large. The corporate media has 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 TimesOctober 19, 2006, have offered false comfort that American citizens will not be the victims, the Act is quite clear that ‘any person’ can be targeted.[xi]

Additionally, under the code-name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally), federally coordinated mass arrests have been occurring since  April 2005 and netted over 54,000 arrests, a majority of whom were not violent criminals as was initially suggested.  This unprecedented move of arresting tens of thousands of “fugitives” is the largest dragnet style operation in the nation’s history. The raids, coordinated by the Justice Department and Homeland Security, directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local and federal) and mark the first time in US history that all domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government.[xii]

All these events are significant in a democratic society that claims to cherish individual rights and due process of law. To have them occur is a tragedy. To have a “free” press not report them or pretend these issues do not matter to the populace is the foundation of censorship today.

2. Repetition of Slogans and Sound Bites- The corporate media in the US present themselves as unbiased and accurate. The New York Times motto of “all the news that’s fit to print” is a clear example, as is CNN’s authoritative “most trusted name in news” and Fox’s mantra of “fair and balanced.” The slogans are examples of what linguist George Lakoff has referred to as framing. Through constant repetition, the metaphors and symbols that pervade our media turn into unquestioned beliefs.  Terms like “liberal media,” “welfare cheaters,” “war on terror,” illegal aliens,” “tax burden,” “support our troops,” are all distorted images serving to conceal a transfer of wealth from people needing a safety net to corporations seeking profitable markets and military expansion.

3. Embedded Journalism- The media are increasingly dependent on governmental and corporate sources of news. Maintenance of continuous news shows requires a constant feed and an ever-entertaining supply of stimulating events and breaking news bites. The 24-hour news shows on MSNBC, Fox and CNN maintain constant contact with the White House, Pentagon, and public relations companies representing both government and private corporations.

By the time of the Gulf War in 1991, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as “collateral damage” and “smart bombs” flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned but more rarely seen civilians killed by U.S. firepower.  This clearly foreshadowed the structure of “embedded” reporting in the second Iraq War, where mainstream corporate journalists literally lived with the troops and had to submit all reports for  military review.[xiii] A related militarization of news studies by Diane Farsetta at the Center for Media Democracy documented a related introduction of bias. These investigations showed Pentagon propaganda penetration on mainstream corporate news in the guise of retired Generals as “experts” or pundits who turned out to be nothing more than paid shills for government war policy.[xiv]

The problem then becomes more complex.  What happens to a society that begins to believe such lies as truth?  The run up to the 2003 war in Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) is a case in point.  It illustrates the power of propaganda in creating not only public support for an ill-begotten war, but also reduces the possibility of a peace movement, even when fueled by the truth, to stop a war based on falsehoods.  The current war in Iraq was the most globally protested war in recorded history. This did nothing to stop it and has done little to end it even under a Democratic president who promised such on the campaign trail.  The candidate of “hope and change,” with peace groups in tow, has proven to be dependent upon the same interests in foreign policy that got the US into war in the first place.[xv]

The Progressive Press

Where the left progressive press may have covered some of the Winter Soldier issues, most did not cover the major story of Iraqi deaths. InManufacturing Consent, Wharton School of Business Professor of Political Economy Edward Herman and MIT Institute Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky claim that because media are firmly embedded in the market system, they reflect the class values and concerns of their owners and advertisers. The corporate media maintain a class bias through five systemic filters: concentrated private ownership; a strict bottom-line profit orientation; over-reliance on governmental and corporate sources for news; a primary tendency to avoid offending the powerful; and an almost religious worship of the market economy. These filters limit what will become news in society and set parameters on acceptable coverage of daily events.[xvi]

The danger of these filters is that they make subtle and indirect censorship more difficult to combat. Owners and managers share class identity with the powerful and are motivated economically to please advertisers and viewers. Social backgrounds influence their conceptions of what is “newsworthy,” and their views and values seem only “common sense.” Journalists and editors are not immune to the influence of owners and managers. Reporters want to see their stories approved for print or broadcast, and editors come to know the limits of their freedom to diverge from the “common sense” worldview of owners and managers. The self-discipline that this structure induces in journalists and editors comes to seem only “common sense” to them as well. Self-discipline becomes self-censorship—independence is restricted, the filtering process hidden, denied, or rationalized away.

Project Censored’s analysis on the top ten progressive left publications and websites coverage of key post-9/11 issues found considerable limitations on reporting of specific stories. The evidence supports the Chomsky and Herman understanding that the media barrage may in fact contribute to the news story selection process inside the left liberal media as well.[xvii] Even the left progressive media showed limited coverage of the human costs of the 9/11 wars.

The figure reported in summer, 2007 documenting a million dead did appear in progressive websites and radio  including After Downing Street, Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Alternet, Democracy Now! and the Nation, but several took months to get to it. This lack of timely reporting on such a critical story on the humanitarian crisis of the US occupation by the alternative press in America does not bode well for a strong, public, peace movement.  The US is in dire need of a media democracy movement to address truth emergency concerns.

In response, the Truth Emergency Movement, held its first national strategy summit in Santa Cruz, California Jan. 25-27, 2008. Organizers gathered key media constituencies to devise coherent decentralized models for distribution of suppressed news, synergistic truth-telling, and collaborative strategies to disclose, legitimize and popularize deeper historical narratives on power and inequality in the US. In sum, this 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 defend their world. We learn from grassroots actions in the US but also from experiences of other countries. This requires us to transcend the stereotypes of other countries hammered by the corporate media. It is not by chance that two Latin American nations, both targets of US efforts to remove their popular leaders by force, have been vilified by mainstream media. Both Cuba and Venezuela, however, have been experiments in local democratic participation in which voices of communities weigh heavily upon social policy.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action:  Venezuela

Democracy from the bottom is evolving as a ten-year social revolution in Venezuela. Led by President Hugo Chavez, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) gained over 1½ million voters in the November, 2008  elections. “It was a wonderful victory,” said Professor Carmen Carrero with the communications studies department of the Bolivarian University in Caracas. “We won 81 percent of the city mayor positions and seventeen of twenty-three of the state governors,” Carrero reported.

The Bolivarian University is housed in the former oil ministry building and now serves 8,000 students throughout Venezuela. The University (Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela) is symbolic of the democratic socialist changes occurring throughout the country. Before the election of Hugo Chavez as president in 1998, college attendance was primarily for the rich in Venezuela. Today over one million, eight hundred thousand students attend college, three times the rate ten years ago. “Our university was established to resist domination and imperialism,” reported Principal (president) Marlene Yadira Cordova in an interview November 10, 2008, “We are a university where we have a vision of life that the oppressed people have a place on this planet.” The enthusiasm for learning and serious-thoughtful questions asked by students was certainly representative of a belief in the potential of positive social change for human betterment. The University offers a fully staffed free healthcare clinic, zero tuition, and basic no-cost food for students in the cafeteria, all paid for by the oil revenues now being democratically shared by the people.

Bottom up democracy in Venezuela starts with the 25,000 community councils elected in every neighborhood in the country. “We establish the priority needs of our area,” reported community council spokesperson Carmon Aponte, with the neighborhood council in the barrio Bombilla area of western Caracas. Aponte works with Patare Community TV and radio station and  is one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela.  Community radio, TV and newspapers are the voice of the people, where they describe the viewers/listeners as the “users” of media instead of the passive audiences.[xviii]

Democratic socialism has meant healthcare, jobs, food, and security, in neighborhoods where in many cases nothing but poverty existed ten years ago. With unemployment down to a US level, sharing the wealth has taken real meaning in Venezuela. Despite a 50 percent increase in the price of food last year, local Mercals offer government subsidized cooking oil, corn meal, meat, and powdered milk at 30-50 percent off market price. Additionally, there are now 3,500 local communal banks with a $1.6 billion dollar budget offering neighborhood-based micro-financing loans for home improvements, small businesses, and personal emergencies.

“We have moved from a time of disdain [pre-revolution—when the upper classes saw working people as less than human] to a time of adjustment,” proclaimed Ecuador’s minister of Culture, Gallo Mora Witt at the opening ceremonies of the Fourth International Book Fair in Caracas, November, 2007. Venezuela’s Minister of Culture, Hector Soto added, “We try not to leave anyone out. . . before the revolution the elites published only 60-80 books a year, we will publish 1,200 Venezuelan authors this year…the book will never stop being the important tool for cultural feelings.” In fact, some twenty-five million books—classics by Victor Hugo and Miguel de Cervantes along with Cindy Sheehan’s Letter to George Bush—were published in 2008 and are being distributed to the community councils nationwide. The theme of the International Book Fair was books as cultural support to the construction of the Bolivarian revolution and building socialism for the 21st century.

In Venezuela the corporate media are still owned by the elites. The five major TV networks, and nine of ten of the major newspapers maintain a continuing media effort to undermine Chavez and the socialist revolution. But despite the corporate media and $20 million annual support to the anti-Chavez opposition institutions from USAID and National Endowment for Democracy, two-thirds of the people in Venezuela continue to support President Hugo Chavez and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. The democracies of South America are realizing that the neo-liberal formulas for capitalism are not working and that new forms of resource allocation are necessary for human betterment. It is a learning process for all involved and certainly a democratic effort from the bottom up.

International Models of Media Democracy in Action:  Cuba

“You cannot kill truth by murdering journalists,” said Tubal Páez, president of the Journalist Union of Cuba. In May of 2008, One hundred and fifty Cuban and South American journalists, ambassadors, politicians, and foreign guests gathered at the Jose Marti International Journalist Institute to honor the 50th anniversary of the death of Carlos Bastidas Arguello —the last journalist killed in Cuba.  Carlos Bastidas was 23 years old when he was assassinated by Fulgencia Batista’s secret police after having visited Fidel Castro’s forces in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Edmundo Bastidas, Carlos’ brother, told about how a river of change flowed from the Maestra (teacher) mountains, symbolized by his brother’s efforts to help secure a new future for Cuba.

The celebration in Havana was held in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which is observed every year in May. The UN first declared this day in 1993 to honor journalists who lost their lives reporting the news and to defend media freedom worldwide.

Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. In addition to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, these attacks include the blowing up of a Cuban airlines plane in 1976 killing seventy-three people, the starting in 1981 of an epidemic of dengue fever that killed 158 people, and several hotel bombings in the 1990s, one of which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist.

In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt government control. Ricardo Alarcon, President of the National Assembly Cuba allows CNN, AP and Chicago Tribune to maintain offices in Cuba, noted that the US refuses to allow Cuban journalists to work in the United States.[xix]

Cuban journalists complain that the US corporate media is biased and refuses to cover the positive aspects of socialism in Cuba. Unknown to most Americans are the facts that Cuba is the number one country in percentage of organic foods produced in the world, has an impressive health care system with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, trains doctor from all over the world, and has enjoyed a 43% increase in GDP between 2005 and 2008.

Neither Cuba nor Venezuela are utopian societies. Developing countries subject to continuing pressure by the US may be cautious and suspicious of provocateurs that would incite violence or provoke US military intervention. But in these countries, the ability of local media expressing voices of local communities is something from which media reformers can learn.

Grassroots Antidotes to Corporate Media Propaganda

Tens of thousands of Americans engaged in various social justice issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate, or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on issues like 9/11 Truth, election fraud, impeachment in the Bush era, war propaganda, civil liberties abridgements, torture, the Wall Street meltdown, and corporate-caused 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.

Now, however, a growing number of activists are finally saying “enough!” and 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 people what is really going on.  These activists know we need a journalism that moves beyond inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider patterns of corruption, propaganda and illicit political control by a military and corporate elite.             Recent efforts at national media reform through micro-power community radio– similar to the 400 people’s radio stations in Venezuela– and campaign finance changes, that would mandate access for all candidates on national media, have been strongly resisted by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). NAB, considered one of the most powerful corporate lobby groups in Washington, works hard to protect over $200 billion dollars of annual advertising and the several hundred million dollars political candidates spend in each election cycle.

The Truth Emergency movement now recognizes that corporate media’s political power and failure to meet its First Amendment obligation to keep the public informed leaves a huge task. Citizens must mobilize resources to redevelop news and information systems from the bottom up. Citizen journalists can expand distribution of news via small independent newspapers, local magazines, independent radio, and cable access TV.  Using the internet, the public can interconnect with like-minded grassroots news organizations to share important stories.  These changes are already in progress.

Becoming the Media:  Media Freedom International and Project Censored

In response to Truth Emergency conference, the Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored launched an effort to both become a repository of independent news and information as well as a producer of content in what are called Validated Independent News stories vetted by college and university professors and students around the world. As corporate media continue their entertainment agenda and the PR industry—working for governments and corporations—increasingly dominates news content, there exists a socio-cultural opening to transform how the public receives and actually participates in the validation and creation of their own news.

Corporate media are increasingly irrelevant to working people and to democracy. People need to tell their own news stories from real experiences and perspectives, as an alternative to the hierarchically imposed and “official” top-down narrative.  What better project in support of media democracy than for universities and colleges worldwide to support truth telling and validate news stories and independent news sources.

Only 5% of college students under 30 read a daily newspaper. Most get their news from corporate television and increasingly on the internet. One of the biggest problems with independent media sources on the internet is a perception of inconsistent reliability. The public is often suspicious of the truthfulness and accuracy of news postings from non-corporate media sources. Over the past ten years, in hundreds of presentations all over the US, Project Censored staff has frequently been asked, “what are the best sources for news and whom can we trust?”

The goal of this effort is to encourage young people to use independent media as                                       their primary sources of news and information and to learn about trustworthy news sources through the Media Freedom International News Research Affiliate Program.  By the end of 2008, there were over thirty affiliate colleges and universities with plans to expand that participation several fold this next year.  Through these institutions, validated independent news stories can be researched by students and scholars, then written, produced and disseminated via the web.  In addition, on any given day at the Media Freedom Foundation website, one can view enough independent news stories from RSS feeds to fill nearly fifty written pages, more than even the largest US newspapers.  An informed electorate cannot remain passive consumers of corporate news. As aforementioned activist David Mathison suggested in his how-to manual, Be the Media, where he argues and instructs not only about how to build community media but how to build community through media.[xx]

Part of building community is in developing awareness about the type of world we want to participate in creating, and developing strategies for achieving change. New forms of media that promote widespread responsibility for both creating and disseminating information do not remove the need for people to protest, to demonstrate, to march, to boycott and to demand entry into corporate board rooms. Rather it assures that voices can be heard and, as shown in Howard Rheingold’s Smartmobbing Democracy,[xxi] the power of new Internet communication technologies can be harnessed to mobilize more effectively. Contrasted with previous more limited technologies, Rheingold points out that now, “[m]obile and deskbound media such as blogs, listserves and social networking sites allow for many-to-many communication.” Technology has helped level the playing field by creating a virtual sphere where people can exchange ideas and instigate activism. Grassroots, bottom-up, peer-to-peer efforts have increased in influence and effectiveness due to the speed and breadth of new communication technologies. We are currently experiencing a potential for collective activism on a scale never before seen.

The continued expansion of independent internet news sources allows for the mass political awareness of key issues and truth emergencies in the world. The involvement of university and college professors and their students in validating news stories will be an important component of reliability verification of these sources. As we learn who we can trust in the independent news world, we will be in a stronger position for the continued development and expansion of democratic social movement/anti-war efforts in the future.

It is up to the people to unite and oppose the common oppressors manifested in a militarist and unresponsive government along with their corporate media courtiers and PR propagandists.  Only then, when the public forms and controls its own information resources, will it be armed with the power that knowledge gives to move beyond the media induced mindsets that limit change to modest reform. Grassroots media providing voice to those who would challenge elite domination are our best hope to create a truly vibrant democratic society that promises as well as delivers liberty, peace, and economic justice to all.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and President  of the Media Freedom Foundation and recent past director of Project Censored.

Mickey Huff is an Associate Professor of History and Social Science at Diablo Valley College and serves on the executive committeeof the Media Freedom Foundation and is recent past associate director of  Project Censored.

Media Freedom website include:

Daily News at: http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources

Validated News & Research at: http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/

Daily Censored Blog at: http://dailycensored.com/

Project Censored:  http://www.projectcensored.org/

[ii] Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth, Censored 2009, (New York:  Seven Stories, Press, 2008), 19-25.  This story is the number one censored story of the year at Project Censored for this year, archived online 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.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Various theories exist on the problem of the subject, from historian Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are We to historian and cultural critic Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas,but few examine its affects on the peace community.  For more on the issue of American historical amnesia, see Gore Vidal on Democracy Now!at http://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/21/gore_vidal_on_the_united_states , also, In These Times online at  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3099/the_united_states_of_amnesia/and for a broader academic look at the issue of how Americans have become arguably the least informed, most entertained people in the modern world, see the now classic work from the late New York University media scholar Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, (New York:  Viking Adult, 1985).  This article hopes to shine more light on the impact of all of the aforementioned on the peace movement in general and what can be done about it.  For another view of this written earlier, at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, see Felix Kolb and Alicia Swords, “Do Peace Movements Matter?” Commondreams.org, May 12, 2003, online at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0512-08.htm.

[vi] C. Wright Mills.  The Power Elite, (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2000, reissue).  Also, continuing with this theme in terms of democratic communications theory/policy and the ideas of an open society, see the work of Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, published in1962, and The Theory of Communicative Action, from 1981, as well as Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies,first published in 1945.

[vii] Norman Soloman, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective,” Extra! July/August 2005, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), on the FAIR website at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.

[viii] Cenk Uygur, “Conservative Media vs Progressive Media” Posted on The Daily Kos blog, July 1, 2009.<http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/1/748854/-Conservative-Media-vs.-Progressive-Media> )

[ix] Linda Milazzo,  “Corporate Media Turned Out for Jena, but Not for Anti-War. Here’s Why.” Atlantic Free Press, September 23, 2007, online at http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/2473-corporate-media-turned-out-for-jena-but-not-for-anti-war-heres-why.html.

[x] For more on the Winter Soldiers, see Censored 2009, chapter 1, story 9, pp. 58-62 and online http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-iraq-and-afghanistan-vets-testify/and chapter 12, pp.297-319.  See the KPFA radio and Corp Watch website for the coverage athttp://www.warcomeshome.org/wintersoldier2008.

[xi] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, (New York:  Seven Stories Press, 2007), 35-44.  Online 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/.

[xii] See Censored 2008, chapter 1, story 6, 55-59.  Also online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/6-operation-falcon-raids/.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Diane Farsetta, Center for Media Democracy, studies on Pentagon propaganda online at http://www.prwatch.org/pentagonpundits and http://www.prwatch.org/node/8180.

[xiv] Norman Soloman, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex:

Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective,” Extra! July/August 2005, published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), on the FAIR website at http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.

[xv] For several excellent studies of US Iraq War propaganda, see PR Watch’s John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Weapons of Mass Deception:  The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq,(New York:  Tarcher Penguin, 2003), and their follow up Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq, (New York:  Penguin, 2006), and the exhaustive work by Anthony R. DiMaggio, Mass Media, Mass Propaganda:  Examining American News in the “War on Terror,”(UK:  Lexington Books, 2008).  Additionally, forthcoming in fall 2009, just reviewed by the authors, is Robert P. Abele, The Anatomy of a Deception: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, (Baltimore:  University Press of America, 2009).

For reports on the continuation of war policy under President Barack Obama, see Center for Media Democracy’s John Stauber, “How Obama Took Over the Peace Movement” online http://www.prwatch.org/node/8297, and Peter Phillips, “Barack Obama Administration Continues US Military Dominance” online http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/http-wwwprojectcensoredorg-articles-story-barack-obama-administration-c/.

[xvi] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent:  The Political Economy of the Mass Media, (New York:  Pantheon Books, 1988, 2002).  For an introduction of the Propaganda Model, see chapter 1, or see a retrospective by Edward Herman online http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/20031209.htm.

[xvii] Peter Phillips, Censored 2008, see chapter 7, “Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model,” 233-251.  Online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model/.

[xviii] Co-author Peter Phillips interviewed Carmon Aponte while visiting the Patare Community TV and radio station in a trip to Venezuela for a book fair in 2008.  The station was one of thirty-four locally controlled community television stations and four hundred radio stations now in the barrios throughout Venezuela.

[xix] Co-author Peter Phillips attended the major journalism conference in Cuba in 2008.  About his experiences there, Phillips remarked, “During my five days in Havana, I met with dozens of journalists, communication studies faculty and students, union representatives and politicians. The underlying theme of my visit was to determine the state of media freedom in Cuba and to build a better understanding between media democracy activists in the US and those in Cuba.”

Phillips continued, “I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast. Over 90 municipalities in Cuba have their own locally run radio stations, and journalists report local news from every province.”

“During the course of several hours in each station I (Phillips) was interviewed on the air about media consolidation and censorship in the US and was able to ask journalists about censorship in Cuba as well. Of the dozens I interviewed all said that they have complete freedom to write or broadcast any stories they choose.  This was a far cry from the Stalinist media system so often depicted by US interests.”

[xx] For more details see the Project Censored website at http://projectcensored.org/, for independent media feeds see Media Freedom Foundation at http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources, and for more on the Project Censored International Affiliates Program, see http://projectcensored.org/project-censored-international-affilates-program and http://mediafreedominternational.org.  For more on how to become the media, see David Mathison’s work online http://bethemedia.com.  For more on Smart Mobs, see Howard Rheingold’s work onlinehttp://www.smartmobs.com/book/.

[xxi] Howard Rheingold, “Smartmobbing Democracy,” in Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age,” ed. Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy. Retrieved from The Personal Democracy Press Website:http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5484.

By Mickey Huff and Frances A. Capell

The late New York University media scholar Neil Postman once said about America, “We are the best entertained least informed society in the world.” Since the mid 1980’s, Project Censored has examined this phenomenon in the culture of the 24/7-television news cycle.  Looking beyond what the corporate news media undercover or ignore, Project Censored surveys what they do spend precious airtime and column inches on while not covering the top censored stories or others in the public interest.  Which news stories have been found consistently by such surveys in this so-called information age?  “Junk Food News,” said Project Censored founder Dr. Carl Jensen.  “It’s like a Twinkie, not very nourishing for the consumer.” This is how Jensen described it back in 1984 when he first began looking at how tabloid sensationalism had inundated the nightly news with the “Where’s the Beef” campaign.  Jensen still considers Junk Food News a major problem in journalism and corporate media, particularly on today’s cable and television news.  In that tradition, Project Censored “celebrates” the 25th anniversary of Junk Food News this year… Please continue reading this article here: Junk_Food_News.pdf

This investigative report concerns itself with the ongoing phenomena of media myth making and the events of September 11th, 2001.  Corporate mainstream media have resurrected powerful myths from America’s past to shape public perception in the present. Through the prism of 9/11 as case study, one can see how the corporate mass media are in fact doing more myth making than news reporting, which amounts to a form of censorship.  Here, Professors Huff and Rea examine central historic American myths the corporate media and even much of the alternative independent media have extended into the post-9/11 era especially about the events of 9/11 themselves. This analysis looks at how media mythmaking surrounding the events of 9/11, exploiting the strong emotions these events aroused, has prevented a dispassionate inquiry of its causes or of those responsible.

Read the complete article here DeconstructingDeceitOnlineEd.pdf

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

—Frederick Douglass

Critics of Project Censored often declare that we are a left-leaning organization. This is an interesting claim, given that over 200 faculty and students from multiple disciplines and political orientations work with Project Censored each year.  Over 1,500 students have been trained in media research techniques since we began in 1976, and it would be hard to find a more mainstream, mostly Californian college student body.

Critical thinking and fact finding are not left leaning, they are the basis of democracy, and we proudly stand for the maximization of informed participatory democracy at the lowest possible level in society.  To this end, Project Censored supports social justice and media democracy in action.

The second most often announced complaint is that we cover news stories that are really not “censored.” But our definition of censorship has been quite clear all along. Any interference with the free flow of information is censorship. Even if the interference is structural or not deliberate, it has the same impact of creating a lack of public awareness on critical issues. This means that when the New York Times chooses to cover the updates on celebrity deaths, marriages, or divorces, and ignores the ACLU’s release of military autopsy reports proving that the US was torturing prisoners to death in Iraq and Afghanistan (Censored Story #7, 2007), that is censorship.  It is censorship even if most of the New York Times journalists didn’t know about the ACLU report; they certainly should have—it was an AP release!  The ACLU report was only covered in a dozen or so newspapers (not the Times) and went widely unnoticed.  For a story this important to go virtually unreported implies a degree of overt censorship.

Further, if journalists ignore topics related to 9/11, election fraud, electromagnetic weapons, contrail irregularities, and so on because they might be labeled “conspiracy theorists,” that is censorship as well. Any decision to cover up, ignore, avoid, steer away from, or simply fail to investigate—even if the investigation is not fruitful—is censorship because it implies a willful choice to not cover a particular story.  Ignoring important news stories, no matter the reason, is not commensurate with the principles of a free press.

Conspiracy Theories

Those who think we at Project Censored are “left leaning” and who dispute our definition of censorship also accuse us of reporting on and perpetuating conspiracy theories—as though this were a bad thing. Allow us to explain our position on this topic.

Conspiracies tend to be actions by small groups of individuals rather than massive collective plots by governments and corporations. However, small groups can be dangerous, especially when the individuals have significant power in huge public and private bureaucracies. But it is very unlikely that conspiracies can be interlinked in a macro way, bridging the gaps between dozens of corporations and government bureaucracies. There are just too many opportunities for leaks and exposures.

Nonetheless, corporate boards of directors do 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. Conspiracies exist everywhere, and yes, people do sit in rooms and conspire all the time. They may not congregate at the end of dark piers in abandoned warehouses under lights with no shades, smoking cigars in trenchcoats and looking askance, but conspirators do exist.  Micro-plots may well be the answer to some of the famous conspiracies theories floating in our circles of cynicism on the Internet. However, without accurate, thorough investigations, we can only stew in our distrust. Critical thinking and accurate, transparent investigative research are needed to counter the emotional fraud and propaganda of speculative ideas, fear mongering, and groupthink.

The first thing that critics of investigations on 9/11, election fraud, and any other issues do is to link all the questions—including some of the most hairbrained ideas— together in a crazy hodgepodge of irrationality that undermines legitimate investigations.  There is often a series of logical fallacies used by critics of controversial issues, including ad hominem attacks, red herring and straw person distractions, and false dilemmas. Because many people are taken in by these irrationalities, some journalists are fearful of being labeled conspiracy theorists. To protect their careers many—especially those in corporate media—will steer their inquiries to “safer” stories.

For example, in 2007, Project Censored covered research into the events of 9/11 by Brigham Young University physics professor Steven E. Jones. Dr. Jones concluded that the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings was implausible according to laws of physics. Jones called for an independent, international scientific investigation “guided not by politicized notions and constraints but rather by observations and calculations.” Jones specifically investigated the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” in the same manner as a controlled demolition late in the afternoon on September 11, 2001. WTC 7 collapsed in 6.6 seconds, just .6 of a second longer than it would take an object dropped from the roof to hit the ground. “Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum, one of the foundational laws of physics?” Jones asked. “That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors—and intact steel support columns—the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass,” he explained.  “How do the upper floors fall so quickly, then, and still conserve momentum in the collapsing buildings?” The paradox, he says, “is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis, whereby explosives quickly removed lower-floor material, including steel support columns, and allow near free-fall-speed collapses.”

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. The Open Chemical Physics Journal, Volume 2, 2009 included their research article, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from 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.

Additionally, architect Richard Gage, AIA, founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has to date amassed nearly 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and physics who have signed a petition calling for a new investigation of the events of 9/11 in New York.  Gage’s and Jones’ empirical research suggesting the possibility of controlled demolition have moved thousands of others to question the events of 9/11, but most in the media have either ignored their hard data, marginalized their significance, or outright attacked them.  Again, this is not the role of a free press.  If bias is unacceptable, these views should be heard and vetted fairly in an open society regardless of their ultimate outcomes and without contingency upon their popularity.[i]

In the case of Gage and Jones, there are scientific, factual arguments that establish the clear possibility of controlled demolition of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, and there is zero coverage in the corporate media in the US. This is top down corporate censorship pure and simple. Even if other scientists can be found to disagree with the study, the policy of ignoring the topic inside the corporate media is absolute. It seems unlikely that corporate journalists are unaware of the research, as it is listed on hundreds of websites worldwide. Perhaps the mainstream science journalists leave their critical thinking skills at home and give the scientific method the day off.  Or maybe the real conspiracy exists within the boardrooms of the corporate mainstream media.

We asked a faculty physicist at Sonoma State University what she thought about the new research from Dr. Jones in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. She had been critical of Jones when he spoke on our campus in 2006. At that time she said she didn’t need to read Jones’ research because she had read a Popular Mechanics article on the issue, a nonacademic report that has been debunked in scholarly circles. She went on to imply that she “just knew” Jones was wrong. So when presented with a peer-reviewed release in an academic chemical journal, her response was that it was not one of the most prestigious journals, without going into any detail. In other words, if one doesn’t like what a scientific journal says, one can dismiss it a priori.  No debate, no open discussion required.  These are hardly principles of the academy and they are not tenets of a free press.  In fact, these tactics and practices of attack and avoidance are enemies of free thought in any democratic society.

Project Censored as Left Leaning

According to the editor of the Pasadena Weekly, Project Censored suffers from a “perceived extreme left-leaning bent that editors . . . have assumed over the years in selecting, writing, and publishing its stories . . . more than anything it has been the Project’s perceived long leftward lean that has done the most damage to its overall credibility. Although the group never explicitly takes a political stance, a majority of the stories Project Censored highlights have a leftist political slant, criticizing big business, economic inequality, damage to the environment, the Pentagon, and misdeeds of conservative politicians, among other progressive issues.”[ii]

Why stories about the powerful in government and big business, or about environmental and inequality issues, are left leaning is beyond our understanding.  It seems that this is just good journalism—the journalism that is missing in the corporate media—and could just as well be middle-leaning-journalism, right-leaning-journalism or crazy California journalism. We are holding those in powerful positions in society accountable for their decisions and actions, which we believe is what a free press is supposed to do. Nonetheless, to address the accusation we decided to examine the key stories Project Censored covered over the past sixteen years during both the George W. Bush and the William Jefferson Clinton administrations. Perhaps we would detect the bias in our records.

But after examining our censored news stories from both the Bush and Clinton administrations, we found very evident similarities. Both administrations lied to support military aggression, supported policies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, spied on Americans, undermined civil liberties and violated international treaties, supported global arm sales/distribution and private mercenaries, ignored environmental issues, lobbied for unsafe industrial practices, allowed big banks and Wall Street unregulated freedoms, and encouraged media consolidation and repression of open journalism.

Following are some of the stories Project Censored covered under the Clinton and Bush Presidencies; you may decide for yourself whether a bias toward the Left is expressed. All stories are archived online at http://projectcensored.org under the archives link catalogued by year.[iii]

Arms Sales/Support and Consequences

Under Clinton

Turkey Destroys Kurdish Villages with US Weapons

Censored 2000, Story #5

Source: Kevin McKiernan, “Turkey’s War on the Kurds,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April, 1999.

In 1995, the Clinton administration recognized that the Turkish government used American arms in domestic military operations where human rights abuses occurred. In fact, Turkey has forcibly evacuated, leveled and burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages in the past decade. Most of the atrocities, which have cost over 40,000 lives, took place during Clinton’s first term in office. As an ally of the US through NATO, Turkey receives US weapons from dozens of companies, including Hughes, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Despite a horrifying report of violent abuse by Amnesty International, the State Department passed arms deals with Turkey. The war in Turkey represents the greatest use of US weapons in combat anywhere in the world today.

Under Bush

US Aid to Israel Fuels Repressive Occupation in Palestine

Censored 2004, Story #24

Sources: John Steinbach, “Palestine in the Crosshairs: US Policy and the struggle for Nationhood,” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 2002, No. 72; Matt Bowles, “US Aid Lifeblood of the Occupation,” Left Turn, March 4, 2002; Bob Wing, “Israel Erecting ‘Great Wall’ Around Palestine,” Wartimes, April 2003.

US aid to Israel over the course of its fifty-four years of nationhood has fueled the illegal occupation of Palestinian land superceding Palestinian rights to self-government.        During the last twenty-five years US aid to Israel has been about 60 percent military aid and 40 percent economic aid. There is a new plan to phase out all economic aid by 2008 in order to have all the aid going to military. Israel receives about $3 billion a year in direct aid and $3 billion a year in indirect aid in the form of special loans and grants. Under the Arms Export Control Act the US can only supply weapons that are used “for legitimate self defense.” The US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military assistance to any country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” The Proxmire Amendment bans military assistance to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities. All three of these laws are currently being broken with aid to Israel.

Pre-War Intelligence Used to Justify Military Aggression

Under Clinton

Evidence Indicates No Pre-war Genocide in Kosovo

Censored 2000, Story #12

Sources: Mark Cook, “William Walker: ‘Man With a Mission,’” Covert Action Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1999; The Progressive Review, “My Multinational Entity, Right or Wrong,” June 1999;  Pablo Ordaz , “Spanish Police and Forensic Experts have not Found Proof of Genocide in the North of Kosovo,” El Pais, September 23, 1999.

According to the New York Times, the “turning point” to NATO’s decision to go to war against Yugoslavia occurred on January 20, 1999 when US diplomat William Walker led a group of news reporters to discover a so-called Serb massacre of some forty-five Albanians in Racak, Kosovo. This story made international headlines and was later used to justify the NATO bombings.

The day before the “massacre,” Serb police had a firefight with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels that was covered by an Associated Press (AP) film crew. At the end of day, the village was deserted. Then, the next day the village had been reoccupied by the KLA, and it was the KLA who initially led foreign visitors to the alleged massacre site. William Walker arrived at noon with additional journalists, and expressed his outrage at a “genocidal massacre” to the world press.

Walker’s story remains shrouded with doubt. “What is disturbing,” remarks war correspondent Renaud Girard, “is that the pictures filmed by the AP journalists radically contradict Walker’s accusations.” Challenges to Walker’s massacre story were published in Le Monde and Le Figaro: “During the night, could the UCK (KLA) have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre?” (Le Figaro). Belarussian and Finnish forensic experts were later unable to verify that a massacre had actually occurred at Racak.

Under Bush

US Illegally Removes Pages from Iraq UN Report

Censored 2004, Story #3

Source: Michael I. Niman, “What Bush didn’t want you to know about Iraq,” The Humanist and ArtVoice, March/April 2003.

Throughout the winter of 2002, the Bush administration publicly accused Iraqi weapons declarations of being incomplete. The almost unbelievable reality of this situation is that it was the United States itself that had removed over 8,000 pages of the 11,800 page original report given by Iraq to the UN. This came as no surprise to Europeans, however, as Iraq had made extra copies of the complete weapons declaration report and unofficially distributed them to journalists throughout Europe. The Berlin newspaper Die Tageszetung broke the story on December 19, 2002 in an article by Andreas Zumach.

According to Niman, “The missing pages implicated twenty-four US-based corporations and the successive Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. administration in connection with the illegal supplying of Saddam Hussein government with myriad weapons of mass destruction and the training to use them.” Groups documented in the original report that were supporting Iraq’s weapons programs prior to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait included  Eastman Kodak, Dupont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, and Bechtel; US government agencies such as the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Defense; and nuclear weapons labs such as Lawrence-Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia.

Beginning in 1983, the US was involved in eighty shipments of biological and chemical components, including strains of botulism toxin, anthrax, gangrene bacteria, West Nile fever virus, and Dengue fever virus. These shipments continued even after Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran in 1984.

Civilian Deaths in Iraq

Under Clinton

US Weapons Mass Destruction Linked to the Deaths of a Half-Million Children

Censored 1999, Story #5

Sources: Dennis Bernstein, “Made in America,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 25, 1998; Bill Blum, “Punishing Saddam or the Iraqis,” I.F. Magazine, March/April 1998; Most Rev. Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.), “Our Continuing War Against Iraq,” Space and Security News, May 1998.

For the past seven years, the United States has supported sanctions against Iraq that have taken the lives of more Iraqi citizens than did the war itself. The sanctions imposed on Iraq are causing shortages of food, medical supplies, and medicines. Since the war ended, more than half a million children under the age of five have died. UNICEF reports that 150 children are dying every day.

The Iraqi people are being punished for their leader’s reticence to comply fully with US-supported UN demands “to search every structure in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.” Ironically, 1994 US Senate findings uncovered evidence that US firms supplied at least some of the very biological material that the UN inspection teams are now seeking.

A 1994 US Senate panel report indicated that between 1985 and 1989, US firms supplied microorganisms needed for the production of Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare. The Senate panel wrote, “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.

Under Bush

Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation

Censored 2009, Story #1

Sources: Michael Schwartz, “Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More?” After Downing Street, July 6, 2007; Joshua Holland, “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda genocide, Cambodian killing fields,” AlterNet, September 17, 2007; Luke Baker, “Iraq conflict has killed a million, says survey,” Reuters (via AlterNet), January 7, 2008; Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, “Iraq: Not our country to Return to,” Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). ORB’s research covered fifteen of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. Those not covered include two of Iraq’s more volatile regions—Kerbala and Anbar—and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work. In face-to-face interviews with 2,414 adults, the poll found that more than one in five respondents had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, as opposed to natural cause.

Authors Joshua Holland and Michael Schwartz point out that the dominant narrative on Iraq—that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility—is ill conceived. Interviewers from the Lancet report of October 2006 (Censored 2006, #2) asked Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died. Of deaths for which families were certain of the perpetrator, 56 percent were attributable to US forces or their allies. Schwartz suggests that if a low pro rata share of half the unattributed deaths were caused by US forces, a total of approximately 80 percent of Iraqi deaths are directly US perpetrated.

Administrative Support for Big Banks And Stock Brokers

Under Clinton

New Mega-Merged Banking Behemoths = Big Risk

Censored 1997, Story #6

Source: Jake Lewis, “The Making of the Banking Behemoths,” Multinational Monitor, June 1996.

Nineteen ninety-five was a record year of bank mergers. Chase Manhattan and Chemical banks combined to create the nation’s largest bank, with $300 billion in assets—while on the West coast, the merger of First Interstate and Wells Fargo created a new giant with over $100 billion in assets. The massive consolidation of the nation’s banking resources has resulted in 71.5 percent of US banking assets being controlled by the 100 largest banking organizations, representing less than 1 percent of the total banks in the nation.

The trend toward bigger banks is creating a system whereby giant banking institutions are taking on “too big to fail” status. Indeed, a failure of any one of these new giants would have a devastating effect on the nation’s financial health. And with the Federal Reserve capping the amount that financial institutions have to pay into the government’s bank insurance fund at $25 billion, just 1.25 percent of deposits are now insured. Consequently, any bailout of one of these new megabanks would come directly from the pockets of taxpayers.

Studies have also found that banks in concentrated markets tend to charge higher rates for certain types of loans, and tend to offer lower interest rates on certain types of deposits than do banks in less concentrated markets. A 1995 study by the US Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Study of Responsive Law showed that fees on checking and savings accounts increased at twice the rate of inflation from 1993 to 1995 as bank mergers moved forward.

Under Bush

Little Known Stock Fraud Could Weaken US Economy

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2006, Story #18

Sources: David Hendricks, “Naked Short Selling Is A Plague For Businesses And Investors,” San Antonio Express News, March 2, 2005;  Karl Thiel, “Who’s Behind Naked Shorting?” TheMotleyFool.com, March 30, 2005; Stockgate Today Series, “SEC’s Donaldson Addresses Liquidity Fraud,” Financial Wire, September 20, 2004; and Dave Patch, “Dateline NBC Cancelled and Attorney Accuses DTCC of Cheap Thuggery,” April 7, 2005.

While the balance of supply and demand is a fairly well known principle of economic health, a related and similar relationship exists between liquidity—the availability of liquid, spendable assets such as cash, stocks and bonds—and security—the stability, endurance and trustworthiness of more long-term financial mechanisms.

The scandal coined “Stockgate” by the Financial Wire involves the abuse of a practice called “short selling.” As opposed to a traditional approach to investing in which stocks are researched and bought on the hope they will rise over the “long” term, going “short” involves a bet that a stock is about to go down in value. In a short sale, an investor sells stock that he or she technically doesn’t own. The investor borrows these shares of stock from their broker, who in turn may likely borrow the shares himself from a financial clearinghouse like a brokerage firm or hedge fund. Hoping that the price of the stock will drop, the investor is obligated to eventually “close” the short by buying back the sold shares at a hopefully lower price, thus making a profit from the fall of the stock. When the time runs out for “covering” the short and the price hasn’t dropped, the investor is forced to buy back the shares at a loss and take a financial hit. The short sale of stocks is a risky bet, usually not recommended except for speculation or hedging-to protect long-term financial positions with short-term offsets. As short-selling is a sale of stocks not owned, but loaned, it is an example of buying on margin-a category of practices whose abuses stand out clearly in many people’s minds as a significant factor in the Stock Market Crash of 1929 which ushered in the Great Depression.

Naked shorting is an illegal abuse of short selling in which investors short-sell stock that they have no intention or ability to ever cover. When allowed to occur, naked shorting drives the stock value of a company down by creating more stock shares flowing around the market than actual shares of stock that the company can back with their current earnings. Companies, their shareholders, and indeed the entire economy are hurt financially by naked shorting, as it reduces the money available to support economic growth.

Additional References:

David Sedore, “Hedge Fund Assets Frozen,” March 4, 2005, and “Hedge Fund Virtually Bare,” March 12, 2005, The Palm Beach Post-KL Financial fraud series; “First American Scientific Corp. Takes Counter Measures to Stop ‘Naked Shorting’ of its Stock,” PrimeZone Media Network, December 17, 2004.

National Security/Government Secrecy

Under Clinton

Little Known Federal Law Paves The Way for National Identification Card

Censored 1998, Story #8

Sources:  Cyndee Parker, “National ID Card is Now Federal Law and Georgia Wants to Help Lead the Way,” Witwigo, May/June 1997; Mainstream media coverage: The New York Times, September 8, 1996, section 6; page 58, column 1; related article in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1996, page A1.

In September 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996. Buried on approximately page 650 was a section that creates a framework for establishing a national ID card for the American public. This legislation was slipped through without fanfare or publicity.

This law has various aspects: It establishes a “Machine Readable Document Pilot Program” requiring employers to swipe a prospective employee’s driver’s license through a special reader linked to the federal government’s Social Security Administration. The federal government would have the discretion to approve or disapprove the applicant for employment. In this case, the driver’s license becomes a “national ID card.”

The author of the national ID law, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), stated in a Capitol Hill magazine that it was her intention to see Congress immediately implement a national ID system whereby every American would be required to carry a card with a “magnetic strip on it on which the bearer’s unique voice, retina pattern, or fingerprint is digitally encoded.” Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), among others, has strongly denounced the new law, calling it “an abomination, and wholly at odds with the American tradition of individual freedom.”

Under Bush

Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

Censored 2006, Story #1

Source: Karen Lightfoot, “New Report Details Bush Administration Secrecy,” Committee on Government Reform, September 14, 2004, http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/newsprint.cgi?file=/news2004/0914-05.htm.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives citizens the ability to file a request for specific information from a government agency and provides recourse in federal court if that agency fails to comply with FOIA requirements. Over the last two decades, beginning with Reagan, this law has become increasingly diluted and circumvented by each succeeding administration.

Under the Bush administration, agencies make extensive and arbitrary use of FOIA exemptions (such as those for classified information, privileged attorney-client documents and certain information compiled for law enforcement purposes) often inappropriately or with inadequate justification. Recent evidence shows agencies making frivolous (and sometimes ludicrous) exemption claims, abusing the deliberative process privilege, abusing the law enforcement exemption, and withholding data on telephone service outages.

The Bush administration also engages in an aggressive policy of questioning, challenging and denying FOIA requesters’ eligibility for fee waivers, using a variety of tactics. Measures include narrowing the definition of “representative of news media,” claiming information would not contribute to public understanding.

The Bush administration has also obtained unprecedented authority to conduct government operations in secret, with little or no judicial oversight. Under expanded law enforcement authority in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department can more easily use secret orders to obtain library and other private records, obtain “sneak-and-peek” warrants to conduct secret searches, and conduct secret wiretaps.

Homeland Security And Government Spying

Under Clinton

Exposing the Global Surveillance System

Censored 1998, Story #4

Source: Nicky Hager, “Secret Power. Exposing the Global Surveillance System,” Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), Winter 1996/1997.

For over forty years, New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), has been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region. Neither the public nor the majority of New Zealand’s top elected officials had knowledge of these activities. These procedures have operated since 1948 under a secret, Cold War-era intelligence alliance between the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-the UKUSA agreement. But in the late 1980s, the US prompted New Zealand to join a new and highly secret global intelligence system. US National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the world’s biggest, most closely held intelligence projects. Unlike many of the Cold War electronic spy systems, ECHELON is designed primarily to gather electronic transmissions from nonmilitary targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country.

The system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass of unwanted ones. Computers at each secret station in the ECHELON network automatically search millions of messages for pre-programmed key words. For each message containing one of those key words, the computer automatically notes time and place of origin and interception, and gives the message a four-digit code for future reference.

Under Bush

Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberty

Censored 2004, Story #2

Sources: Alex Jones, “Secret Patriot II Destroys Remaining US Liberty,” Global Outlook, Volume 4; Frank Morales, “Homeland Defense: Pentagon Declares War on America,” Global Outlook, Winter 2003; Charles Lewis and Adam Mayle, “Justice Department Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Terrorism Act,” Center for Public Integrity,  http://publicintegrity.org.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) represents the most extensive restructuring of the US government since 1947—the year the Department of War was combined with the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force to create the Department of Defense. The new Department of Homeland Security combines over one hundred separate entities of the executive branch, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, and the Border Patrol, among others. The DHS employs over 170,000 federal workers and commands a total annual budget of $37 billion.

One DHS mandate largely ignored by the press requires the FBI, CIA, state, and local governments to share intelligence reports with the department upon command, without explanation. Civil rights activists claim that this endangers the rights and freedoms of law-abiding Americans by blurring the lines between foreign and domestic spying (as occurred during the COINTELPRO plan of the 1960s and 1970s). According to the ACLU, the Department of Homeland Security will be “100% secret and 0% accountable.”

As part of Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 allows the government increased and unprecedented access to the lives of American citizens and represents an unrestrained imposition on our civil liberties. Wiretaps, previously confined to one phone, can now follow a person from place to place at the behest of government agents and people can now be detained on the vague suspicion that they might be a terrorist—or assisting one. Detainees can also be denied the right to legal representation (or the right of private counsel when they are allowed to meet with their attorneys).

Private Mercenary Companies Used Around the World

Under Clinton

Mercenary Armies in Service to Global Corporations

Censored 1999, Story #16

Sources: Pratap Chatterjee, “Mercenary Armies & Mineral Wealth,” Covert Action Quarterly, Fall 1997, No. 62; Pratap Chatterjee, “Guarding the Multinationals,” Multinational Monitor, March 1998.

In many countries, multinational corporations have paid directly for private policing services from the local army; or have hired outside security companies to harass nationals who protest against the environmental impact of their operations. The firms involved represent a growing number of new corporate security operations around the world, linking former intelligence officers, standing armies, and local death squads.

One of these security companies is Defense Systems Limited (DSL). DSL is run by two ex-Special Air Service commandos out of London offices, across the street from Buckingham Palace. Their clients include petrochemical companies, multinational banks, embassies, nongovernmental organizations, and national and international organizations. One of DSL’s biggest contracts is with Mark Heathcote, a former M16 (British equivalent of the CIA) officer who ran operations in Argentina during the Falklands War. Heathcote is now the chief of security for British Petroleum (BP). In 1996, DSL sent a group of British personnel to train Colombian Police on BP-owned rigs. Training included lethal-weapons handling, sniper fire, and close quarter combat.

Another firm, Executive Outcomes, also offers mercenary armies to multinationals. Executive Outcomes fielded a private mercenary army in Angola in 1993, and offers high-tech security forces to corporations all over the world. In Nigeria, the Anglo-Dutch multinational Shell Corporation has been accused of causing major pollution in the Niger Delta for the last thirty-eight years. Shell directly employs an elite detachment of Nigerian police to protect its own interests. Numerous demonstrators have been beaten and executed because of Shell operations in Nigeria.

Under Bush

Behind Blackwater Inc.

Censored 2008, Story #7

Source: Jeremy Scahill, “Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush’s Undeclared Surge,” Democracy Now! January 26, 2007, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232.

The company that most embodies the privatization of the military industrial complex—a primary part of the Project for a New American Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security firm Blackwater (now called Xe). Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own surveillance blimps and target systems.

Blackwater is headed by a right-wing Christian-supremecist and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep neo-conservative connections. Bush’s latest call for voluntary civilian military corps to accommodate the “surge” will add to over half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against Muslims and others.

One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war profiteer bonanza.

Administration Support for the Chemical Industry

Under Clinton

Clinton Administration Lobbied for Retention of Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Toys

Censored 1999, Story #9

Source: Charlie Gray, “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” Multinational Monitor, June 1998.

The Clinton administration and the Commerce Department have lobbied on behalf of US toy and chemical manufacturers against proposed new European Union (EU) restrictions, which would prevent children’s exposure to toxic chemicals released by polyvinyl chloride (PVC) toys such as teething rings. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), suggesting that the US government lobbied at the behest of toymaker Mattel and chemical manufacturer Exxon, may help explain the European Commission’s rejection of the proposed emergency ban. A cable from Vernon Weaver, the US Representative to the EU in Brussels, sent “heartfelt thanks” to Washington and US missions in Europe for “making contact” with member state representatives of the EU Product Safety Emergencies Committee. “We are told by Exxon Chemical Europe Inc. that the input was very effective and the weigh-in was invaluable.”

Health authorities in several European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, have recommended a ban on PVC toys, such as teething rings and bath toys. The Spanish government requested action by the EU in March 1998. PVC, or polyvinyl chloride (also known as vinyl), is a common plastic that frequently contains toxic additives. The Front reports that no major US retailers have taken precautionary action, chiefly because the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which is responsible for toy safety regulations, has yet to take action.

Under Bush

Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

Censored 2007, Story #15

Sources: Jeff Ruch, “Chemical Industry Is Now EPA’s Main Research Partner,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 5, 2005; Jeff Ruch, “EPA Becoming Arm of Corporate R&D,” Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, October 6, 2005.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) research program is increasingly relying on corporate joint ventures, according to agency documents obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The American Chemical Council (ACC) is now EPA’s leading research partner and the EPA is diverting funds from basic health and environmental research towards research that addresses regulatory concerns of corporate funders.

Since the beginning of Bush’s first term in office, there has been a significant increase in cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) with individual corporations or industry associations. During Bush’s first four years EPA entered into fifty-seven corporate CRADAs, compared to thirty-four such agreements during Clinton’s second term.

EPA scientists claim that corporations are influencing the agency’s research agenda through financial inducements. One EPA scientist wrote, “Many of us in the labs feel like we work for contracts.” In April 2005, EPA’s Science Advisory Board warned that the agency was no longer funding credible public health research. It noted, for example, that the EPA was falling behind on issues such as intercontinental pollution transport and nanotechnology.

Attacks on Journalists

Under Clinton

Did the US Deliberately Bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade?

Censored 2001, Story #4

Sources: Joel Bleifuss, “A Tragic Mistake?” In These Times, December 12, 1999; Seth Ackerman, “Mission Implausible,” June 26, 2000, http://inthesetimes.com; Yoichi Shimatsu, “Reports Showing US Deliberately Bombed Chinese Embassy Deliberately Ignored by US Media,” Pacific News, October 20, 1999; Action Report, “NY Times on Chinese Embassy Bombing: Nothing to Report,” Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, February 9, 2000, http://www.fair.org/activism/china-response2.html.

Elements within the CIA may have deliberately targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, without NATO approval, because it was serving as a rebroadcast station for the Yugoslavian army.

The London Observer and Copenhagen’s Politiken reported that, according to senior US and European military sources, NATO knew very well where the Chinese embassy was located and listed it as a “strictly prohibited target” at the beginning of the war. The Observer stated that the CIA and its British equivalent, M16, had been listening to communications from the Chinese embassy routinely since it moved to its new site in 1996. The Chinese embassy was taken off the prohibited target list after NATO detected it sending Yugoslavian army signals to forces in the field. “Nearly everyone involved in NATO air operations (radio) signals command knows that the bombing was deliberate,” said Jens Holsoe, lead investigative reporter on the news team reporting on the story for Politiken.

President Clinton called the bombing a “tragic mistake” and said it was the result of a mix-up. NATO claimed that they were using old maps and got the address wrong. However, Observer reporters quoted a Naples-based flight controller who said the NATO maps that were used during the campaign had correctly identified the Chinese embassy.

A French Ministry of Defense report stated that the flight that targeted the Chinese embassy was not under NATO command, but rather an independent US bombing raid. In July 1999, CIA director George Tenet testified before Congress that of the 900 sites struck by NATO during the bombing campaign, the only one targeted by the CIA was the Chinese embassy.

Under Bush

Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

Censored 2006, Story #7

Sources: Steve Weissman, “Dead Messengers: How the US Military Threatens Journalists,” Truthout, February 28, 2005; http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405A.shtml; Dahr Jamail, “Media Repression in ‘Liberated’ Land,” Inter Press Service, November 18, 2004, http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26333.

According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ)1, 2004 was the deadliest year for reporters since 1980, when records began to be kept. Over a twelve-month span, 129 media workers were killed and forty-nine of those deaths occurred in the Iraqi conflict. According to independent journalist Dahr Jamail, journalists are increasingly being detained and threatened by the US-installed interim government in Iraq. When the only safety for a reporter is being embedded with the US military, the reported stories tend to have a positive spin. Non-embedded reporters suffer the great risk of being identified as enemy targets by the military.

The most blatant attack on journalists occurred the morning of April 8, 2004, when the Third Infantry fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad killing cameramen Jose Couso and Taras Protsyuk and injuring three others. The hotel served as headquarters for some 100 reporters and other media workers. The Pentagon officials knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of journalists and had assured the Associated Press that the US would not target the building.

Environmental Issues

Under Clinton

Clinton Administration Retreats on Ozone Crisis

Censored 1995, Story #5

Source: David Moberg, “Full of holes: Clinton’s retreat on the ozone crisis,’ In These Times, January 24, 1994.

The ozone hole over Antarctica has continued to grow every year since its discovery in 1985 and damage to the ozone layer over heavily populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere also has been increasing rapidly. Scientists recorded all-time low levels of ozone over the United States in 1993.

The ultraviolet rays that penetrate a weakened ozone layer have been linked to increased cataracts, skin cancer, genetic damage and infectious diseases among humans—as well as reduced plant growth. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration has been moving backward on protecting the stratospheric ozone layer. This ominous precedent will encourage other industrial countries to stall on their own CFC phase-outs and puts the administration in a far weaker position to argue for an accelerated phase-out of CFCs in the developing countries where CFC production is soaring.

DuPont, the giant chemical firm that developed the first industrial CFC, had planned to halt CFC production at the end of 1994. Yet, in late 1993, EPA asked DuPont to keep making CFCs until 1996. The EPA defended its decision as a “consumer protection” measure that will make it easier for car owners to recharge their old air conditioners, which use CFCs as a cooling agent.

Under Bush

Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists

Censored 2005, Story #3

Sources: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “The Junk Science of George W. Bush,” The Nation, March 8, 2004; “Censoring Scientific Information,” Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, #91; Sunny Lewis, “Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks Integrity,” Environment News Service and Oneworld.net, February 20, 2004; Committee on Government Reform – Minority Staff, “Politics And Science In The Bush Administration,” Office of US Representative Henry A. Waxman, August 2003, updated November 13, 2003.

Critics charge that the Bush administration is purging, censoring, and manipulating scientific information in order to push forward its pro-business, anti-environmental agenda. In Washington, D.C. more than sixty of the nation’s top scientists, including twenty Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, and former federal agency directors, issued a statement on February 18, 2004 accusing the Bush administration of deliberately distorting scientific results for political ends and calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking.

Under the current administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has blacklisted qualified scientists who pose a threat to its pro-business ideology. When a team of biologists working for the EPA indicated that there had been a violation of the “Endangered Species Act” by the Army Corps of Engineers, the group was replaced with a “corporate-friendly” panel.

Media Deregulation

Under Clinton

Telecommunications Deregulation: Closing Up America’s “Marketplace of Ideas”

Censored 1996, Story #1

Source: Ralph Nader, James Love, and Andrew Saindon, “Federal Telecommunications Legislation,” Consumer Project on Technology, July 14, 1995.

The Telecommunications Deregulation Bill, eliminates virtually all regulation of the United States communication industry. As tends to be the case with most anti-consumer legislation, the bill stealthily moved under the guise of “encouraging competition”—but will, in reality, have the opposite effect of creating huge new concentrations of media power.

The most troubling aspect of the bill allows easing-and outright elimination-of current anti-trust regulations. In what the New York Times described as “a dazzling display of political influence,” the nation’s broadcast networks scored big in the House version of the bill by successfully getting the limits on ownership eased so that any individual company can control television stations serving up to 50 percent of the country. The Senate version of the bill provides for a more modest 35 percent coverage.

The legislation also dismantles current regulations, which limit the number of radio stations that can be owned by a single company. Currently no one single company can own more than forty stations. It also would lift the current FCC ban on joint ownership of a broadcast radio or TV license and a newspaper in the same market—allowing a single company to have 100 percent control over the three primary sources of news in a community.

Under Bush

FCC Moves to Privatize Airwaves

Censored 2003, Story #1

Sources: Jeremy Rifkin, “Global Media Giants Lobby to Privatize Entire Broadcast System,” London Guardian, April 28, 2001 and in Media File, Autumn 2001 volume 20, #4; Brendan l. Koerner, “Losing Signal,” Mother Jones, Sept/October 2001; Dorothy Kidd, “Legal Project to Challenge Media Monopoly,” Media File, May/June 2001.

For almost seventy years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has administered and regulated the broadcast spectrum as an electronic “commons” on behalf of the American people. The FCC issues licenses to broadcasters that allow them, for a fee, to use, but not own, one or more specific radio or TV frequencies. Thus, the public has retained the ability to regulate, as well as influence, access to broadcast communications.

Several years ago, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, in their report “The Telecom Revolution: An American Opportunity,” recommended a complete privatization of the radio frequencies, whereby broadcasters with existing licenses would eventually gain complete ownership of their respective frequencies. They could thereafter develop them in markets of their choosing, or sell and trade them to other companies. The few non-allocated bands of the radio frequency spectrum would be sold off, as electronic real estate, to the highest bidders. With nothing then to regulate, the FCC would eventually be abolished. The reasoning behind this radical plan was that government control of the airwaves has led to inefficiencies. In private hands, the frequencies would be exchanged in the marketplace, and the forces of free-market supply and demand would foster the most creative (and, of course, most profitable) use of these electronic “properties.”

This privatization proposal was considered too ambitious by the Clinton administration. However, in February 2001, within months after a more “pro-business” president took office, thirty-seven leading US economists requested, in a joint letter, that the FCC allow broadcasters to lease, in secondary markets, the frequencies they currently use under their FCC license. Their thinking was that with this groundwork in place, full national privatization would follow, and eventually nations would be encouraged to sell off their frequencies to global media enterprises.

Violations of International Treaties

Under Clinton

Planned Weapons in Space Violate International Treaty

Censored 2000, Story #8

Sources: Karl Grossman, “US Violates World Law to Militarize Space,” Earth Island Journal, Winter/Spring 1999; Bruce K. Gagnon, “Pyramids to The Heavens Space,” Toward Freedom, September/ October 1999.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 bans the deployment of space weapons of mass destruction. Recently the US Congress ignored further need of such a treaty, and approved the development of the US Military’s Space Command Weapons program. This sudden shift of viewpoint coincides with the complete absence of any foreign government competition, and with the increase in the ability of the US to effectively use satellite surveillance in military campaigns. The proposed system is designed to extend control of space far beyond the outer boundaries of the Earths atmosphere. To prevent deployment of any adversarial country’s satellites, the Pentagon is well along in its research and development of an anti-satellite weapons program. The reemergence of a “Star Wars” weapon system is echoed in the words of General Joseph Ashly, commander-in-chief of the US Space Command: “It’s politically sensitive but its going to happen . . . we are going to fight from space and we are going to fight into space.” Concerned with the possibility of nuclear contamination of the atmosphere from satellite breakup, the European Space Agency has urged the US to utilize solar power to fuel space-military command modules.

Under Bush

Treaty Busting By the United States

Censored 2004, Story #7

Sources: Marylia Kelly and Nicole Deller, “Rule of power or rule of law?” Connections, June 2002; John B. Anderson, “Unsigning the ICC,” The Nation, April 2002; Eamon Martin, “US Invasion Proposal Shocks the Netherlands,” Ashville Global Report, June 20-26, 2002; John Valleau, “Nuclear Nightmare,” Global Outlook, Summer 2002.

The United States is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly violated or gradually subverted. The Bush administration is now outright rejecting a number of those treaties, and in doing so places global security in jeopardy as other nations feel entitled to do the same. The rejected treaties include: the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a protocol to create a compliance regime for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The US is also not complying with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Chemical Weapons Commission (CWC), the BWC, and the UN framework Convention on Climate Change.

The ABM Treaty alone is a crucial factor in national security; letting Bush get away with facilitating its demise will destroy the balance of powers carefully crafted in our Constitution. The Bush administration has no legitimate excuse for nullifying the ABM Treaty since the events that have threatened the security of the United States have not involved ballistic missiles, and none of them are in any way related to the subject matter of the ABM Treaty. Bush’s withdrawal violates the US Constitution, international law, and Article XV of the ABM Treaty itself. The Bush administration says it needs to get rid of the ABM Treaty so it can test the SPY radar on the Aegis cruisers against Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and so that it can build a new test facility at Fort Greely, Alaska. In addition, some conservatives have willingly dismissed the ABM Treaty because it stands as the major obstacle towards development of a “Star Wars” missile defense system. Discarding treaty constraints and putting weapons in space is nothing short of pursuing absolute military superiority.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is crucial to global security because it bars the spread of nuclear weapons. The US is currently in noncompliance with the NPT requirements, as demonstrated in the January 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review. Moreover, critics charge that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) under construction at Livermore lab violates the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the US signed in 1996 but has not ratified. The CTBT bans nuclear explosions, and its language does not contain any “exceptions allowing laboratory thermonuclear explosions.”

Some Things Never Change: Power of Elites Inside the Trilateral Commission

Under President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission

Censored 1977, Story #1

Sources: Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975); The Review of the News, August 18, 1976; Gar Smith, The Berkeley Barb, July 30, 1976; Gary Allen, “Carter Brings Forth a Cabinet,” American Opinion, February 1977; W.E. Barnes, Political Analyst, San Francisco Examiner, December 12, 1976; In These Times, February 2, 1977; Noam Chomsky, “Trilateral’s RX for Crisis: Governability Yes, Democracy No,” Seven Days, February 14, 1977.

In the election year of 1976, Jimmy Carter ran a successful campaign for the presidency based on his image as an anti-establishment, peanut-farming, ex-governor of the state of Georgia. Yet, since the fall of 1973, Carter had been associated with David Rockefeller and other members of an international power elite through his association with the Trilateral Commission, one of Rockefeller’s many policy-making organizations. According to the Italian publication Europa, as cited in The Review of The News, Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a founding director of the Trilateral Commission (TLC), had agreed on Carter’s potential as our next president as far back as 1970. Supportive of Carter’s close relationship with this little-known power elite is the fact that many members of his administration have been drawn from the membership rolls of the TLC. These include Cyrus Vance, Secretary of State; Brzezinski, National Security Adviser; W. Michael Blumenthal, Secretary of Treasury; Harold Brown, Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State; Richard N. Cooper, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs; Andrew Young, US Ambassador to the United Nations; and C. Fred Bergsten, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs. Carter’s personal choice for vice president, Walter Mondale, is also a member of the TLC.

Under President Barack Obama

Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team

Censored 2010, Story # 22

Source:  Patrick Wood, “Obama: Trilateral Commission Endgame,” The August Review, January 30, 2009, http://www.augustreview.com/news_commentary/trilateral_commission/obama%3a_trilateral_commission_endgame_20090127110/.

Barack Obama has appointed no less than eleven members of the Trilateral Commission to top-level and key positions in his Administration. During Obama’s presidential campaign Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973, was Obama’s principal foreign policy advisor.

According to official Trilateral Commission membership lists, there are only eighty-seven members from the United States (the other 337 members are from other regions). Thus, in less than two weeks since his inauguration, Obama’s appointments encompass more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership.

Conclusion

“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all avenues of the truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.  It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”

—Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Media scholar and FreePress.net founder Robert McChesney wrote in his book Rich Media, Poor Democracy, “A media system set up to serve the needs of Wall Street and Madison Avenue cannot and does not serve the needs of the preponderance of the population . . .What types of important stories get almost no coverage in the commercial news media? The historical standard is that there is no coverage when the political and economic elites are in agreement.”[iv]

Reflecting upon the aforementioned examples of censored topics and stories, the bias of Project Censored seems to be quite simple: we promote protection of First Amendment rights in support of a truly free press, one that holds those in power, elected by the people or appointed, accountable. Investigating controversial and difficult subjects that impact society should not earn journalists and scholars the label “conspiracy theorist.” Labeling is a tactic of suppression and censorship.

Furthermore, supporting the US Constitution should not be distorted as an ideological bias of Left or Right. It is merely patriotic duty to enforce the rule of law, in so far as the law is based upon the true notions of liberty and justice for all.  Without media freedom, not only can democracy not thrive, it simply cannot exist.

Peter Phillips is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, director of Project Censored, and President of the Media Freedom Foundation.

Mickey Huff is associate professor of history at Diablo Valley College, associate director of Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation, and the Project Censored College and University Affiliates Coordinator for Media Freedom International (http://mediafreedominternational.org).

Elliot van Patten and Frances A. Capell provided research and editing assistance for this article.

Notes

pp.7-31,

http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM.  For more detailed, scientific discussion on these issues, including possibilities of controlled demolition, see Richard Gage and Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth online at http://AE911Truth.org.

Then-President George W. Bush said to the UN in November, 2001, “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.”  Apparently, even though the eventual official story of the 9/11 Commission itself was a conspiracy theory, the press seemed to follow Bush’s lead by not looking closely at the many problems associated with the events of 9/11 (which can be viewed at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/unanswered-questions-of-9-11-july-2005/).  Even most “left-leaning” journalists refuse to honestly and openly investigate the events of 9/11 as was noted by Peter Phillips in the study “Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model,” online at http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model/.  For more fact-based information regarding the many research problems associated with the official government theories on 9/11, see http://911truth.org.

We in a free society should be entitled to robust debate in the press.  As Thomas Jefferson stated in his 1801 inaugural address, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change it’s 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.”  This is a crucial component of media democracy.

[ii] Uhrich, Kevin, “Uncovering Project Censored,” Pasadena Weekly, May 18, 2006.

[iii] All the stories in this chapter were published by Project Censored as part of the Top 25 Censored Stories for each year between 1976 and 2009.  Included here are only brief summaries of each story example.  For more details on each, please see the Project Censored website.  The stories are accessible online at http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/publications/.  There, the stories are catalogued by year in their Top 25 rankings.  A subject archive is available online as well at http://ringnebula.com/.   All other sources not in endnotes here are in the actual text of this article with more available online in the Project archives.

[iv] Thomas Jefferson quote from The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, p. 637.  Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy:  Communication Politics in Dubious Times, (New York:  The New Press, 1999), p. xiii, xviii.

The book is researched by hundreds of students and professors from around the country. It contains research on important national news stories that are under reported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media, as well as numerous chapters of scholarly media criticism and analysis that focus on exposing corporate media propaganda.

Huff co-edited the book with Dr. Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University. Phillips and Huff were director and associate director, respectively, of Project Censored, and are on the board of Media Freedom Foundation, directing a new college-based news research agency, Media Freedom International (MFI). Huff serves as College and University Affiliates Coordinator for MFI in conjunction with Project Censored.

In the preface, Phillips and Huff explain the corporate media’s emphasis on commercialism, the “inane,” the “irrelevant,” and their willful suppression of real news and information on vital issues.

The book is both a textbook and for use by the general public. “I have used the books in my classes on critical thinking for years,” Huff said. “And last year, we were recognized with the 2008 PEN Oakland National Literary Censorship Award.”

Huff has been interviewed by many radio stations and news sources throughout the country, and has co-organized and presented at numerous national academic conferences on media and recent historical events. He has also given many public addresses on media censorship and American history at colleges, community halls, and bookstores across the US. In spring 2009 he was the Visiting Scholar for the Academic Library at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

You can find this content at http://www.dvc.edu/news/newsmakersMickeyHuff20091221.htm

So-called “news” topics range from Tyra Banks’ figure fluctuations to the Balloon Boy hoax; from the White House Beer Summit to the death of Michael Jackson; while We the People become bloated from ubiquitous, no news nonsense. Absent from this smorgasbord of purported news programming¬ is any actual information, or news, generating healthy democratic dialogue and responsive representative government policy on the most important issues facing the general public– our faltering economy, lack of healthcare, and issues of war and peace.

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 our 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 our 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 us in cynicism (reports of personal scandals, rampant corruption, and Congressional stagnation), rationalizing us into deep denial (falsely claiming the recession is over while key public indicators refute this), and leaving us 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.

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. 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.

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.

Independent media, both on the local and national level, is at risk. This is just one of the reasons that Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation just gave Media Freedom Awards to the KPFA Flashpoints radio team at our recent book release celebration in Santa Rosa. Help us support the critical independent voices that cover the “news that doesn’t make the news.”

Project Censored is not only working on new underreported stories but spreading the word via our new Daily Censored website, Facebook page and Media Freedom Foundation PNN site which aggregates independent news from many of the most reliable sources around the world. We are also organizing the first Modern Media Dialogue Series to be held from February to May at Sonoma State University. This is the only university series in the United States devoted to dialogue and deliberation about the modern media.

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.

As I begin my first year as Project Censored director I would like to personally ask each of you to consider a gift of support so that we may continue our work. Our project requires us to raise $150,000 every year and given the cutbacks in the California State system and on the Sonoma State University campus, your support is more vital to us now more than ever. Please make your tax deductible donation at http://www.projectcensored.org/about/support/

For this holiday period we have set a fund raising target of $10,000 for the next five weeks. You can watch our progress towards that goal on-line at www.projectcensored.org.

We are also offering our new Censored 2010 book edited by Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff for a special 20% discounted rate when you buy two or more for seasonal gifts. You can buy the discounted books at http://www.projectcensored.org/project-censored-2010-book-holiday-promotion

Sincerely,

Benjamin Frymer, Director Project Censored

In cooperation with Peter Phillips, President: Media Freedom Foundation

Media Freedom Foundation is the Fiscal Non-profit Fund Raising Corporation that Supports Project Censored and related Media Freedom Efforts.

Check out some of our most recent work at these links:

http://www.peterbcollins.com/podcast/PBC_20091203.mp3

http://www.dailycensored.com

http://www.projectcensored.org

http://www.mediafreedominternatinal.org

http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources

Book Release Celebration & Awards Party

December 5, 2009

Open invitation to all Project Censored Students, Interns, Alumni, Authors, and Supporters. Join

Project Censored in celebrating the release of Censored 2010, Peter Phillips’s final yearbook, co-

edited by Mickey Huff.  Meet Ben Frymer, the new director of Project Censored and Carl Jensen,

our founder. Good food, beer, wine and Great conversation.

Reception 6:00 PM – Music and Speakers 7:30-9:30

Michael Parenti, Bruce Brugmann (SF Bay Guardian)

Dennis Bernstein, Miguel Molina, Nora Barrows-Friedman (Flashpoints Radio)

Odd Fellows Hall, 545 Pacific Avenue, Santa Rosa, California

Admission includes food and one drink ticket

$35.00 per person includes autographed Censored 2010 yearbook

$20.00 general, $10.00 students and low-income

A benefit for Project Censored sponsored by Media Freedom Foundation: 707-664-2588

You can also pre-order tickets here:

$35.00 Autographed Book

$20 General Admission

Or $10 for Student and Low Income

If you can not attend the event and would like to help Project Censored please donate here!:

Check out the Project Censored sites:

www.projectcensored.org

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Project-Censored/151690209993

www.dailycensored.com

www.mediafreedominternational.org

www.mediafreedom.pnn.com/5174-independent-news-sources