by Mickey Huff
Notes
1. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed., Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, Semiotext(e), 2001).
2. Ibid., 11–14.
3. Ibid., 22; as Foucault states in a subsequent lecture, members of Greco-Roman culture understood parrhesia as “not primarily a concept or theme, but a practice,” 106, emphasis original.
4. Ibid., 19, emphases added. Foucault uses male pronouns here and throughout the lectures, but obviously, in contemporary context, fearless speech is not exclusively a male domain.
5. Ibid., 16.
6. Foucault: “The parrhesia comes from ‘below,’ as it were, and is directed toward ‘above,” ibid., 18; again, “[T]he king or tyrant generally cannot use parrhesia for he risks nothing,” 16.
7. Thanks to Steve Sherwood for teaching me [ALR] this simple but crucial point, back when we were graduate students in sociology at University of California-Los Angeles.
8. See, for example, Adrian Chen, “Newly Declassified Memo Shows CIA Shaped Zero Dark Thirty’s Narrative,” Gawker, May 6, 2013, http://gawker.com/declassified-memo-shows-how-cia-shaped-zero-dark-thirty-493174407. For more on this topic, see Rob Williams, “Screening the Homeland,” in this volume.
9. “Chris Hedges: Monitoring of AP Phones a ‘Terrifying’ Step in State Assault on Press Freedom,” Democracy Now!, May 15, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/15/chris_hedges_ monitoring_of_ap_phones.
10. Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Sure You Saw a Flying Saucer,” New York Times Magazine, May 26, 2013, 16.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Noam Chomsky, “Anniversaries from ‘Unhistory,’” In These Times, February 6, 2012, http://inthesetimes.com/article/12679/anniversaries_from_unhistory. See also Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2012), 25, 217, 333–4.
SECTION I
CENSORED NEWS AND
MEDIA ANALYSIS
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. There is the whole case against censorships in a nutshell.
—George Bernard Shaw1
The first chapter of Censored 2014 summarizes and analyzes the twenty-five most important censored news stories for 2012–13. The presentation of this year’s Top 25 stories extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across the country and around the world—initiated several years ago as outgoing director Peter Phillips passed the reins to current director Mickey Huff—has made the Project even more diverse and robust.
During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 233 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 219 college students and 56 professors from 18 college and university campuses that participate in our affiliate program, with 13 additional community evaluators. A perusal of the credits for this year’s Top 25 gives evidence of how the affiliates program extends Project Censored’s ability to “ensure progress by removing censorships.” We look forward to doubling the size of the affiliates program in the next year, and we invite interested faculty and students to visit our website in order to learn how to get involved.
Of course, no matter how robust our network, Project Censored could not exist without the dedicated efforts of the independent journalists and news organizations that publish and broadcast the news stories that we bring to broader public attention. Although many of the Top 25 stories can be interpreted as emphasizing “what’s wrong” in the world today, we hope that our annual list is also understood as a celebration and appreciation of the good work that these independent reporters and news organizations do.
Those familiar with Project Censored’s work know that we define censorship as “anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that purports to have a free press.”2 This broader conception of censorship includes
the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality by mass media. . . . Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (from the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions). Censorship includes stories that were never published, but also those that get such restricted distribution that few in the public are likely to know about them.3
By this standard, each of the news stories in our listing of the Top 25 for 2012–13 is a censored story, whether the story has received no corporate coverage at all, or—in cases where the story has received corporate coverage—that coverage is partial in one or both senses of the term, i.e., incomplete and/or biased.
Two stories on US drone policy and targeted killings do not appear in this year’s Top 25 despite having garnered tremendous support from affiliate campuses’ faculty and students and our distinguished panel of judges during this year’s story selection process. Although Democracy Now! and the Huffington Post’s Lindsay Wilkes-Edrington deserve credit for their early coverage of Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s new film, Dirty Wars, before Censored 2014 went to press, the cor-porate media—perhaps spurred by independent news coverage and growing public concern—has come round to provide some coverage of this important documentary.4 Similarly, Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research article on Yemeni and Pakistani children killed by US drone strikes brought vital attention to this topic before corporate media did so.5
Because these stories eventually gained traction in the corporate media—the New York Times and Washington Post deserve credit for their coverage6—we chose not to include them in this year’s Top 25, even though it is obvious that US drone policy is one of the most important ongoing news stories about which all Americans ought to be informed.7 For more on this topic, see Chapter 2, “Deja Vu: What Happened to Previous Top Censored Stories?”
Section I begins with a brief “Note on Research and Evaluation,” which explains Project Censored’s methodology and story selection process, followed by summaries of the Top 25 stories themselves. Then we present this year’s Censored News Clusters, highlighting major themes in this year’s news cycle that the corporate media frequently overlook in the course of their 24/7 competition to be first, often at the expense of being most thorough or informative. Brian Covert provides perspective on “Whistleblowers and Gag Laws”; James F. Tracy on “Plutocracy, Poverty, and Prosperity”; Susan Rahman and Donna Nassor cover “Human Rights and Civil Liberties”; Targol Mes-bah and Zara Zimbardo analyze the “Technologies and Ecologies of War”; Susan Rahman and Liliana Valdez-Madera address “Health and the Environment”; and Andy Lee Roth examines “Iceland, the Power of Peaceful Revolution, and the Commons.”
Beyond Chapter 1, the media analysis in this section includes the aforementioned “Deja Vu,” Chapter 2; an examination of corporate Junk Food News and News Abuse, Chapter 3; and “Media Democracy in Action,” Chapter 4, our survey of free speech and free press organizations that make a difference.
We hope you will agree that this year’s Top 25 stories demonstrate how today’s independent journalists, as well as Project Censored, strive tirelessly to remove censorship, challenge current conceptions and existing institutions, and, thereby, ensure progress.
Notes
1 “The Author’s Apology” (1902) to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894) in Plays by George Bernard Shaw (New York: Penguin, 1960), 41. We are grateful to John K. Roth for bringing this quotation to our attention.
2 See Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution, Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories, 2012), 30. Also see Antoon De Baets, “Censorship Backfires: A Taxonomy of Conce
pts Related to Censorship,” in Censored 2013, 223–234.
3 Ibid, 31.
4 “Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare,” Democracy Now!, January 22, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/i/22/dirty_wars_jeremy_scahill_and_rick; Lindsay Wilkes-Edrington, “‘Dirty Wars,’ Sundance Documentary, Investigates Joint Special Operations Command,” Huffington Post, January 28, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/dirty-wars-sundance-docum_n_2538914.html. On subsequent corporate coverage, see, for example, Jeremy Egner, “Snapshot: Jeremy Scahill: His Target is Assassinations,” New York Times Magazine, June 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/movies/jeremy-scahill-on-his-documentary-dirty-wars.html.
5 Michel Chossudovsky, “The Children Killed by America’s Drones,” Global Research, January 26, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-children-killed-by-americas-drones-crimes-against-humanity-committed-by-barack-h-obama/5320570.
6 At the Washington Post, Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, among others, deserve credit for their reporting on US drone strikes and targeted killings. At the Times, Scott Shane, Jo Becker, and others also merit recognition. See, e.g., Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane, “How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs,” New York Times, March 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/middleeast/anwar-al-awlaki-a-us-citizen-in-americas-cross-hairs.html.
7 Peter Scheer, “Connecting the Dots Between Drone Killings and Newly Exposed Government Surveillance,” Huffington Post, June 8, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-scheer/drones-surveillance_b_3408487.html. For example, describing Americans’ “collective discomfort” with the US government’s paradigms of targeted killing and domestic surveillance, Peter Scheer wrote, “The logic of warfare and intelligence has flipped. . . . Warfare has shifted from the scaling of military operations to the selective targeting of individual enemies. Intelligence gathering has shifted from the selective targeting of known threats to wholesale data mining for the purpose of finding hidden threats.”
A Note on Research and
Evaluation of Censored
News Stories
How do we at Project Censored identify and evaluate independent news stories, and how do we know that the Top 25 stories that we bring forward each year are not only relevant and significant, but also trustworthy? The answer is that each candidate news story undergoes rigorous review, which takes place in multiple stages during each annual cycle. Although adapted to take advantage of both the Project’s expanding affiliates program and current technologies, the vetting process is quite similar to the one Project Censored founder Carl Jensen established thirty-seven years ago.
Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or nominated by members of the general public, who bring them to the Project’s attention through our website.1 Together, faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story does not go forward.
Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review of any competing corporate coverage. Stories that pass this round of review get posted on our website as Validated Independent News stories (VINs).2
In early spring, we present all VINs in the current cycle to the faculty and students at all of our affiliate campuses, and to our national and international panel of judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from nearly 300 down to 25.
Once the Top 25 have been determined, students in Peter Phillip’s Media Censorship course at Sonoma State University, and Project Censored student interns working with Mickey Huff at Diablo Valley College, begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNex-is and ProQuest databases.
The Top 25 finalists are then sent to our panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. At the same time, these experts—including communications and media studies professors, professional journalists, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, among others—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.3
Thus, by the time a story appears in the pages of Censored, it has undergone at least five distinct rounds of review and evaluation.
Although the stories that Project Censored brings forward may be socially and politically controversial—and sometimes even psychologically challenging—we are confident that each is the result of serious journalistic effort and, so, deserves greater public attention.
Notes
1. For information on how to nominate a story, see “How To Support Project Censored,” at the back of this volume.
2. Validated Independent News stories are archived on the Media Freedom International website: http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/category/validated-independent-news.
3. For a complete list of the national and international judges and their brief biographies, see the acknowledgments section of this book.
CHAPTER 1
The Top Censored Stories and
Media Analysis of 2012–13
Compiled by Andy Lee Roth
1. Bradley Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media
In February 2013, United States military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning confessed in court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, saying he wanted the information to become public “to make the world a better place” and that he hoped to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military in (US) foreign policy.” The 700,000 released documents revealed a multitude of previously secret crimes and acts of deceit and corruption by US military and government officials.
According to Manning’s testimony in February 2013, he tried to release the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs through conventional sources. In winter 2010, he contacted the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Politico in hopes that they would publish the materials. Only after being rebuffed by these three outlets did Manning begin uploading documents to WikiLeaks. Al Jazeera reported that Manning’s testimony “raises the question of whether the mainstream press was prepared to host the debate on US interventions and foreign policy that Manning had in mind.”
Indeed, US corporate media have largely shunned Manning’s case, not to mention the importance of the information he released. When corporate media have focused on Manning, this coverage has often emphasized his sexual orientation and past life, rather than his First Amendment rights or the abusive nature of his imprisonment, which includes almost three years without trial and nearly one year in “administrative segregation,” the military equivalent of solitary.
In his February 2013 court appearance, Manning pled guilty to twelve of the twenty-two charges against him, including the capital offense of “aiding and abetting the enemy.” He faces the possibility of a life sentence without parole. His severe treatment is a warning to other possible whistleblowers.
For sources and further analysis, see page 65 and the “Whistleblowers and Gag Laws” News Cluster.
2. Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Trillions in Tax Havens
The global 1 percent hold twenty-one to thirty-two trillion dollars in offshore havens in order to evade taxes, according to James S. Henry, the former chief economist at the global management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. Based on data from the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and 139 countries, Henry found that the top i percent hid more than the total annual economic output of the US and Japan combined. For perspective, this hidden wealth is at least seven times the amount—$3 trillion—that many estimates suggest would be necessary to end global poverty.
If this hidden wealth earned a modest rate of 3 percent interest and that interest income were taxed at just 30 percent, these investments would have generated income tax revenues between $190 and $280 billion, according to the analys
is.
Domestically, the Federal Reserve reported that the top seven US banks hold more than $10 trillion in assets, recorded in over 14,000 created “subsidiaries” to avoid taxes.
Henry identified this hidden wealth as “a huge black hole in the world economy that has never before been measured,” and noted that the finding is particularly significant at a time when “governments around the world are starved for resources, and we are more conscious than ever of the costs of economic inequality.”
For sources and further analysis, see page 85 and the “Plutocracy, Poverty, and Prosperity” News Cluster.
3. Trans-Pacific Partnership Threatens a Regime of Corporate Global Governance
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), branded as a trade agreement and negotiated in unprecedented secrecy, is actually an enforceable transfer of sovereignty from nations and their people to foreign corporations.
As of December 2012, eleven countries were involved—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States—with the possibility of more joining in the future due to inclusion of an unusual “docking agreement.”
While the public, US Congress, and the press are locked out, 600 corporate advisors are meeting with officials of signatory governments behind closed doors to complete text for the world’s biggest multinational trade agreement, which aims to penalize countries that protect their workers, consumers, or environment.
