Censored 2014 (5 page)

In
Chapter 6
, James F. Tracy deepens the analysis of conspiracy theories, cynicism, and public use of reason by looking at the phenomenon of conspiracy panics. He draws on the work of Erich Fromm and C. Wright Mills, among others, to address “the prevailing myth of terrorism as an existential threat to the Western world,” and at the same time goes beyond even historian Kathryn Olmsted's observation, calling for the public use of reason in identifying and understanding actual national and international conspiracies as state/corporate crimes against democracy, thus providing a platform from which to safely and openly discuss significant yet controversial matters.

In
Chapter 7
, John Pilger provides a candid insider's view of censorship within liberal and progressive circles among those who normally decry such censorious actions. Pilger discusses how his documentary
The War You Don't See,
documenting the many failures of the press in wartime, became the film some liberal foundations didn't want people to see in the US. In
Chapter 8
, Rob Williams concludes the section with a critical analysis of two recent Hollywood films,
Zero Dark Thirty
and
Argo,
showing how “political interests are quick to exploit Hollywood's uniquely powerful reach to propagandize, rather than to educate.”

The third and final section of
Censored 2014
offers four case studies of “unhistory” in the making, while this section's fifth and ultimate chapter provides a positive alternative. As in
Censored 2013,
we adapt Noam Chomsky's term “unhistory” to convey the importance of bringing to public attention and holding in collective memory a range of issues, events, and sociohistorical patterns that the corporate media and power elite might otherwise prefer—or actively encourage—the public to ignore or forget.
¹³

Thus, whereas establishment academics often analyze “power elites”
in the abstract, in
Chapter 9
, Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne examine the transnational “superclass” in specific detail, summarizing their findings from an exhaustive analysis of the 161 specific individuals who represent “the financial core of the world's transnational capitalist class.”

Though followers of Project Censored may feel like they have learned all they need to know about the problematic role of Apple and its subcontractors in China, Nicki Lisa Cole and Tara Krishna deepen our understanding in
Chapter 10
, “Apple Exposed.” By examining Chinese news coverage—some of which they translate into English for a first time here—Cole and Krishna find that US reporting on Apple in China “has been clouded by a Western lens, and that it has overwhelmingly ignored the voices of workers themselves, rural Chinese citizens affected by environmental pollution, and those displaced by ongoing construction of new factories.”

In
Chapter 11
, Brian Martin Murphy, who served for six years as editor in chief of Inter Press Service's African bureau, surveys the recent history of conflict in Saharan Africa to put the current crisis in Mali into perspective. His account illuminates standing US interests in the region and disentangles the indigenous Tuareg role, two angles of the Mali story that are crucial to a deep understanding of ongoing events in the region, but which US corporate media coverage either obscures or omits.

In “The Sixth Mass Extinction,” our penultimate chapter (in perhaps more ways than one), Julie Andrzejewski and John C. Alessio amplify the theme of climate change addressed in Sarah van Gelder's foreword. Andrzejewski and Alessio identify obstacles to assessing and taking seriously what we know scientifically about the impact of climate change on animal extinction. In keeping with our focus on critique and affirmation, they provide six important steps that we can take to “reverse the forces driving the extinction process.”

Finally, shifting from the threats and challenges of “unhistory” to building a better future, Michael Nagler of the Metta Center for Nonviolence explains why we need a “new story” and explains how to tell it, using the Center's clear and realistic “Roadmap” as a guide. Nagler's chapter brings
Censored 2014
full circle, back to the keynote of Sarah van Gelder's foreword heralding solutions journalism, providing powerful ideas and practical actions for a better future.

NOW'S THE TIME

The cover of
Censored 2014
features detail from artist Marcia Annen-berg's striking piece, “No News Is Good News.” We do not believe there is a more salient image to convey the theme of this year's book, “Fearless Speech in Fateful Times.” In “No News Is Good News,” the cord, which pulls back the veil to reveal the day's news, is adorned by a bow that features the US flag's stars and stripes. Truth-telling—including whistleblowing and other forms of fearless speech—is patriotic, as those who engage in fearless speech remind us when they invoke defense of the Constitution, protection of the commonwealth, and informing the public as the driving motivations for their selfless acts of civil courage.

As Project Censored's associate director and director, and as coeditors of
Censored 2014,
the message of Annenberg's artwork, with the creativity and integration of history behind it, reminds us of two crucial insights integral for building a better future. First, in the hands of
independent
journalists—who number too many for even such an extensive volume as this to identify and appreciate completely—the US has a robust free press worthy of the loftiest ideals expressed in the US Constitution and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, and related, given the urgency of those journalists' dispatches and our authors' keen analyses, we hope that
Censored 2014
will inspire you, too, with our abiding feeling that, more than ever,
now
is the time to do something good in service of a better future, for ourselves, our communities, and the world.

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.

—George Bernard Shaw
¹

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 ad
ditional 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

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 coverage
⁶
—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 Concepts 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.”