In
August, two news stories broke the same day - one meaty, one junky.
In Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush
administration's warrant-less National Security Agency surveillance
program was unconstitutional and must end. Meanwhile, somewhere in
Thailand, a man named John Mark Karr claimed he was with six-year-old
beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey when she died in 1996.
Predictably, the mainstream media devoted acres of newsprint and hours of airtime to the self-proclaimed beauty-queen killer, including stories on what he ate on the plane ride home, his desire for a sex change, his child-porn fixation, and - when DNA tests proved Karr wasn't the killer - why he confessed to a crime he didn't commit.
During that same time period, few words were written or said in the same outlets about Judge Diggs Taylor's ruling and the questions it raised about due process in the context of the "war on terror."
The mainstream media's fascination with unimportant stories isn't anything new. Professor Carl Jensen, a disenchanted journalist who became a sociologist, says the media's preoccupation with "junk-food news" inspired him three decades ago to create Project Censored, a media-research project at Sonoma State University. Project Censored annually publicizes big stories that the media had censored, ignored, or underreported the previous year.
Jensen and his project have drawn plenty of criticism from journalists in the past 30 years. "I was taking a lot of flak from editors around Project Censored's annual list of the top stories the mainstream media missed," recalls the now-retired Jensen. "They said the reason they hadn't covered the stories was that they only had a limited amount of time and space, and that I was an academic, sitting there criticizing."
But Jensen had an answer: There was plenty of time and space, but it was being filled with fluff.
Since 1993, Project Censored has been running not only the stories that didn't get adequate coverage but also the "junk-food news" - the trivial, overblown stories that filled precious pages and airtime that could have been used for real news.
While Jensen would love to be able to claim that Project Censored solved the media's fixation on unimportant news, that didn't happen. "If anything, it's gotten worse," Jensen says, pointing to increased media monopolization.
Project Censored's current director, Peter Phillips, says entertainment news may be addictive, but that's no excuse for the media to push it.
"Massacres, celebrity gossip - we're automatically attracted," Phillips says. "It's like selling drugs. But we don't tolerate the drug dealer on the corner. For the democratic process to happen, we have to have information presented and made available. To just give people entertainment news is an abdication of the First Amendment."
Art Brodsky, a telecommunications expert at Public Knowledge (an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.), says that the lack of coverage given to hard-hitting news is partly a product of journalistic laziness. Brodsky, who has written extensively on network neutrality (the number-one issue on this year's list), says the topic hasn't received enough coverage partly because the debate has largely remained couched in telecommunications jargon.
"Network neutrality is a crappy term, other than its alliterative value," Brodsky says. "It's one of those Washington issues that gets intense coverage in the field where it happens but can be successfully muddied, and it's technical. So a lot of editors and reporters throw their hands up in the air, a lot like senators."
Following are Project Censored's top 10 stories for the past year.
1. The Future of Internet Freedom
In its relatively brief life, the Internet has been touted as the greatest vehicle for democracy ever invented by humankind. It's given disillusioned Americans hope that there is a way to get out the truth, even if they don't own airwaves, newspapers, or satellite stations. It's forced the mainstream media to talk about issues it previously ignored, such as the Downing Street memo and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.
So when the Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren't required to share their wires with other Internet service providers, it shouldn't have been a surprise that the major media did little in terms of exploring whether this ruling would destroy Internet freedom. As Elliot Cohen reported in BuzzFlash, the issue was misleadingly framed as an argument over regulation, when it's really a case of the Federal Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone companies the freedom to control supply and content - a decision that could have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay to get information and services that currently are free.
The good news? The U.S. Senate will likely be addressing the issue of network neutrality in its rewrite of the Telecommunications Act.
Source: "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story," Elliot D. Cohen, BuzzFlash.com, July 18, 2005.
2. Halliburton Accused of Selling Nuclear Technology to Iran
Halliburton sold key nuclear-reactor components to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005, using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions, journalist Jason Leopold reported on GlobalResearch.ca, the Web site of a Canadian research group. He cited sources intimate with the business dealings of Halliburton and Kish.
The story is particularly juicy because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation of U.S. law.
Leopold contended that the Halliburton-Kish deals have helped Iran become capable of enriching weapons-grade uranium.
Source: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran's Nuclear Team," Jason Leopold, GlobalResearch.ca, August 5, 2005.
3. Oceans in Danger
Rising sea levels. A melting Arctic. Governments denying global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper, zinc, and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. This is the sobering picture author Julia Whitty painted in a beautifully crafted piece that makes the point that "there is only one ocean on Earth ... a Mobius-like ribbon winding through all the ocean basins, rising and falling, and stirring the waters of the world."
If this world ocean, which encompasses 70.78 percent of our planet, is in peril, then we're all screwed. As Whitty reported in Mother Jones magazine, researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced greenhouse gases."
Source: "The Fate of the Ocean," Julia Whitty, Mother Jones, March-April 2006.
4. Eliminating Embarrassing Information on Hunger and Homelessness
As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality - a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.
President Bush's proposed budget for fiscal year 2007 includes an effort to eliminate the Census Bureau's Survey of Income & Program Participation. Founded in 1984, the survey tracks American families' use of Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, child care, and temporary assistance for needy families.
With legislators and researchers trying to prevent the cut, author Abid Aslam argued that this isn't just an isolated budget matter: It's the Bush administration's third attempt in as many years to remove funding for politically embarrassing research. In 2003, it tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs, and in 2004 and 2005 attempted to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.
Sources: "New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness," Brendan Coyne, New Standard, December 2005; "U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire," Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net, March 2006.
5. The High-Tech Stakes of Genocide in Congo
If you believe the corporate media, the ongoing genocide in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that, according to stories published in Z magazine and the Earth First! Journal and heard on The Taylor Report, is a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect this terrible suffering with the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones, laptop computers, and other high-tech equipment.
What's really at stake in this bloodbath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin, and copper, as well as cobalt - which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace, and defense industries - and coltan and niobium, which is important for high-tech industries. These disturbing reports concluded that a meaningful analysis of Congolese geopolitics requires a knowledge and understanding of the organized crime perpetuated by multinationals.
Sources: "The World's Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to Keith Harmon Snow," The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005; "High-Tech Genocide," Sprocket, Earth First! Journal, August 2005; "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo," Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Z magazine, March 1, 2006.
6. Muzzling Federal Whistle-Blowers
Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud, and other financial abuse in recent years, the agency charged with defending government whistle-blowers has reportedly been throwing out hundreds of cases - and advancing almost none. Statistics released at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led to claims that special counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistle-blower rights.
What makes this development particularly troubling is that, thanks to a decline in congressional oversight and investigative journalism, the role of the Office of Special Counsel in advancing governmental transparency is more vital than ever. As a result, employees within the Office of Special Counsel have filed a whistle-blower complaint against Bloch himself.
Ironically, Bloch has now decided not to disclose the number of whistle-blower complaints in which an employee obtained a favorable outcome, such as reinstatement or reversal of a disciplinary action, making it hard to tell who, if anyone, is being helped by the agency.
Sources: "Whistle-Blowers Get Help from Bush Administration," Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Web site, December 5, 2005; "Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins," PEER Web site, October 18, 2005; "Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistle-Blower Protections," PEER Web site, September 22, 2005.
7. Detainee Deaths
Hooded. Gagged. Strangled. Asphyxiated. Beaten with blunt objects. Subjected to sleep deprivation and hot-and-cold environmental conditions. These are just some of the techniques that the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan inflicted on detainees, according to an American Civil Liberties Union analysis of autopsy and death reports that were made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU's FOIA request, 21 were homicides and eight appear to have been the result of these abusive techniques.
Sources: "U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq," American Civil Liberties Union Web site, October 24, 2005; "Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantánamo to Iraq," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, March 5, 2006.
8. No Freedom of Information with the Defense Department
In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, a law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to government documents. The stated reason for this move? FOIA is a hindrance to protecting national security.
The ruling could hamper the efforts of groups such as the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents on the U.S. military's treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib scandal.
With ACLU lawyers predicting that this ruling will likely result in more abuse and with Americans becoming increasingly concerned about the federal government's intelligence-gathering methods, Congress has imposed a two-year sunset on this FOIA exemption, ending December 2007.
Sources: "Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information," Michelle Chen, New Standard, May 6, 2005; "FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency," Newspaper Association of America Web site, posted December 2005.
9. World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall Israel is building deep into Palestinian territory should be torn down. Instead, construction of this cement barrier, which annexes Israeli settlements and breaks the continuity of Palestinian territory, has accelerated. In the interim, the World Bank has come up with a framework for a Middle Eastern Free Trade Area, which would be financed by the World Bank and built on Palestinian land around the wall to encourage export-oriented economic development. But with Israel ineligible for World Bank loans, the plan seems to translate into Palestinians paying for the modernization of checkpoints around a wall that they've always opposed, a wall that will help lock in and exploit their labor.
Sources: "Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank," Jamal Juma', Left Turn, issue 18; "U.S. Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion," Linda Heard, Aljazeera, March 9, 2005.
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
At the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command Air Force statistics showed an increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths.
These trends are problematic for the United States. Bombings and the killing of innocent civilians can act as an effective recruiting tool among Iraqi militants. Yet as Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker at the end of 2005, a key component in the federal government's troop-reduction plan was the replacement of departing U.S. troops with air power.
Meanwhile, Hersh's sources within the military have expressed fears that if Iraqis are allowed to call in the targets of these aerial strikes, they could abuse that power to settle old scores.
Sources: "Up in the Air," Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, December 2005; "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, December 2005.
Sarah Phelan writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
For more information on Project Censored, visit (http://www.projectcensored.org).
