OUT OF
SIGHT
Our expanding police state
tops the Project Censored list
B Y YA E L C H A N O F F
P H O T O B Y R O B A N D T R A C Y S Y D O R • D I G I TA L L AT T E .CO M
P
roject Censored has been documenting
inadequate media coverage of crucial
stories since it began in 1967 at Sonoma
State University. Each year, the group
considers hundreds of news stories
submitted by readers, evaluating their
merits. Students search LexisNexis
and other databases to see if the stories
were underreported, and if so, the
stories are fact-checked by professors
and experts in relevant fi elds.
A panel of academics and journalists chooses the Top 25
stories and rates their signifi cance. The project maintains
a vast online database of underreported news stories that
it has “validated” and publishes them in an annual book.
Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution
was released Oct. 30.
For the second year in row, Project Censored has grouped
the Top 25 list into topical “clusters.” This year, categories
include “Human cost of war and violence” and “Environment
and health.” Project Censored Director Mickey Huff said
the idea was to show how various undercovered stories fi t
together into an alternative narrative, not to say that one
story was more censored than another.
“The problem when we had just the list was that it did
imply a ranking,” Huff says. “It takes away from how there
tends to be a pattern to the types of stories they don’t cover
or underreport.”
In May, while Project Censored was working on the list,
another 2012 list was issued: the Fortune 500 list of the
biggest corporations, whose infl uence peppers the Project
Censored list in a variety of ways.
Consider this year’s top Fortune 500 company:
ExxonMobil. The oil company pollutes everywhere it goes,
yet most stories about its environmental devastation go
underreported. Weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin
(58 on the Fortune list), General Dynamics (92), and
Raytheon (117) are tied into stories about U.S. prisoners in
slavery conditions manufacturing parts for their weapons
and the underreported war crimes in Afghanistan and Libya.
These powerful corporations work together more than
most people think. In the chapter exploring the “Global 1
percent,” writers Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro explain
how a small number of well-connected people control the
majority of the world’s wealth. In it, they use Censored story
number 6, “Small network of corporations run the global
economy,” to describe how a network of transnational
corporations are deeply interconnected, with 147 of them
controlling 40 percent of the global economy’s total wealth.
For example, Philips and Soeiro write that in one
such company, BlackRock Inc., “The 18 members of the
board of directors are connected to a signifi cant part of the
world’s core fi nancial assets. Their decisions can change
empires, destroy currencies and impoverish millions.”
Another cluster of stories, “Women and Gender, Race
and Ethnicity,” notes a pattern of underreporting stories that
affect a range of marginalized groups. This broad category
includes only three articles, and none are listed in the top
10. The stories reveal mistreatment of Palestinian women
in Israeli prisons, including being denied medical care and
shackled during childbirth, and the rape and sexual assault
of women soldiers in the U.S. military. The third story in
the category concerns an Alabama anti-immigration bill,
HB56, which caused immigrants to fl ee Alabama in such
numbers that farmers felt a dire need to “help farms fi ll the
gap and fi nd suffi cient labor.” So the Alabama Department
of Agriculture and Industries approached the state’s
Department of Corrections about making a deal where
prisoners would replace the fl eeing farm workers.
But with revolutionary unrest around the world, and
the rise of a mass movement that connects disparate issues
together into a simple, powerful class analysis — the 99
percent versus the 1 percent paradigm popularized by
Occupy Wall Street — this year’s Project Censored offers
an element of hope.
It’s not easy to succeed at projects that resist corporate
dominance, and when it does happen, the corporate media
are sometimes reluctant to cover it. Number seven on the
Top 25 list is the story of how the United Nations designated
2012 the International Year of the Cooperative, recognizing
the rapid growth of co-op businesses, organizations that are
eugeneweekly.com • November 21, 2012
13