UNDERCOVERED
Annual PROJECT CENSORED report critiques news coverage BY JOE FITZGERALD RODRIGUEZ San Francisco Bay Guardian, joe@sfbg.com
T
his year’s annual Project Censored list of the
most underreported news stories includes
the widening wealth gap, the trial of Chelsea
(formerly known as Bradley) Manning for
leaking classifi ed documents and President
Obama’s war on whistleblowers — all stories
that actually received considerable news
coverage.
So how exactly were they “censored” and what does
that say of this venerable media watchdog project?
Project Censored isn’t only about stories that were
deliberately buried or ignored. It’s about stories the media
has covered poorly through a sort of false objectivity that
skews the truth. Journalists do cry out against injustice, on
occasion, but they don’t always do it well.
That’s why Project Censored was started back in 1967:
to highlight stories the mainstream media missed or gave
scant attention to. Sonoma State University academics
and students pore through hundreds of submissions
of overlooked and under reported stories. A panel of
academics and journalists then picks the top 25 stories
and curates them into themed clusters. This year’s book,
Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fearful Times, hit
bookstores in October.
What causes the media to stumble? There are as many
reasons as there are failures.
Brooke Gladstone, host of the radio program On the
Media and writer of the graphic novel cum news media
critique, The Infl uencing Machine, said the story of
Manning (who now goes by the fi rst name Chelsea) was
the perfect example of the media trying to cover a story
right, but getting it mostly wrong.
The Manning case “is for far too long centered on
his personality rather than the nature of his revelations,”
Gladstone told us. Manning’s career was sacrifi ced for
sending 700,000 classifi ed documents about the Iraq war
to WikiLeaks. But the media coverage focused largely on
Manning’s trial and subsequent change in gender identity.
Gladstone said that this is part of the media’s inability
to deal with vast quantities of information which, she said,
“is not what most of our standard media does all that well.”
The media mangling of Manning is number one on
the Project Censored list, but the shallow coverage this
story received is not unique. The news media is in a crisis,
particularly in the U.S., and it’s getting worse.
Watching the watchdogs
The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which
conducts an annual analysis of trends in news, found that
as revenue in journalism declined, newsrooms have shed
30 percent of their staff in the last decade. In 2012, the
number of reporters in the U.S. dipped to its lowest level
since 1978, with less than 40,000 reporters nationally. This
creates a sense of desperation in the newsroom, and in the
end, it’s the public that loses.
“What won out is something much more palpable to the
advertisers,” said Robert McChesney, an author, long-time
media reform advocate, professor at University of Illinois
and host of Media Matters from 2000-2012. Blandness
beat out fearless truth-telling.
Even worse than kowtowing to advertisers is the false
objectivity the media tries to achieve, McChesney told
us, neutering its news to stay “neutral” on a topic. This
handcuffs journalists into not drawing conclusions, even
when they are well-supported by the facts.
In order to report a story, they rely on the words of
others to make claims, limiting what they can report.
“You allow people in power to set the range of legitimate
debate, and you report on it,” McChesney said.
Project Censored stories refl ect that dynamic — many
of them require journalists to take a stand or present an
illuminating perspective on a set of dry facts. For example,
reporting on the increasing gulf between the rich and the
poor is easy, but talking about why the rich are getting
richer is where journalists begin to worry about their
objectivity, Gladstone said.
“I think that there is a desire to stay away from stories
that will inspire rhetoric of class warfare,” she said.
Unable to tell the story of a trend and unable to talk
about rising inequality for fear of appearing partisan,
reporters often fail to connect the dots for their readers.
One of Project Censored stories this year, “Bank
Interests Infl ate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent,”
is a good example of the need for a media watchdog.
Researchers point to interest payments as the primary way
wealth is transferred from Main Street to Wall Street.
It’s how the banks are picking the pockets of the 99
percent. But if no politician is calling out the banks on this
practice, if no advocacy group is gaining enough traction,
shouldn’t it be the media’s role to protect the public and
sound the battle cry?
“So much of media criticism is really political
commentary squeezed through a media squeezer,”
Gladstone said, “and it comes out media shaped.”
Shaping the media
McChesney said journalism should be a proactive
watchdog by independently stating that something needs to
be done. He said there’s more watchdog journalism calling
out inequity in democracies where there is a more robust
and funded media.
And they often have one thing we in the U.S. don’t —
government subsidies for journalism.
“All the other democracies in the world, there are huge
subsidies for public media and journalism,” McChesney
said. “They not only rank ahead of us in terms of being
democratic, they also rank ahead of us in terms of having a
free press. Our press is shrinking.”
No matter what the ultimate economic solution is, the
crisis of reporting is largely a crisis of money. McChesney
called it a “whole knife in the heart of journalism.”
For American journalism to revive itself, it has to move
beyond its corporate ties. It has to become a truly free
press. It’s time to end the myth that corporate journalism
is the only way for media to be objective, monolithic and
correct.
The failures of that prescription are clear in Project
Censored’s top 10 stories of the year:
1. MANNING AND THE FAILURE
OF CORPORATE MEDIA
Untold stories of Iraqi civilian deaths by American
soldiers, U.S. diplomats pushing aircraft sales on foreign
royalty, uninvestigated abuse by Iraqi allies, the perils of
the rise in private war contractors — this is what Manning
exposed. They were stories that challenge the U.S. political
elite, and they were only made possible by a sacrifi ce.
Manning got a 35-year prison sentence for the revelation
of state secrets to WikiLeaks, a story told countless times
in corporate media. But as Project Censored posits, the
failure of our media was not in the lack of coverage of
Manning, but in its focus.
Though The New York Times partnered with WikiLeaks
to release stories based on the documents, many published
in 2010 through 2011, news from the leaks have since
slowed to a trickle — a waste of over 700,000 pieces of
classifi ed intelligence giving unparalleled ground-level
views of America’s costly wars.
The media quickly took a scathing indictment of U.S.
military policy and spun it into a story about Manning’s
politics and patriotism. As Rolling Stone pointed out (“Did
the Media Fail Bradley Manning?”), Manning initially
took the trove of leaks to the Washington Post and The New
York Times, only to be turned away.
Alexa O’Brien, a former Occupy activist, scooped most
of the media by actually attending Manning’s trial. She
produced tens of thousands of words in transcriptions of
the court hearings, one of the only reporters on the beat.
2. RICHEST GLOBAL 1 PERCENT
HIDE BILLIONS IN TAX HAVENS
Global corporate fatcats hold $21 trillion to $32 trillion
in offshore havens, money hidden from government
taxation that would benefi t people around the world,
according to fi ndings by James S. Henry, the former chief
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