Last month, two news stories broke on the same day. One was meaty, the other junky.
In Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration’s warrantless National Security Agency surveillance program was unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, in Thailand, a strange bird named John Mark Karr claimed that he was with 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey when she died, in 1996.
Guess the story that dominated the news.
Predictably, acres of newsprint and hours of airtime were devoted to the alleged killer of the child beauty queen. We learned what Karr ate on the plane ride to the States and about his desire for a sex change and his child-porn fixation. When DNA tests later showed that Karr wasn’t the killer, the media speculated about the reasons he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
During that same period, hardly a word was written or said in the same outlets about the court ruling and the questions it raises about Bush’s power-grabbing administration.
The media’s fascination with the Ramsey story comes as no surprise to Carl Jensen, a sociologist and founder of a media research project at Sonoma State University.
For 30 years, Jensen’s Project Censored has identified and publicized stories with major national and international significance that were censored, underreported, or otherwise ignored by major U.S. media outlets. The organization has taken plenty of hits during that time from editors and publishers.
“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. It was just 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 stories that were way, way overblown and filled precious pages and airtime that could have been used for real news.
Although Jensen would be love to be able to claim that Project Censored solved the media’s problems with censorship and junk-food news, that didn’t happen.
“If anything it’s gotten worse,” says Jensen, pointing to increased media monopolization. Acknowledging that some items on the Project Censored 2007 list have already been published on the Internet or in well-known magazines such as The New Yorker and Mother Jones, Jensen says, “What’s known to some isn’t known to everyone. Not everyone reads The New Yorker — and if a story is really important I call it censored anyway.”
Project Censored’s current director, Peter Phillips, says that just because entertainment news is addictive is no excuse for the media to push it.
“Massacres, celebrity gossip, we’re automatically attracted,” says Phillips. “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.”
Here are Project Censored’s top 10 stories of the past year:
1. INTERNET FREEDOM FADING
In its relatively brief life, the Internet has been touted as the greatest example of democracy ever invented by humankind. It has given disillusioned Americans hope that there is a way to get out the truth, even if you don’t own airwaves, newspapers, or satellite stations. It’s forced the mainstream media to talk about issues they 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 cables 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 FCC 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 extra to get information and services that currently are free.
Source: Elliot D. Cohen, “Web of Deceit,” BuzzFlash.com, July 18, 2005.
2. WHO’S SUPPLYING IRAN’S NUKES
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: Jason Leopold, “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team,” GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005.
3. OCEANS AWAY
Rising sea levels. A melting Arctic. Governments denying that 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 paints in a beautifully crafted piece that makes the point that “there is only one ocean on Earth . . . a Mobiuslike ribbon winding through all the ocean basins, rising and falling, and stirring the waters of the world.”
The problem is that if this world ocean, which encompasses 70.78 percent of our planet, is in peril, 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.”
A Scripps researcher called on the Bush administration to convene a “Manhattan-style project” to address the problem. It hasn’t happened yet.
Source: Julia Whitty, “The Fate of the Ocean,” Mother Jones, March/April 2006.
4. NO ROOM FOR THE TRUTH
As hunger and homelessness increase in the United States, the Bush administration plans to get rid of a source of much of the data that supports this embarrassing reality — a survey that’s been used to improve state and federal programs for retired and low-income Americans.
Bush’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2007 includes an effort to eliminate the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Founded in 1984, the survey tracks American families’ use of Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and childcare 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 but the Bush administration’s third attempt in as many years to remove funding from politically embarrassing research. In 2003 it tried to whack the Bureau of Labor Statistics mass-layoff-statistics report, and in 2004 and 2005 it attempted to drop the bureau’s questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment data.
Sources: Brendan Coyne, New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness,” The New Standard, December 2005, and Abid Aslam, “U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families Draws Fire,” OneWorld.net, March 2006.
5. WHY GENOCIDE IN THE CONGO
If you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in 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 the dots between this terrible suffering and the immense fortunes made from the manufacture and sale of 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, most important for the high-tech industry, coltan, and niobium. 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; Sprocket, “High-Tech Genocide,” Earth First! Journal, August 2005; Keith Harmon Snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo,” Z Magazine, March 1, 2006.
6. WHISTLEBLOWING IN THE WIND
Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste, fraud, and abuse since Bush became president, the agency charged with defending government whistleblowers 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 Bush in 2004, is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.
What makes this development particularly troubling is that, thanks to a decline in Congressional oversight and hard-hitting 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 OSC have filed a whistleblower complaint against Bloch himself.
Ironically, Bloch has now decided not to disclose the number of whistleblower complaints in which an employee has 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.
Source: Jeff Ruch, “Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections,” Sept. 22, 2005; “Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel Finally Begins,” Oct. 18, 2005; and “Whistleblowers Get No Help from Bush Administration,” Dec. 5, 2005, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility Web site (www.peer.org).
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 forms to torture that detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have been subjected to, 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 lawsuit.
Although reports of torture aren’t new, the documents are evidence of torture as a policy, begging a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as who authorized such techniques, and why have the resulting deaths been covered up?
Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU’s FOIA request, 21 were homicides, and eight appeared to have resulted from these abusive torture techniques.
Sources: “U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” American Civil Liberties Union Web site (www.aclu.org), Oct. 24, 2005; Dahr Jamail, “Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantánamo to Iraq,” TomDispatch.com, March 5, 2006.
8. DODGING ACCOUNTABILITY
In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, a crucial law that allows journalists and watchdogs access to federal documents. The stated reason for this dramatic move: The 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 torture of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
With ACLU lawyers predicting that the end result of this ruling is likely to be more abuse and with Americans becoming increasingly concerned about the federal government’s illegal intelligence-gathering activities, Congress has imposed a two-year sunset on this FOIA exemption, ending December 2007 — which is cold comfort to anyone rotting in a U.S. overseas military facility right now.
Sources: Michelle Chen, “Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information,” The New Standard, May 6, 2005; “FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency,” Newspaper Association of America Web site (www.nna.org), posted December 2005.
9. ANOTHER BRICK IN THE 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 they’ve always opposed that helps lock in and exploit their labor.
Sources: Jamal Juma, “Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank,” Left Turn, Issue 18; Linda Heard, “U.S. Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion,” Al-Jazeerah, March 9, 2005.
10. BOMBS AWAY
At the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command statistics showed an increase in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian deaths, thanks to increased bombing of Iraqi cities. But with bombings and the killing of innocent civilians acting as a highly effective recruiting tool among Iraqi militants, the U.S. war on Iraq seemed to increasingly be following that of the Vietnam war. As Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker at the end of 2005, the federal government’s troop-reduction plan relies on increased U.S. airpower.
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, causing the sectarian violence to escalate.
Sources: Seymour M. Hersh, “Up in the Air,” The New Yorker, December 2005; Dahr Jamail, “An Increasingly Aerial Occupation,” TomDispatch.com, December 2005.
Sarah Phelan writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2006.
