ANDY LEE ROTH with MICKEY HUFF
The COVID-19 pandemic has functioned like an X-ray, starkly exposing fateful compound fractures in American society. Beyond its terrible toll on human life, the pandemic has made clearer than ever before structural weaknesses in fundamental US institutions and the nationwide malignancy of chronic racial prejudices and economic inequalities.
The pandemic has not spared journalism, and any contemporary assessment of the free press must necessarily begin with the coronavirus and its impacts. The pandemic has accelerated two trends that imperil journalism and the free flow of information upon which the profession depends.
As the New York Times reported in May 2020, approximately 36,000 employees of news media companies in the United States have been “laid off, furloughed or had their pay reduced since the arrival of the coronavirus.”1 One news industry analyst told BuzzFeed that, due to plummeting advertising revenues, the pandemic would likely amount to a “full extinction event” for many news organizations.2
Even venerable independent news outlets are not escaping unscathed. For example, in May 2020 The Atlantic laid off 68 employees, comprising 17 percent of its staff.3 News industry layoffs, furloughs, and closures have become so frequent during the pandemic that the Poynter Institute reports having to update its online record of these events “almost daily.”4
Under the pandemic, intensified censorship and a “global crackdown” on press freedoms constitute a second existential threat to journalism.
An April 2020 Foreign Policy article observed that the coronavirus had initiated a “censorship pandemic,” with governments around the world “cracking down on their critics” under the pretext of banning fake news about the crisis.5 As of May 14, 2020, the Index on Censorship had documented more than 150 incidents in which journalists were physically or verbally assaulted, detained, or arrested—a figure the Index wrote was likely just “the very tip of the iceberg.”6
In a separate article, the Index on Censorship reported that governments throughout the world, from Brazil to Scotland, have used the pandemic to justify revamping or curtailing freedom of information laws, which journalists (and the general public) in 126 countries depend on to obtain government records and documents.7 As Amnesty International’s director of law and policy, Ashfaq Khalfan, stated, “There is no hope of containing this virus if people can’t access accurate information.”8
In the United States, Index on Censorship noted, President Donald Trump maintained his habit of attacking reporters’ credentials and terminating press conferences when journalists’ questions about his administration’s handling of the crisis displeased him.9 In late May of 2020 Trump issued an executive order to impose new regulatory pressures on social media companies after Twitter placed warnings on two misleading tweets he made about mail-in balloting, notifying Trump’s readership that his claims were unsubstantiated by facts.10
Even as establishment news outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post cover the pandemic and its impacts on other news outlets, they also run features that deny credit to—or, worse yet, discredit—legitimate independent news outlets.
For example, the Washington Post and the New York Times were quick to report on evidence that US senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) each sold significant shares of their personal stock holdings immediately after attending a Senate Health Committee meeting in which they were briefed on the coronavirus. Burr and Loeffler sold their shares in hotels and other companies that stood to be hit hard by the pandemic, while publicly expressing confidence in the government’s ability to fight the virus and forestall a national crisis. Their transactions were “not only unethical but almost certainly illegal,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, noting that, under the STOCK Act of 2012, lawmakers and their aides are “explicitly barred from using nonpublic information for trades.”11
Notably, however, the story of Burr and Loeffler’s potentially illegal transactions was originally broken not by the Times or the Post, but by a pair of independent news outlets: ProPublica reported on Burr’s market transactions and the Daily Beast reported on Loeffler’s stock sales on March 19, 2020, a day before the first print reports in the Times or the Post.12 ProPublica and the Daily Beast received no credit for breaking the stories—they were not mentioned at all—in the New York Times’s first report on the topic.13 The Washington Post’s first story credited the Daily Beast, but not ProPublica.14
As an organization that highlights the crucial contributions of independent journalism, we at Project Censored noted these omissions with dismay. In the classrooms where we teach, students learn to credit their sources appropriately or risk receiving a failing grade for academic dishonesty.
But there are more glaring problems with establishment news media coverage of the pandemic than failing to give credit where credit is due. As Anthony DiMaggio noted in an April 2020 CounterPunch article about right-wing protests against public health restrictions in Ohio, Idaho, Michigan, and other states, “News outlets like the New York Times are repeating clichés about how right-wing shutdown protests are another manifestation of working-class resentment against the system.”15
This narrative endures, DiMaggio noted, despite a substantial body of research demonstrating that Trump’s so-called “working-class” base is “not motivated by concerns with poverty and economic vulnerabilities,” while the reportedly grassroots protests have in fact been orchestrated by “national pro-business groups” (including Freedom-Works and Americans for Prosperity) and “quasi-fascist and white nationalist groups” (such as the Proud Boys).
The Washington Post for its part has taken advantage of fears and misapprehensions about the pandemic to run a series of articles that effectively echo President Trump’s call for a tough stance against China, while on May 24, 2020, the Post featured a lead article that Melvin Goodman described as “a chauvinist attack on Iran that had the rare attribute of being both counterfactual and counter-instinctive.”16 For more evidence of how corporate news media have distorted the public’s understanding of the pandemic, see Robin Andersen’s chapter on News Abuse in this volume.
Even more alarming, perhaps, in a May 2020 “Here to Help” feature on recognizing false information in online feeds, the New York Times audaciously advised its readers that, if they have never heard of the outlet that published an article, “there’s a good chance that it exists solely to publish fake news.”17 The feature further advised that, if a questionable story’s contents were “legitimately outrageous,” then “plenty of other news outlets would have written about it, too.”
We encourage editors and reporters at the Times to consider the first chapter of this book, the Project’s annual listing of the year’s 25 most important but underreported news stories—nearly all of which were factually reported by legitimate independent news outlets, but systematically ignored by the New York Times and other “trustworthy” establishment outlets. Given the Times’s apparent inability to acknowledge high-quality, transparently-sourced journalism produced by independent news organizations, its counsel on “obscure news outlets” reveals more about its own hegemonic stance as the self-appointed arbiter of legitimate news and journalism than it does to help readers effectively distinguish valid stories from bogus ones.
Part of the Project’s mission is to expand the public’s awareness of important news stories and topics that fall outside the corporate news media’s narrow definition of who and what are newsworthy. This mission derives from the Project’s guiding principles.
Guiding principles function like a compass, providing direction. Although guiding principles cannot dictate what to do at every step in a journey, without them it is harder to assess when the path taken strays from the goal.
Guiding principles are even more important in times of crisis, when it is even easier—and more dire—to lose one’s bearings.
This year’s Media Democracy in Action chapter includes a contribution by the Society of Professional Journalists, the oldest organization currently representing US journalists, whose mission is to promote and defend freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In Chapter 6, Fred Brown introduces the SPJ’s guiding principles for ethical journalism: Seek truth and report it; minimize harm; act independently; and be accountable and transparent. If more corporate news outlets rigorously adhered to these principles, the chapters in this book on Junk Food News and News Abuse would be shorter than they are—or perhaps altogether unnecessary.
What, then, are Project Censored’s guiding principles? Based on the belief that a free press and an informed public are cornerstones of democratic self-government, Project Censored’s work is guided by the following tenets:
These four principles define the Project, and—because we are a small organization with a lean budget—they help us choose how to focus our efforts.
Unlike the news organizations whose work we track and evaluate, Project Censored does not report breaking news, and we do not work on a 24/7 news cycle. In fact, Project Censored might be better described as following a 52/12 news cycle.
In each yearbook, we track underreported news topics and important story themes over the course of a 52-week, 12-month year. Candidly, this means the Project is not an ideal source for daily, breaking news stories—though we also produce a weekly syndicated radio program and maintain an active online presence through our website and social media.
As State of the Free Press | 2021 goes to print, we are actively monitoring news coverage of developing stories, including the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and subsequent protests across the United States and around the world, and the responses of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites to President Trump’s executive order targeting social media platforms. In covering protests against police violence, journalists in the United States have been subjected to increasing attacks, arrests, and other threats to their personal safety and their profession.18 In response to Trump’s executive order regarding social media censorship, the Center for Democracy & Technology is bringing a lawsuit against the president, arguing that Trump’s order violates the First Amendment.19 The world does not stop for us to take its temperature.
Nevertheless, we credit our 52/12 orientation for helping us to identify and analyze systemic patterns and subsurface trends in news coverage that otherwise remain invisible or taken for granted amidst the unceasing stream of breaking news. The kind of insight that comes with stepping back from the squalls of the 24/7 news cycle is evident, we contend, in the Project’s analysis and clearing away of what we have previously described as “the black smoke of fake news.”20
Since the tragical 2016 presidential election, politicians, pundits, and pollsters have latched onto “fake news” as a hot issue. So too have the corporate news media, which have found in this topic an endless source of content that is not just “newsworthy” but also a ratings-winning lure for audience attention.
Thus, for example, the establishment media dutifully report on each new statement by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg about his company’s role in policing (or perpetuating) the online spread of misinformation, while other corporate news reports uncritically endorse fact-checking organizations such as NewsGuard and Snopes.21
But is anyone checking the fact-checkers?
Corporate news organizations tend to sidestep this important question. A deeper examination suggests why this might be so. The corporate press appears to assume that NewsGuard is a trustworthy judge of fake news because it has partnered with major corporate entities—such as Microsoft—and because its advisory board includes a number of former government officials—such as Tom Ridge, the first director of Homeland Security, and Michael Hayden, who ran the Central Intelligence Agency when George W. Bush was president—who tidily fit the establishment news media’s standard if narrow criteria of newsworthy actors and sources.22
If corporate news coverage of NewsGuard followed the Society of Professional Journalists’s guidelines—act independently, be transparent—it would highlight these essential considerations, which call into question the fact-checking organization’s credibility and ultimate purpose.
Deeper investigative analysis of fact-checking operations promoted by NewsGuard, Facebook, and others demonstrates how formulaic news reporting of complex issues fails to promote genuine understanding.23 At best, quickly produced news reports based on the typical corporate and government sources serve to provide the appearance of vigorous public debate while doing little if anything to resolve the public’s doubts and fears regarding fake news.
Pico Iyer articulated a more extreme version of this problem when he described how pollsters, pundits, and other popular sources of “news” frequently attempt “to persuade us that hearsay + opinion + guesswork = truth.”24 Iyer likened our contemporary media politics to Othello, Shakespeare’s tragedy in which the villain Iago coaxes noble Othello “away from the realm of knowledge and into the adjacent territories of inference and rumor,” with tragic, fatal consequences.
Shifting from Shakespeare’s Venice to our contemporary media culture, Project Censored and the contributors to the inaugural edition of the Project’s State of the Free Press eschew hearsay and guesswork (though not informed opinion) to ground us firmly in the realm of knowledge, where claims to truth and expressions of opinion are validated by transparently-sourced and verifiable facts.
State of the Free Press launches a new version of the Project’s long-running Censored yearbook series. The book’s streamlined format distills the core components of previous Censored volumes. We continue to publish case studies of specific news themes, as presented in previous yearbooks, via the Project’s online “Censored Notebook,” where we can cover a wider range of topics in a more timely fashion than is possible with each year’s book.25
Chapter 1 of State of the Free Press presents the 25 most important but underreported news stories of 2019–2020 as determined by Project Censored. This list is the final result of a yearlong process of identifying and vetting candidate stories undertaken by several hundred college and university students and faculty members who participate in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. This review process culminates with the Project’s panel of 28 expert judges voting to determine which stories make the list and how they are ranked.26
The resulting 25 stories expose the corporate news media’s blind spots when it comes to reporting on systemic social problems, including the disappearance or murder of a disproportionately large number of Indigenous women and girls (this year’s #1 story), the deadly consequences of enduring economic inequality, and attacks on freedom of expression—as well as important solutions-oriented reporting on voting, banking, and access to affordable medicines. The Top 25 list honors independent journalists and news outlets, and it highlights how their coverage of otherwise untold stories informs the public and bolsters democracy.
In Chapter 2, Steve Macek and Zach McNanna revive the Project’s Déjà Vu News chapter. Last presented in Censored 2017, Déjà Vu News tracks news stories featured in previous Censored yearbooks to update those stories and to assess whether they have subsequently received any more widespread substantive news coverage. Macek and McNanna provide updates on five past stories, including the Project’s 2018 report on global internet shutdowns, its 2011 report on Pentagon pollution, and developments in coverage of the government’s $21 trillion in unaccounted-for spending, as first detailed in Censored 2019.
Izzy Snow and Susan Rahman partner with a team of College of Marin students to present Chapter 3, “Capitalism, Celebrity, and Consuming Corona,” their analysis of the year’s most distasteful Junk Food News. “Junk Food News” is the term Carl Jensen coined to explain how, all too often, profit-driven corporate news outlets peddle cheaply produced, soft-serve “news” stories focused on celebrityhood, the latest trending craze, and other cultural meringue in place of the nutrients provided by substantive investigative journalism. This year Snow, Rahman, and their research team assess the corporate news media’s coverage of the death of professional basketball star Kobe Bryant, Trump’s antic pandemic prescriptions, and the quarantined inspiration we are supposed to derive from Tom Hanks and other Hollywood favorites. Importantly, in each case, the chapter juxtaposes the corporate media’s fixation on “junk food” stories with vital stories from the same time that hardly received any news coverage.
While Junk Food News avoids covering substantial stories by wallowing in trivia, “News Abuse” is the term Project Censored uses to identify genuinely important news topics that have been subject to distorted coverage by corporate news outlets. In Chapter 4, “Establishment Media’s War Metaphors Obscure Injustices and Block Global Healing,” Robin Andersen offers a scathing assessment of corporate media News Abuse in 2019–2020. Andersen identifies how double standards and skewed framing served to mystify the public about the COVID-19 pandemic, the debate over healthcare during the 2020 Democratic primary campaigns, and the mass demonstrations in Hong Kong and Chile. Examined with scrutiny, Andersen suggests, News Abuse makes it clear how far the corporate news media stray from representing the “mainstream” interests and values of most Americans.
Adam Bessie and Peter Glanting’s “Going Remote: Flattening the Curriculum” illustrates how the shift to remote, online “classrooms” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new, exclusionary educational standards that further marginalize historically disadvantaged students and consolidate corporate influence in higher education. Their feature’s vivid imagery and lucid text show that the ‘Zoomified’ corporate vision of education “doesn’t have to pass”—instead, educators can develop “expansive” classrooms that re-center students as “imaginative creators” and “critical citizens.”
The union of imagination and critical thinking is a hallmark of the type of contributions that comprise each year’s Media Democracy in Action chapter. From a platform for whistleblowers, The Whistleblower Newsroom, and Citizen Lab’s work to track links between developing technologies and digital censorship, to critical media literacy education programs in classrooms at UCLA and in programs linked with California’s juvenile justice system, to guiding principles for ethical journalism and organizing for truly democratic, publicly owned news media, the Media Democracy in Action chapter aptly concludes the 2021 edition of State of the Free Press by presenting six inspired exemplars in the struggle to build a more inclusive and civil society.
How to sum up Project Censored’s assessment of the state of the free press in 2021? The question demands a multifaceted response, as this introduction attempts to delineate and artist Anson Stevens-Bollen’s cover illustrates.
From a critical perspective, when we scrutinize the corporate news media’s track record during the previous twelve months, there is plenty to warrant pessimism, if not grave concern.
From an affirmative standpoint, there remains cause for optimism—as documented not only by the forward-thinking contributors to the book’s concluding chapter on Media Democracy in Action, but also by the robust reporting in the public interest by the intrepid independent journalists and news outlets whose work Chapter 1 highlights.
We want you, our readers, to dig into this year’s book in search of your own assessments of the state of the free press in the United States. Even more, we hope that what you find here will galvanize you to action, engaging your imagination and critical thinking skills in service of strengthening independent journalism and revitalizing the democratic institutions that depend on it.
As the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent uprisings against police brutality make clear, our health—as individuals and as a community—depends crucially on a commitment to truth, even when this entails reckoning with harsh realities that challenge cherished beliefs about who we are and what we stand for. Our shared future depends on being media literate, critically savvy, and imaginatively organized. Drawing upon a rich heritage of path-breaking teachers, activists, muckrakers, whistleblowers, and dreamers, we must dare to seek out facts, dispel myths and inaccuracies, and share and act upon the truths that bind us responsibly, effectively, and democratically.
Andy Lee Roth, Seattle
Mickey Huff, Sonoma County
May 2020
Many thanks to Elizabeth Boyd for helpful comments on earlier versions of this introduction, and to Sarah Brooks for encouraging the discussion of guiding principles.