In Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann proposed “no higher law” for journalism than “to tell the truth and shame the devil.”1 A leading political journalist of his era, Lippmann made this judgment in 1920. His basic insight holds true a century later.
The devils Lippmann had in mind were not figurative. At least some of them included the “propagandists and censors” who would “put a painted screen where there should be a window to the world,” in service of what Lippmann—in an original formulation that has been mighty in its influence—described as “the manufacture of consent.”2 Without a “steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news,” he warned, democracy would degenerate into “incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster.”3
The correctives that he proposed in Liberty and the News were multifaceted, but each aimed to promote and safeguard what he described as “assured access to the facts.”4 The strength of Lippmann’s conviction on this point is evident in how he specified “the task of liberty”—which in his view required protecting news sources and making news comprehensible.5 “The administration of public information toward greater accuracy and more successful analysis,” Lippmann wrote, “is the highway of liberty.”6
Accurate reporting and insightful analysis, in service of informing the public, are hallmarks of the independent news stories highlighted in this chapter. From an article in YES! Magazine about a California state court decision that provides a blueprint for reforming excessive, discriminatory policing in schools (story #21), to reports by Common Dreams and the Guardian on indigenous efforts to create a “corridor of life and culture” in the embattled Amazon (story #3), and coverage by In These Times of the fossil fuel industry’s concerted efforts to enlist state governments and co-opt law enforcement in criminalizing its critics (story #14), the independent journalists and news organizations whose work is featured here deserve credit and recognition for providing the public “assured access to the facts” and trustworthy, relevant news on these topics.7 They tell the truth and shame a cast of devils.
In addition to the high quality of journalism evident in these stories, a second attribute unites and distinguishes them. Each of them has been “blockaded” (to adapt another of Lippmann’s vivid images) by the corporate news media.8 Despite their remarkable newsworthiness, the topics and issues addressed in these stories have been either marginalized or ignored altogether by the establishment press. As a result of this corporate blockade, most residents of the United States are unlikely to be informed on these important public issues.
Project Censored’s annual listing of independent news stories that the corporate media have failed to cover adequately should be understood as an affirmation of Lippmann’s observation that “whether one aspect of the news or another appears in the center or at the periphery makes all the difference in the world.”9 The corporate press has, one way or another, decentered each of the news stories reported here. This year’s Top 25 Censored stories represent the best efforts of more than 283 student researchers and 24 faculty evaluators from 15 college and university campuses across the United States to draw greater attention to these stories, and to center them as public issues.
Although each news story featured in this chapter is certainly deserving of recognition on its own, the list of this year’s top stories can also be examined for news themes that connect different stories. Indeed, as we have contended in past editions of the Censored yearbook, identifying these unifying themes is one significant way to gauge the systemic blind spots, third rails, and “no go” zones in corporate news coverage.10 From that perspective, this year’s story list highlights crucial independent news reporting on the following topics:
the environment—including story #3, Indigenous Groups from Amazon Propose Creation of Largest Protected Area on Earth,
#4 US Oil and Gas Industry Set to Unleash 120 Billion Tons of New Carbon Emissions,
#13 Corporate Food Brands Drive Massive Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico,
#15 Trump Administration Threatens Endangered Species Act,
#16 Underwater Avalanches Heighten Risks of Oil Catastrophes, and
#20 Scientists Accelerate Coral Reef Regrowth with Electricity;
criminal justice, including prisons and detention—including story #6, Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Sex Trafficking Criminalized for Self-Defense,
#7 Flawed Investigations of Sexual Assaults in Children’s Immigrant Shelters,
#8 US Women Face Prison Sentences for Miscarriages,
#17 More Than 25 Percent of Formerly Incarcerated People are Unemployed,
#21 Court Ruling Provides “Blueprint” to Reform Excessive, Discriminatory Policing in Schools, and
#22 Violence Rises after End of Mandated Monitoring in California’s Juvenile Detention Centers; and
corporate misconduct—including story #2, Think Tank Partnerships Establish Facebook as Tool of US Foreign Policy,
#4 US Oil and Gas Industry Set to Unleash 120 Billion Tons of New Carbon Emissions,
#9 Developing Countries’ Medical Needs Unfulfilled by Big Pharma,
#13 Corporate Food Brands Drive Massive Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico,
#16 Underwater Avalanches Heighten Risks of Oil Catastrophes,
#23 New Programs Make School Food Systems More Equitable, and
#25 Google Screenwise: Consenting to Surveillance Capitalism.
Additional themes showcased in this year’s list include technology (story #2, #10, #12, and #25), gender inequalities (story #5, #6, and #8), press freedoms (story #1, #2, and #19), and surveillance (story #1, #14, and #25). As this brief summary shows, any one story can belong to multiple news themes—as seen, for example, in story #2, on Facebook’s think tank partnerships, which brings together the themes of compromised press freedoms, corporate misconduct, and technology. Of course, careful readers may identify additional story themes beyond those noted here.
During this year’s voting, several judges observed that the ballot suffered from a deficit of independent news coverage on the topics of organized labor and LGBTQ rights. While other chapters in this volume address these important subjects (see Chapter 4 for labor, and Chapter 7 for LGBTQ rights), we note these gaps in this year’s story list to encourage story nominations focused on these themes for the Project’s next volume.
We are pleased to note that this year’s list does include a number of positive news stories, including reports on indigenous efforts to protect the embattled Amazon rainforest (story #3), solutions to extreme violence in West Africa (#18), efforts to stimulate the regrowth of damaged coral reefs (#20), a California court ruling that provides a model for reforming excessive and discriminatory policing in schools (#21), and new programs to make school food systems more equitable (#23). These stories remind us that not all hard-hitting journalism draws public attention to “bad news.” Indeed, these stories can be seen as exemplars of constructive journalism, which Kenn Burrows, Amber Yang, and Bethany Surface describe in Chapter 9. Journalism that advocates solutions to social problems might seem at odds with Walter Lippmann’s strenuous imperative that journalists and the public not lose contact with “objective information.”11 But Lippmann did not rule out opinion; he objected to opinion that was not based on verifiable evidence.12 Instead, “the really important thing,” he wrote, “is to try and make opinion increasingly responsible to the facts.”13 The positive news stories highlighted in this year’s Top 25 story list fulfill that responsibility even as some of their authors are players and stakeholders, rather than disinterested observers, in relation to the issues they cover.
The chief purpose of news, Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News, is to enable humankind “to live successfully toward the future.”14 From news reports that alert us to grave threats to the planet, the impacts of government and corporate surveillance, and inequalities in the criminal justice system, to stories that bring to public attention solutions to violence and ways to protect ecosystems, the news stories presented here serve that purpose, functioning like a compass that, if followed, can point us in the direction of a more humane and democratic future.
acknowledgments: Geoff Davidian, Elsa Denis, Nicole Wolfe, and Mischa Geracoulis provided invaluable assistance and welcome camaraderie in helping to prepare this year’s slate of several hundred Validated Independent News stories for the Top 25 vote by our panel of judges. Elsa Denis, Troy Patton, Dasha Bukovskaya, Sierra Kaul, and Katy Nguyen helped with the final vetting of this year’s top Censored stories. The chapter’s introduction benefited from insightful suggestions by John Roth.
How do we at Project Censored identify and evaluate independent news stories, and how do we know that the Top 25 stories that we bring forward each year are not only relevant and significant, but also trustworthy? The answer is that every candidate news story undergoes rigorous review, which takes place in multiple stages during each annual cycle. Although adapted to take advantage of both the Project’s expanding affiliates program and current technologies, the vetting process is quite similar to the one Project Censored founder Carl Jensen established more than forty years ago.
Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public, who bring them to the Project’s attention.15 Together, faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is not included.
Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review to include any subsequent, competing corporate coverage. Stories that pass this round of review get posted on our website as Validated Independent News stories (VINs).16
In early spring, we present all VINs in the current cycle to the faculty and students at all of our affiliate campuses, and to our panel of expert judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from several hundred to 25.
Once the Top 25 list has been determined, Project Censored student interns begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases. Additional faculty and students contribute to this final stage of review.
The Top 25 finalists are then sent to our panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. At the same time, these experts—including media studies professors, professional journalists and editors, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.17
Thus, by the time a story appears in the pages of Censored, it has undergone at least five distinct rounds of review and evaluation.
Although the stories that Project Censored brings forward may be socially and politically controversial—and sometimes even psychologically challenging—we are confident that each is the result of serious journalistic effort, and therefore deserves greater public attention.