CHAPTER 1

The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2013–14

Andy Lee Roth, Mickey Huff, and Project Censored

INTRODUCTION

The operation of unwitting bias is difficult either to locate or prove. Its manifestations are always indirect. It comes through in terms of who is or who is not accorded the status of an accredited witness: in the tones of voice: in the set-up of studio confrontations: in the assumptions which underlie the questions asked or not asked: in terms of the analytical concepts which serve informally to link events to causes: in what passes for explanation.

—Stuart Hall22

In a succinct and stimulating but overlooked essay from 1970, the late Stuart Hall (to whom we dedicate Censored 2015) posed a powerful pair of questions. “A World at One with Itself” played with the title of an influential BBC news program, World at One, as Hall critiqued contemporary British news coverage of violence in Trinidad, Guatemala, and his adopted homeland, England. In each of these cases, news coverage attributed violence to groups that, in Hall’s words, consistently challenged “the built-in definitions and values enshrined in the political culture of broadcasters and audiences alike.”23 Without systematic, in-depth background, British journalists provided “actuality without context” (a phrase Hall emphasized with italics) thus contributing to a “general sense of a meaningless explosion of meaningless and violent acts—‘out there’ somewhere, in an unintelligible world.”24

Thus, Hall challenged his readers to consider two questions: “Do/can the media help us to understand these significant real events in the real world? Do the media clarify them or mystify us about them?”

Like so many of his political interventions, Hall’s questions continue to challenge us to stake a position by digging analytically deeper.25 In considering the possibility that media—and journalism, in particular—might mystify our understanding of the real world, rather than clarify it, Hall sought to address deeper themes than the usual debates regarding, for example, the boundaries between “hard” and “soft” news, or “biased” versus “objective” coverage. For Hall, such questions were “relevant” but “technical.” These “routine ways of setting up the problem” were “drawn from the press” itself, reflecting both their shared worldviews as news professionals and the “powerful hold” of journalistic conventions.

Instead, by asking us to consider the media’s capacity to clarify, Hall challenged us to face another, even deeper question: “What constitutes the definition of news currently employed?”26 Questioning the conventional definition of news draws our attention to what Hall termed “unwitting” bias; that is, “the institutional slanting, built-in not by the devious inclination of editors to the political right or left, but by the steady and unexamined play of attitudes which, via the mediating structure of professionally defined news values, inclines all media towards the status quo.”27

The first of Hall’s questions—“Do/can the media help us to understand these significant real events in the real world?”—used what might first seem like an awkward construction, “Do/can.” As is often the case in Hall’s work, slowing down to consider the specific choice yields rewards. Asking whether some condition produces a given outcome is different from asking whether it could do so. Hall leaves open the possibility that, even if the news to which we have access today mystifies the world more than clarifies it, we may nonetheless hope for better.

Four decades later, the unwitting bias that concerned Hall in 1970 remains characteristic of most news that originates from corporate media. This chapter, presenting synopses of Project Censored’s Top 25 censored news stories from 2013 to 2014, bears witness to Hall’s analysis of unwitting news bias in three important ways.

First, and most obviously: in 2014, corporate media continue to reproduce what Hall termed “official ideologies of the status quo”—not simply reflecting a “consensual” style of politics, but also reinforcing it by blocking certain kinds of events and actors from achieving newsworthy status. Though “objectivity” is an oft-invoked journalistic value, standards of treatment vary when journalists cover groups or events that conflict with the political culture’s foundational assumptions and sacred values. As Hall noted, “these are precisely the forms of political and civil action which the media, by virtue of their submission to the consensus, are consistently unable to deal with, comprehend or interpret.”28 The stories covered in this chapter closely fit this description.

Second—and here we hope that Hall’s legacy is duly honored—the journalism represented in the following Top 25 stories makes good on the possibility suggested by his first question; in other words, journalism not only has the potential to clarify our understanding of significant real world events, but it actually does so. Although many of the stories that follow may seem critical—and even discouraging—in tenor, we must remember and appreciate that, but for the work of these intrepid and independent investigative journalists, we would know and understand very little or nothing at all about these important stories. Their dispatches provide the context that is crucial for more complete understanding, and they raise the bar for what counts as explanation.

Peter Phillips captured this point succinctly in his introduction to Censored 1998: “Being named as an author of a ‘most censored’ story is a high honor, as it distinguishes quality investigative journalism from the entertainment news so prevalent in today’s media. The 25 news stories in this chapter are timely, factual accounts of important subjects” that the corporate media have “ignored, under-covered, or diminished.”29 As the stories in this list show, not all journalism inclines toward the status quo. Effectively censored from corporate news media coverage, these stories have only been dealt with, comprehended, and interpreted effectively by independent journalists.

Third, and finally, this year’s Top 25 list bears subtle but significant evidence of one cause for hope regarding the future of journalism and its crucial role in making democracy possible. As the Project’s founder Carl Jensen noted in his preface to Censored: The 1994 Project Censored Yearbook, it is students who have identified, researched, and written the synopses of the Top 25 stories.30 In 1994, these students were all participants in a seminar on media censorship taught by Professor Jensen at Sonoma State University. In 2014, twenty volumes later, Project Censored’s campus affiliates program links students and faculty from approximately two dozen college and university campuses across the country in this ongoing collective effort. The Top 25 stories featured in Censored 2015—plus a handful of honorable mentions—represent the best efforts of some 260 students and 49 faculty members from 18 college and university campuses, who together identified and vetted 237 Validated Independent News stories during our 2013–14 cycle.31

This direct, hands-on training in critical thinking and media literacy is a crucial aspect of Project Censored’s mission to prepare a next generation—including many who are already or will become community leaders, and some who may even pursue journalism as a vocation—to cultivate a wary attitude toward corporate media, to support independent journalism, and to recognize the crucial role of a truly free press for democracy. For each story synopsis, we identify not only the names and publication sources of the original news stories, but also the names and campus affiliations of the students and faculty members who both investigated whether the story received any coverage in the corporate media and wrote the original synopsis of it. We identify the student researchers and faculty evaluators, not only to give credit where credit is due—the independent press is so diverse and extensive today that no single small group of people can keep track of it—but also to inspire other students and teachers, who might want to do this kind of work themselves, to join us. Those interested can learn more about how to do so in this volume or on the Project Censored website.32

The brief synopses that follow are not meant to replace the original news reports on which they are based. Instead, they summarize the stories’ key points, hopefully in ways that lead interested readers back to the original reports themselves. The “Note on Research and Evaluation of Censored News Stories,” which follows immediately, provides more detail on the vetting process and how stories are ranked. Following the Top 25 list, the chapter concludes with analytic comments on several overarching themes that cannot be captured in the format of a list.

We hope you will find that this year’s Top 25 stories, by refusing to conform to the status quo assumptions of the corporate media, provide remarkable clarity about significant real-world events in ways that inspire us to meaningful engagement.

We would like to acknowledge Noah Tenney, James F. Tracy, Susan Maret, and Lori Schwarz for providing crucial assistance in the final stage of reviewing all of the Top 25 stories for any corporate coverage. We are grateful for their invaluable contributions.

A NOTE ON RESEARCH AND EVALUATION OF CENSORED NEWS STORIES

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 each 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 thirty-eight 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 through our website.33 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 does not go forward.

Once Project Censored receives the candidate story, we undertake a second round of judgment, using the same criteria and updating the review of any competing corporate coverage. Stories that pass this round of review get posted on our website as Validated Independent News stories (VINs).34

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 national and international panel of judges, who cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from nearly 300 down to 25.

Once the Top 25 have been determined, students in Peter Phillip’s Media Censorship course at Sonoma State University, and Project Censored student interns working with Mickey Huff at Diablo Valley College, 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 a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, among others—offer their insights on the stories’ strengths and weaknesses.353

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, so, deserves greater public attention.

Footnotes:

22 Stuart Hall, “A World at One with Itself,” in The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media, eds. Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, (London: Constable, 1973), 85–94. [Originally published in New Society, June 18, 1970, 1056–58.]

23 Ibid, 91.

24 Ibid, 91, 92.

25 As one remembrance of Hall observed, “He was committed to intervening publically on key political questions: he never followed a narrow academic path but knew theory was an essential lens for critique.” Les Back, “Stuart Hall: A Bright Star,” openDemocracy, February 16, 2014, http://www.opendemocracy.net/les-back/stuart-hall-bright-star.

26 Hall, “World at One,” 85.

27 Ibid., 87–88.

28 Ibid., 90.

29 Peter Phillips, Censored 1998: The News that Didn’t Make the News (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 25.

30 Carl Jensen, Censored: The 1994 Project Censored Yearbook (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), 8. Note: Four previous yearbooks (1989–92) had been self-published in spiral-bound format; Shelburne Press in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, published the 1993 yearbook.

31 Synopses for all 237 of these stories, including citations and links to the original news reports, can be found on the Project Censored website, under the heading “Validated News.” See http://www.projectcensored.org/category/validated-independent-news, which we update regularly through each annual cycle with new Validated Independent News stories from our campus affiliates. For the early history of the campus affiliates program, see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Colleges and Universities Validate Independent News and Challenge Censorship,” in Censored 2011, eds. Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 355–69.

32 See “How to Support Project Censored” on page 327 and online see “Project Censored in the Classroom,” http://www.projectcensored.org/project-censoreds-commitment-to-independent-news-in-the-classroom.

33 For information on how to nominate a story, see “How To Support Project Censored,” at the back of this volume.

34 Validated Independent News stories are archived on the Project Censored website at http://www.projectcensored.org/category/validated-independent-news.

35 For a complete list of the national and international judges and their brief biographies, see the acknowledgments section of this book.