THE TOP CENSORED STORIES AND
MEDIA ANALYSIS OF 2013–2014

1. Ocean Acidification Increasing at Unprecedented Rate

Julia Whitty, “10 Key Findings From a Rapidly Acidifying Arctic Ocean,” Mother Jones, May 7, 2013, http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/05/arctic-ocean-rapidly-getting-more-acidic.

Craig Welch, “Sea Change, The Pacific’s Perilous Turn,” Seattle Times, September 12, 2013, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview.

Eli Kintisch, “Snails Are Dissolving in Pacific Ocean,” ScienceNOW, May 1, 2014, http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/snails-are-dissolving-pacific-ocean.

Student Researcher: Amanda Baxter (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Elaine Wellin (Sonoma State University)

It’s well known that burning fossil fuels in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air. Less understood is that a quarter of this carbon dioxide—about twenty trillion pounds, every year—is absorbed by oceans. Writing for the Seattle Times, Craig Welch invited us to “imagine every person on earth tossing a hunk of CO2 as heavy as a bowling ball into the sea. That’s what we do to the oceans every day.” As Welch and others reported, this carbon dioxide is changing the ocean’s chemistry faster than at any time in human history, in ways that have potentially devastating consequences for both ocean life and for humans who depend on the world’s fisheries as vital sources of protein and livelihood.

When CO2 mixes with seawater, it lowers the pH levels of the water, making it more acidic and sour. In turn this erodes some animals’ shells and skeletons and robs the water of ingredients that those animals require for healthy development. Known as ocean acidification, this phenomenon, Welch wrote, “is helping push the seas toward a great unraveling that threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom, and far faster than first expected.”

The impacts of ocean acidification have been most pronounced in the Arctic and Antarctic, because cold, deep seas absorb more carbon dioxide. Julia Whitty reported for Mother Jones that we’ve enjoyed a free ride so far: “The ocean has swallowed our atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions and slowed global warming during the past few critical decades while we dithered in disbelief.” Now, however, the average acidity of surface ocean waters worldwide is more than 30 percent greater than at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Whitty’s coverage draws on findings from the 2013 Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment.36 The Arctic Ocean is especially vulnerable, she wrote, because short, simple food webs are characteristic of Arctic marine ecosystems. “Energy is channeled in just a few steps from small plants and animals to large predators like seabirds and seals.” As a result, the integrity of the entire system depends heavily on keystone species, including pteropods (also known as sea butterflies) and echinoderms (more commonly known as sea stars and urchins). Although larger creatures like birds and mammals may not be directly affected by ocean acidification, Whitty reported, they will be indirectly affected if their food sources “decline, expand, relocate, or otherwise change in response to ocean acidification.” As ocean acidification impacts the abundance, productivity, and distribution of Arctic marine species, these changes are likely to affect the culture, diet, and livelihoods of indigenous Arctic peoples and other Arctic residents.

The impacts of ocean acidification are not limited to the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans, however. As Eli Klintisch reported for Science magazine, researchers have documented impacts to tiny marine snails in the Pacific Ocean along the west coast of North America. Normally pteropods have smooth shells. As Klintisch described, a study led by Nina Bednaršek of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and her colleagues found that pteropods from thirteen coastal sites between Washington state and southern California had pitted shells. In an article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B,37 Bednaršek and her colleagues reported that more than half of the shells they collected showed signs of dissolving, which made the shells look like “cauliflower” or “sandpaper.” These findings were consistent with previous laboratory studies, which showed that, as seawater becomes more acidic, the change disrupts the shell formation process in young pteropods and dissolves already formed shells in mature ones. Previous studies, Klintisch reported, document that shell damage makes it harder for pteropods and other invertebrates to “fight infection, maintain metabolic chemistry, defend (themselves) against predators, and control buoyancy.”

The impacts of the pteropods’ fast dissolving shells are difficult to predict, but they could be profound. On one hand, pteropods are among the most abundant organisms on the earth; on the other hand, like other small creatures at the bottom of the ocean food chain that have not been closely studied, their role in the ecosystem is not completely understood. We do know that the pteropods examined in the Royal Society study are a key food source for pink salmon. Pink salmon, in turn, are crucial to the North Pacific fishery.

Scientists initially believed that fish would not be directly affected by ocean acidification, but recent research indicates otherwise.38 From clownfish off the coast of Papua New Guinea (remember Nemo?) to walleye pollock (got fish sticks?), scientists have found that exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide scramble fish’s sense of smell, hearing, and sight. Though fish are excellent at altering their blood chemistry to accommodate changing seas, elevated CO2 levels disrupt many fish’s brain signaling. Baby clownfish exposed to high levels of CO2 were five times more likely to die when placed back in the wild. At first scientists thought clownfish were unusually vulnerable to high levels of CO2, but subsequent research showed that many reef fish are similarly affected. Early results, Craig Welch reported, suggest that walleye pollock experience some of the same behavioral problems as reef fish when exposed to high levels of CO2. That, in turn, raises concerns about the North Pacific’s $1 billion-a-year pollock fishery, which accounts for half the nation’s catch of fish.

As Welch wrote in his “Sea Change” article for the Seattle Times, “The most-studied animals remain those we catch. Little is known about the things they eat.” This points to another problematic dimension of ocean acidification. Despite the potential magnitude of the problem—remember, ocean acidification is changing the chemistry of the world’s oceans faster than ever before, and faster than the world’s leading scientists had predicted—there is little funding for research on ocean acidification and its affects. As Welch reported, “Combined nationwide spending on acidification research for eight federal agencies, including grants to university scientists by the National Science Foundation, totals about $30 million a year—less than the annual budget for the coastal Washington city of Hoquiam, population 10,000.”

2. Top Ten US Aid Recipients All Practice Torture

Daniel Wickham, “Top 10 US Aid Recipients All Practice Torture,” Left Foot Forward, January 30, 2014, http://www.leftfootforward.org/2014/01/top-ten-us-aid-recipients-all-practice-torture.

Student Researcher: Alyssa Tufaro (Florida Atlantic University)

Faculty Evaluator: James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University)

The top ten nations slated to receive US foreign assistance in fiscal year 2014 all practice torture and are responsible for major human rights abuses, Daniel Wickham has reported. Wickham based this conclusion on a combination of projected foreign assistance figures from a January 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service, and from findings on torture reported independently by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other major human rights organizations.

A Congressional Research Service report, prepared for the members and committees of Congress, indicated the projected fiscal year 2014 budgets for US foreign assistance by country.39 According to this report, the top ten countries and their expected assistance (in millions of current US dollars) are as follows:

Israel 3,100

Afghanistan 2,200

Egypt 1,600

Pakistan 1,200

Nigeria 693

Jordan 671

Iraq 573

Kenya 564

Tanzania 553

Uganda 456

Wickham reported that, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other leading human rights organizations, each of the listed countries is accused of torturing people in the last year, and at least half are reported to be doing so on a massive scale.

For example, Israel, the top recipient of US financial assistance, has been accused of committing major human rights abuses over the last year, including the torture of Palestinian children. A recent report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel described how detained children “suspected of minor crimes” have been sexually assaulted by Israeli security forces and kept in outdoor cages during the winter. It found that “74 per cent of Palestinian child detainees experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation.”40 A United Nations report indicated that torture is “widespread” in Afghanistan, while Amnesty International documented torture as a “common” practice in Iraq and an “abysmal” human rights situation in Egypt.41 Human Rights Watch reported that torture is practiced with “near-total impunity” in Jordan.42

As Wickham reported, financial assistance to such governments could violate existing US law, which mandates that little or no funding be granted to a country that “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture.”43 The United States remains a signatory of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified in October 1994.44 That the top ten recipients of U.S. foreign assistance “all practice torture raises serious questions,” Wickham wrote, “about the Obama administration’s stance on human rights. If the United States wants to be taken seriously on these issues, a serious re-evaluation of its foreign assistance programme is needed.”

3. WikiLeaks Revelations on Trans-Pacific Partnership Ignored by Corporate Media

Zachary Keck, “Congress May Have Just Killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Diplomat, November 18, 2013, http://thediplomat.com/2013/11/congress-may-have-killed-the-trans-pacific-partnership.

John Robles, “The TPP Is a Corporate Coup D’état—Kristinn Hrafnsson,” Voice of Russia, November 15, 2013, http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_11_15/The-TPP-is-a-corporate-coup-d-tat-Kristinn-Hrafnsson-5798.

John Robles, “Trans Pacific Partnership is Like SOPA on Steroids—Kristinn Hrafnsson,” Voice of Russia, November 23, 2013, http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_11_23/Trans-Pacific-Partnership-is-like-SOPA-on-steroids-Kristinn-Hrafnsson-1552.

“Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP),” WikiLeaks, November 13, 2013, https://wikileaks.org/tpp.

Shannon Tiezzi, “The TPP’s Not Dead Yet (But It’s Close),” Diplomat, December 7, 2013, http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/the-tpps-not-dead-yet-but-its-close.

James Trimarco, “Will a Secretive International Trade Deal Ban GMO Labeling?,” YES! Magazine, October 18 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/will-secretive-international-trade-deal-ban-gmo-labeling-trans-pacific-partnership.

Student Researchers: Dylan Scherpf (Frostburg State University) and Brandon Karns (Sonoma State University)

Faculty and Community Evaluators: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University) and Thadeus Dean Humphrey (community evaluator)

On November 13, 2013, WikiLeaks published a section of a trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty, or TPP. On the surface, the treaty is meant to facilitate trade among Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. However, there are a number of red flags surrounding the agreement.

Eight hundred million people, and one-third of all world trade, stand to be affected by the treaty—and yet only three people from each member nation have access to the entire document. Meanwhile, six hundred “corporate advisors,” representing big oil, pharmaceutical, and entertainment companies, are involved in the writing and negotiations of the treaty.

The influence of these companies is clear, as large sections of the proposal involve corporate law and intellectual property rights, rather than free trade. Corporations could gain the ability to sue governments not only for loss, but prospective loss. At the same time, patents and copyrights would see more protection. This means longer patents, leading to less access to generic drugs, and a lockdown on Internet content. Commenting on the leaked TPP chapter, which details how corporations could seek financial compensation for non-tariff barriers to trade, Arthur Stamoulis of the Citizens Trade Campaign observed, “The Tribunals that adjudicate these cases don’t have the power to literally demand that a government change its policies, but they can award payments worth millions and even billions of dollars, such that if a country doesn’t want additional cases brought against it, it gets the line.”

Furthermore, as James Trimarco wrote in YES! Magazine, observers believe the TPP “could pull the rug out from under national and local governments trying to regulate the sale and import of GMO [genetically modified organism] foods.” Tony Corbo of Food and Water Watch pointed out that because the TPP is being negotiated in secret, it is hard to say whether it would outlaw the labeling or banning of GMO foods. However, the chief US negotiator on agriculture is Islam Siddiqui, a former Monsanto lobbyist, and the US Food and Drug Administration does not currently recognize GMO foods as any different from non-GMO foods and therefore do not see a reason that products containing GMO ingredients should be specially labeled.

Though the WikiLeaks exposure was followed quickly by an anti-TPP push in Congress, the lack of coverage in corporate US media is disconcerting. Japanese, Australian, and even Russian media discuss the TPP openly, while American news sources remained silent—even as the Obama administration attempted to fast-track it through Congress. The Washington Post was alone among the major establishment press in covering the WikiLeak’s revelations about the TPP. For example, Timothy B. Lee reported that the intellectual property section of the treaty is “a wish list for Hollywood and the pharmaceutical industry” and speculated whether the leak might “derail Obama’s trade agenda.”45 However, the Post relegated even this relatively superficial and US-focused perspective to its online blog. Other major papers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal passed on this story of far-reaching global import.

4. Corporate Internet Providers Threaten Net Neutrality

Paul Ausick, “Verizon Goes After FCC in Court Monday,” 24/7 Wall St., September 9, 2013, http://247wallst.com/telecom-wireless/2013/09/09/verizon-goes-after-fcc-in-court-monday.

Cole Stangler, “Your Internet’s in Danger,” In These Times, October 2, 2013, http://inthesetimes.com/article/15689/your_internets_in_danger.

Jennifer Yeh, “Legal Gymnastics Ensue in Oral Arguments for Verizon vs. FCC,” Free Press, September 10, 2013, http://www.freepress.net/blog/2013/09/10/legal-gymnastics-ensue-oral-arguments-verizon-vs-fcc.

Student Researcher: Petra Dillman (College of Marin)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

As Censored 2015 went to press, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had just publicly revealed its proposed new rules for Internet traffic. A 3–2 vote by the FCC opened a four-month window for formal public comments on how strict those rules should be, and galvanized corporate media attention on the issue of net neutrality.46 By contrast, for months leading up to this development, independent journalists, including Paul Ausick, Cole Stangler and Jennifer Yeh, informed the public about the anticipated showdown over net neutrality and the stakes in that battle.

In September of 2013, the federal appeals court of Washington DC began a crucial case brought by Verizon Communications Inc., challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) authority to regulate Internet service providers. Under the FCC’s current Open Internet Order, service providers such as Verizon cannot charge varying prices or give priority to users that access certain websites or may be able to pay more for faster speeds compared to competitors. Verizon claims the FCC violates their First Amendment right and they should have the ability to manage and promote the content they see fit. The FCC has continually ruled that controlling communications is not in the best interest of the public. If the court decides in favor of Verizon and revokes the Open Internet Order, the FCC will have no way to regulate unbiased data access, changing the future for everyday Internet users in the twenty-first century.

 

Cole Stangler, a reporter for In These Times, described how many open Internet advocates fear that service providers “could ultimately enable the construction of a multi-tiered Internet landscape resembling something like cable television—where wealthy conglomerates have access to a mass consumer base and other providers, such as independent media, struggle to reach an audience.” Today the Internet is a critical medium for public communication. Amalia Deloney, grassroots policy director at the Center for Media Justice, pointed out that corporate oversight would pose a threat to public discourse and organizing efforts. The consequent trepidation seems to be that service providers could make specific websites impossibly slow to load, successfully regulating communication among would-be activists. It seems Internet service providers would do more to limit free speech than advocate for it.

Verizon v. FCC has been well covered by both corporate and independent media. However, corporate outlets such as the New York Times and Forbes tend to highlight the business aspects of the case, skimming over vital particulars affecting the public and the Internet’s future.47

5. Bankers Back on Wall Street Despite Major Crimes

Max Stendahl, “Former GE Execs Freed from Prison after Convictions Nixed,” Law360, November 27, 2013, http://www.law360.com/articles/492222/former-ge-execs-freed-from-prison-after-convictions-nixed.

Matt Taibbi, “Another Batch of Wall Street Villains Freed on Technicality,” Rolling Stone, December 4, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/another-batch-of-wall-street-villains-freed-on-technicality-20131204.

Janine Jackson, “Why Aren’t Big Bankers in Jail?” Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 1, 2014, http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/why-arent-big-bankers-in-jail.

Matt Taibbi, “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,” Rolling Stone, February 14, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214.

Student Researchers: Markisha Barber (Frostburg State University), and Noah Tenney and Tania Sanchez (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

A story spanning a decade has come to an unfortunate yet unsurprising end. Three former General Electric bankers—Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg, and Peter Grimm—had been convicted in 2012 for rigging auctions of municipal bonds, essentially stealing from projects intended to build public schools, hospitals, libraries, and nursing homes in virtually every US state.48 However, in November 2013, those convictions were reversed on a technicality: Because it took federal prosecutors so long to build the massive case, the statute of limitations ran out. The three men were released from prison the next day—just in time, as a defense attorney noted, to be home for Thanksgiving dinner.

These men were part of a decade-long scheme that bilked cities and towns of funds for public-works projects by paying kickbacks to brokers and manipulating bids. Between August 1999 and November 2006, Carollo, Goldberg, and Grimm participated in countless rigged bids via telephone. Like mafiosi, they used a secret language and code words to keep their underground business low-key. Prosecutors accumulated over 570,000 recorded phone conversations that directly linked the men to fraudulent activity. Evidence at trial established that they cost municipalities around the country millions of dollars.

This type of white-collar immorality is a major issue because cash-strapped municipalities could have used the stolen money to provide essential services. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone called this fraud the equivalent of robbing a church fund to pay for lap dances. Taibbi, however, is among a few reporters—including Paul Burton and Jonathan Hemmerdinger of the Bond Buyer—to consistently inform the public on these crimes and to point out the perhaps insurmountable obstacles faced by even an activist US Department of Justice in getting convictions. “It really is hard to put these guys away,” Taibbi wrote. “It’s even harder to keep them there.”

Meanwhile, as Janine Jackson reported for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Extra!, “While there have been substantive inquiries into the wrongdoing of investment banks and auditors, those calling for jail time are often dismissed as irrational, driven by ‘blood lust’ (Washington Post, 9/12/13), ‘anger’ (Chicago Tribune, 11/30/13) or ‘vengeance’ (Washington Post, 11/18/13).” Various media outlets have explained that, while bad business decisions are not crimes, knowingly selling fraudulent mortgages and other dubious financial products is punishable by jail time. People have pointed to multiple reasons for the lack of prosecutions, such as regulatory agencies stopping key functions and non-deterrent settlements from government watchdogs. Media outlets have also made the case that imprisonment and increased liability would be ineffective, and many press accounts appear to be arguing for the legality of CEO actions. As Jackson reported, “Many press accounts seem more intent on explaining why what CEOs did wasn’t a crime than on asking whether it should be.”

However, outlets acknowledging the human victims of Wall Street wrongdoing have been less dismissive of imprisonment. Calls for jail time can be seen as demands for equal treatment under law. For example, in February 2013, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone argued against the emerging distinction between “an arrestable class and an unarrestable class.”

6. The Deep State: Government “without Reference to the Consent of the Governed”

Mike Lofgren, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” Moyers & Company, February 21, 2014, http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state.

Student Researcher: Alexander P. Ruhe (Burlington College)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (Burlington College)

It is no secret that concerned citizens are condemning the United States government’s lack of transparency, accountability, and honest constituent representation. Reporting for Moyers & Company, Mike Lofgren, a congressional staff member for twenty-eight years specializing in national security, addressed the issue of the “deep state” that undemocratically orchestrates unchecked private agendas, while corporate media distract the public’s attention by focusing on traditional Washington partisan politics. Lofgren contended that, although the deep state is “neither omniscient nor invincible,” it is a “relentlessly well entrenched,” “hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed.”

Exploiting the world’s resources and governments with criminal impunity, a wealthy elite—sporting an estimated $32 trillion in tax-exempt offshore havens—are the deep dark secret of plutocratic imperialism, operating behind more visible, privately controlled government representatives. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the House Financial Services Committee incoming chairman in 2010, openly flouted constitutional rights when he stated, “My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

The establishment news media labels Congress as the most hopelessly deadlocked since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the American Civil War. However, corporate media do little to draw attention to the hidden wealthy elites who undemocratically control our government, because these elites own the major media. It is only the deep state’s protectiveness toward its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. The US needs brave, determined, and well-supported leaders to demand implementation of “loophole” proof laws in a restructured system of checks and balances in order to effectively halt the unethical influence of wealthy powers on our democratic representatives.

7. FBI Dismisses Murder Plot against Occupy Leaders as NSA and Big Business Crack Down on Dissent

Dave Lindorff, “FBI Document—‘[DELETED]’ Plots to Kill Occupy Leaders ‘If Deemed Necessary,’” WhoWhatWhy, June 27, 2013, http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/06/27/fbi-document-deleted-plots-to-kill-occupy-leaders-if-deemed-necessary.

Beau Hodai, “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch/DBA Press, May 2013, http://www.prwatch.org/files/Dissent or Terror FINAL.pdf.

Alex Kane, “How America’s National Security Apparatus—in Partnership With Big Corporations—Cracked Down on Dissent,” AlterNet, May 21, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/how-americas-national-security-apparatus-partnership-big-corporations-cracked-down.

Student Researchers: Danielle Davis and Andie Bugajski (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Robert Switky and Melinda Milligan (Sonoma State University)

In October 2011, when the Occupy movement arrived in Houston, protesters were subject to local and federal surveillance, infiltration by police provocateurs, and police assault. Months later, Dave Lindorff reported that a document obtained in December 2012 from the Houston FBI office shows that the agency was aware of a plot to assassinate Occupy movement leaders—and did nothing about it.

The document, obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington DC–based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, reads in part:

An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified [DELETED] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. [DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.

As of June 2013, Lindorff reported, the FBI knew the identity of the person(s) who planned the sniper attacks, but had not released any names. The head of the FBI’s media office, Paul Bresson, explained, “The FOIA documents that you reference are redacted in several places pursuant to FOIA and privacy laws that govern the release of such information so therefore I am unable to help fill in the blanks. . . . [I]f the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action.”

 

Occupy Houston activists have speculated that the wording “if deemed necessary” might indicate that the unidentified plotter was an organization, such as the police or a private security group. Documents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security identify Occupy as a “terrorist” activity.

The FBI has a record of orchestrating attacks on citizen organizations deemed to be threats. For example, the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s revealed that the FBI orchestrated local police attacks (in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York) on leaders of the Black Panther Party.

Alex Kane of AlterNet wrote that Beau Hodai’s SourceWatch report provided “an eye-opening look into how US counter-terrorism agencies monitored the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012.” Government documents, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press from the National Security Agency and other government offices, revealed “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ operations” and negative attitudes toward activists and other citizens.

For instance, the largest Occupy Phoenix action took place in early December 2011, outside of meetings held there by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC hired forty-nine active but off-duty Phoenix Police Department (PPD) officers and nine retired PPD officers to act as private security during ALEC’s meetings.

The upshot, Hodai reported, is “the wholesale criminalization of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of American citizens who have dared to voice opposition to what is increasingly viewed as the undue influence of private corporate/financial interests in the functions of public government.”

8. Corporate News Ignores Connections between Extreme
Weather and Global Warming

Peter Hart, “Weather—Without Climate,” Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), December 2, 2013, http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/weather-without-climate.

Dahr Jamail, “The Climate Change Scorecard,” Tomdispatch, December 17, 2013, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175785/tomgram%3A_dahr_jamail,_the_climate_change_scorecard.

Jamie Henn, “In the Wake of Haiyan, We Must Divest from Fossil Fuels,” YES! Magazine, November 12, 2013, http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/divesting-from-disaster.

Student Researchers: Noah Tenney, Kayla Silva, Cydney Shorkend, and Carla Cardenas (Sonoma State University), and Nicholas DePietro (Florida Atlantic University)

Faculty Evaluators: Peter Phillips, Ervand Peterson, and Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University), and James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University)

As extreme weather becomes increasingly common, it has received a fair share of coverage during network news broadcasts. Often missing from these reports, however, is any mention of climate change and its connection to extreme weather events. As Peter Hart reported for Extra!, the nightly news covers extreme weather events as unusual and newsworthy, but usually without explanation of climate change as an underlying cause.

A study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that extreme weather events in 2013 resulted in 450 news segments, of which only sixteen mentioned climate change. As for specific evening news shows, CBS Evening News only used terms like “global warming” and “greenhouse gases” in two of 114 extreme weather reports. ABC World News only mentioned climate change in eight reports out of 200, and NBC Nightly News only mentioned it in six reports out of 136. There was also a CBS report on the unsupported notion that there had been a “pause” in global warming.

There continues to be serious scientific debate on the extent to which current weather events and climate change should be linked. Nonetheless, a majority of the American public still makes the connection between climate and weather despite the media’s failure to report on it.

Writing for Tomdispatch, Dahr Jamail reported on the increasingly high stakes of ignoring the scientific evidence for climate change. Jamail reported the perspectives of scientific experts who do not figure in corporate news coverage of our “extreme weather.” Concerns range from the costs of Arctic methane releases to a December 2013 study by eighteen eminent scientists concluding that “continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice.”49

Although Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in November 2013, received ample corporate news coverage, Jamie Henn reported for YES! Magazine that it should not be thought of as a “natural” disaster but, instead, as a “climate disaster”—driven by coal, oil, and gas companies that “continue to pour billions of tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, disrupting our climate.” Henn reported on the growing fossil fuel divestment campaign that now includes over 500 universities, cities, and religious institutions across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. “It’s time,” Henn wrote, “to tell our public institutions to divest from disaster.”

Though climate engineering is often touted as a technological answer to climate change, German researchers have argued that attempts to artificially engineer the earth’s climate would likely cause worse effects than presently forecasted climate change trends. David Keller and colleagues from the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, reported findings based on an earth system model that replicated five different strategies to reduce global warming and help prevent wide-scale climate change. Climate engineering, or reducing the levels of sunlight hitting the planet’s surface through “solar radiation management,” could change rainfall patterns, worsen conditions in arid zones, or cause irreversible harm once the technology’s use ceased. After considering other technological fixes, the study’s authors concluded that any such measures would have limited effectiveness without further cutbacks in carbon-based greenhouse emissions.

9. US Media Hypocrisy in Covering Ukraine Crisis

Robert Perry, “America’s Staggering Hypocrisy,” Consortium News, March 4, 2014, http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/04/americas-staggering-hypocrisy.

Stephen F. Cohen, “Distorting Russia: How the American Media Misrepresent Putin, Sochi and Ukraine,” Nation, March 3, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia.

Nafeez Ahmed, “Ukraine Crisis is about Great Power Oil, Gas Pipeline Rivalry,” Guardian, March 6, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/06/ukraine-crisis-great-power-oil-gas-rivals-pipelines.

Student Researcher: Bryan Brennan (Diablo Valley College)

Faculty Evaluator: Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

Russia’s occupation of Crimea has caused US corporate media and government officials to call for a stern US response. Secretary of State John Kerry declaimed the Russian intervention as “a nineteenth-century act in the twenty-first century.” What Russia’s US critics seem to forget, Robert Parry reported, is the United States’ own history of overthrowing democratic governments, including the illegal invasion of Iraq, which Kerry supported.

Corporate media also fail to acknowledge that Putin ordered the occupation of Kiev after a coup, led at least partly by neo-Nazis—conditions arguably less criminal than the US invasion of Iraq, which the US legitimized with false claims. “If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected president,” wrote Parry, “then why hasn’t the US government turned over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of Iraq?”50

Further, Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev for his life after the coup and sought Russia’s help quelling the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, citing their oppression of the country’s native Russian population. It was only after this that Putin requested the Russian parliament’s permission to deploy Russian troops in to stop the expansion of neo-Nazi control to areas that have deep historical ties to Russia.

 

Nevertheless, while downplaying these details, US corporate media accuse Russia of violating international law. “The overriding hypocrisy of the Washington Post, Secretary Kerry and indeed nearly all of Official Washington, is their insistence that the United States actually promotes the principle of democracy or, for that matter, the rule of international law,” wrote Parry. “Those are at best situational ethics when it comes to advancing US interests around the world.” In a subsequent report, Parry wrote that, despite evidence to the contrary, US policy makers and corporate media have intentionally neglected to report that neo-Nazi militias played a central role in the February 22, 2014, overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. Parry reported, “The US media’s take on the Ukraine crisis is that a ‘democratic revolution’ ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, followed by a ‘legitimate’ change of government. So, to mention the key role played by neo-Nazi militias in the putsch or to note that Yanukovych was democratically elected—and then illegally deposed—gets you dismissed as a ‘Russian propagandist.’”51

Parry is not alone in the view that US media outlets exacerbate conflict with propaganda to vilify Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. As Stephen Cohen reported, from coverage of living conditions and high terror tension at the Sochi Olympics to the bullying cruel regime of Putin and its strong arming of Ukraine, the US corporate media have painted Putin and Russia as public enemy number one, thereby reviving Cold War rhetoric and tactics. Putin and Russia are depicted as militant bullies, rather than a leader and a country trying to preserve control over strategic oil assets to maintain the country’s sphere of influence.

The corporate media’s coverage of Putin and the Ukraine is part of a larger pattern of bias identified by Cohen. He has described the positive US press coverage enjoyed by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, at a time when “the US media adopted Washington’s narrative that almost everything President Boris Yeltsin did was a ‘transition from communism to democracy’ and thus in America’s best interests.” Whereas the US media presented Yeltsin as pursuing legitimate politics and national interests, the frame that US media now use to portray Putin and Russia is that Putin’s Russia has no legitimate politics and national interests, even on its own borders, as in Ukraine. “American media on Russia today,” Cohen wrote, “are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.”

A resurgence of cold war rhetoric may make better sense against the backdrop of geopolitical oil interests, as analyzed by Nafeez Ahmed. As he reported, Ukraine finds itself between the two superpowers and their ongoing struggle for influence in the Eurasian oil market. Russia’s Gazprom Company already controls roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. In 2013, Ukraine signed a $10 billion shale gas deal with US-based Chevron in hopes of ending its dependency on Russian gas by 2020. Professor R. Craig Nation, director of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the US Army War College, stated in a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) publication, “Ukraine is increasingly perceived to be critically situated in the emerging battle to dominate energy transport corridors linking the oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian basin to European markets.” The Obama administration has since spent over $5 billion to “ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” For those who are pondering whether we face the prospect of a New Cold War,” Ahmed concluded, “a better question might be—did the Cold War ever really end?”

10. World Health Organization Suppresses Report on
Iraqi Cancers and Birth Defects

Denis Halliday, “WHO Refuses to Publish Report on Cancers and Birth Defects in Iraq Caused by Depleted Uranium Ammunition,” Global Research, September 13, 2013, http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-refuses-to-publish-report-on-cancers-and-birth-defects-in-iraq-caused-by-depleted-uranium-ammunition/5349556.

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, “What’s Delaying the WHO Report on Iraqi Birth Defects?” ZNet, June 12, 2013, http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/whats-delaying-the-who-report-on-iraqi-birth-defects-by-mozhgan-savabieasfahani.

Student Researcher: Jessica Clark (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)

In contradiction with its own mandate, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to suppress evidence uncovered in Iraq that US military use of depleted uranium (DU) and other weapons have not only killed many civilians but are also the cause of an epidemic of birth defects and other public health issues. By refusing to release the report publicly, the WHO effectively protects the US military and its government from accountability for the resulting public health catastrophe.

A WHO and Iraq Ministry of Health report on cancers and birth defects was set to be released in November 2012, but officials have indefinitely delayed that report’s release. To this date, Denis Halliday wrote, the WHO report remains “classified.” According to the WHO, the report’s release has been delayed because its analysis needs to be evaluated by a “team of independent scientists.”

Halliday’s report drew comparisons between the Iraqi case and the legacy of health issues arising from US use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the reality in Iraq, Mozhgan Savabieasfahani contended, is that “Iraq is poisoned.” For example, she wrote, “[T]hirty-five million Iraqis wake up every morning to a living nightmare of childhood cancers, adult cancers and birth defects. Familial cancers, cluster cancers and multiple cancers in the same individual have become frequent in Iraq.”52 Why, then, does the WHO refuse to release its study? “One possible answer,” she wrote, “was suggested on May 26 by the Guardian.”53

It reported the recent comments of Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations: “The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers.”

Containing information that is “essential” to inform public health policy in Iraq, the WHO report, Savabieasfahani wrote, “will enable researchers to collaborate, ask the most relevant questions and spearhead research to remedy this health emergency.”

11. Wealthy Donors and Corporations Set Think Tanks’ Agendas

Rick Carp, “Who Pays for Think Tanks? Corporate and Foundation Money Often Comes with an Agenda,” Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), July 1, 2013, http://fair.org/home/who-pays-for-think-tanks.

“Not Just Koch Brothers: New Study Reveals Funders behind Climate Change Denial Effort,” Science Daily, December 20, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131220154511.htm.

Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of US Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations,” Climatic Change 122, no. 4 (February 2014): 681–94, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-013-1018-7.

Student Researchers: Devin Elliott and Mitchell Monack (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Joseph Anderson (Monterey Peninsula College), James J. Dean (Sonoma State University), and Stanley Falkow (Stanford University)

Think tanks provide information and analysis to policy makers and the public, making them increasingly influential institutions in our political process. However, many think tanks—including the Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, and the RAND Corporation, among others—receive significant financial backing from extremely wealthy corporations and/or individuals. Because the law does not require public disclosure of donors’ identities, these relationships raise the issue of whether think tanks’ analyses and recommendations are “tainted by donor agendas,” according to a July 2013 report by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).

For example, the Center for American Progress instructs its analysts to consult the organization’s development staff (who maintain the closest contacts with donors and potential donors) before publishing findings that might upset its contributors.

 

In its study of the nation’s top twenty-five think tanks, FAIR finds that all have received money from corporations, foundations, government, or major individual donors. In many cases, these donors not only get a tax deduction for their contributions, they also can influence the think tank’s formulation of policy.

FAIR found that almost two-thirds of the top twenty-five think tanks have taken money from oil companies, with thirteen funded by ExxonMobil, nine by Chevron, and four by Shell. Representatives of Big Energy also serve as members of many think tanks’ boards. Similarly, half of the top twenty-five think tanks receive money from weapon manufacturers. And, overall, all the think tanks in the FAIR study appear to be influenced by the corporations, foundations, and billionaires who fund them and who seek government policies that favor their own private interests.

In a separate study, Robert J. Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University, exposed “the organizational underpinnings and funding behind the powerful climate change countermovement.” According to Brulle’s study, conservative foundations (including the Searle Freedom Trust, the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard Charitable Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation) have bankrolled climate change denial. However, since 2008, major foundations, including the Koch-affiliated foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation, have pulled back from publicly visible funding; instead, funding has been channeled through untraceable sources, including organizations such as the DonorsTrust foundation. According to Brulle’s data, approximately 75 percent of the income of climate change–denying organizations now comes from “unidentifiable sources.” Brulle explained:

Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight—often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians—but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations. If you want to understand what’s driving this movement, you have to look at what’s going on behind the scenes. . . . The real issue here is one of democracy. . . . Without a free flow of accurate information, democratic politics and government accountability become impossible. . . . Powerful funders are supporting the campaign to deny scientific findings about global warming and raise public doubts about the roots and remedies of this massive global threat. At the very least, American voters deserve to know who is behind these efforts.

12. Pentagon Awash in Money Despite Serious Audit Problems

Dave Gilson, “Can’t Touch This,” Mother Jones, December 2013, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/pentagon-budget-deal-charts-cuts.

Student Researcher: Jeannette Acevedo (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

Congress is expanding the Pentagon’s 2014 budget by $32 billion. The Pentagon currently receives over $600 billion, when its current budget is combined with supplemental war funding. One out of every five US tax dollars is spent on defense, cumulatively more than the total of the next ten countries’ defense budgets combined. Where does the money go? “The exact answer is a mystery,” wrote Dave Gilson for Mother Jones. “That’s because the Pentagon’s books are a complete mess.” As the Government Accountability Office dryly noted, the Pentagon has “serious financial management problems” that render its financial statements “inauditable.”

Despite a 1997 requirement that federal agencies submit to annual audits, the Pentagon, Gilson reported, claims it will not “achieve audit readiness” until 2017.

Lack of budgetary accountability has led to risky investments by the Pentagon, Gilson reported, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for example. As Gilson summarizes, the F-35 program is “years behind schedule, hugely over budget, and plagued with problems that have earned it a reputation as the biggest defense boondoggle in history.”

The Mother Jones report also analyzed how congressional interests and coalitions contributed to the protection of the Pentagon budget, even at a time when Congress was imposing spending reductions to food stamps and other mandatory social programs. Though fiscal conservatives in Congress favored defense cuts (like their liberal dove counterparts), they aligned with conservative hawks to impose social cuts, rather than reduce the Pentagon’s budget. Similarly, those conservative hawks found allies among liberal hawks, who were not supportive of domestic cuts, but also wanted more money for military spending. As Gilson observed, military spending was “the glue holding the budget deal together.”

13. Lawsuit Challenges Nuclear Power Industry Immunity from Liability in Nuclear Accidents

“Fukushima: Landmark Lawsuit Filed against General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi,” News Network and Broadcasting Collective (NSNBC) International, January 30, 2014, http://nsnbc.me/2014/01/30/fukushima-landmark-lawsuit-filed-general-electric-toshiba-hitachi.

Faith Aquino, “Senior Advisor for Fukushima Cleanup Says Foreign Assistance Needed,” Japan Daily Press, October 17, 2013, http://japandailypress.com/senior-adviser-for-fukushima-cleanup-says-foreign-assistance-needed-1738025.

Chris Carrington, “Why the Obama Administration Will Not Admit that Fukushima Radiation is Poisoning Americans,” Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-the-obama-administration-will-not-admit-that-fukushima-radiation-is-poisoning-americans/5365626.

Student Researchers: Alfredo Rivas (San Francisco State University) and Paige Vreeburg (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Emily Acosta Lewis (Sonoma State University)

A lawsuit filed by lawyers on behalf of 1,415 plaintiffs, including 38 residents of Fukushima and 357 persons from outside Japan, holds not only the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) but also Toshiba, Hitachi, and General Electric responsible for the 2011 meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Historically, manufacturers and operators of nuclear power plants have been granted immunities in liability for accidents, because no insurance company anywhere in the world would agree to insure the power plants when the industry first developed. As NSNBC International reported, the Fukushima case is a “landmark challenge” to nuclear power plant manufacturers’ immunity from liability in nuclear accidents.

Toshiba, Hitachi, and General Electric manufactured the tanks developed to hold radioactive fluids back in the 1970s. Among the evidence in support of the plaintiffs’ case is a report by Japan’s Fisheries Research Agency that found radiation levels in sea life south of the plant to be 124 times more than the threshold considered safe for human consumption.

The Japanese government and TEPCO have sought to keep the situation under wraps, and the public is largely unaware of the nuclear power industry’s irresponsible actions. Inaccurate reports of the radiation damage from TEPCO, along with inadequate manpower to deal with the crisis, have resulted in poor attempts to reverse the radiation damage that resulted from the meltdown of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the March 2011 tsunami.

A senior advisor of the Fukushima cleanup, Barbara Judge, has said that foreign assistance in dealing with the nuclear cleanup is needed; however, TEPCO has withheld accurate radiation readings of the leaks, making foreign assistance impossible. The resulting poor cleanup efforts have further damaged ecosystems around Fukushima without proper supportive action to repair them.

General Electric (GE) is not being held accountable for its role in the Fukushima disaster, Chris Carrington reported, because of its ties to the Obama administration. General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt was appointed to lead the United States Economic Recovery Advisory Board by President Barack Obama in 2009. Five of the six nuclear reactors used at Fukushima were GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor vessels; three of these were not only supplied but also built by General Electric. Since 1972, nuclear reactors of the type have been considered safety risks due to their particular vulnerability to explosion and rupture from hydrogen buildup.

14. Accumulating Evidence of Ongoing Wireless
Technology Health Hazards

“Two Important New Papers Show Mobile Phone Use Does Cause an Increase in Brain Tumours,” Powerwatch (UK), October 16, 2013, http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/news/20131016-hardell-carlberg-papers.asp.

James F. Tracy, “Health Impacts of RF Radiation: Media Blackout on Smart Meter Danger,” Global Research, January 21, 2014, http://www.globalresearch.ca/health-impacts-of-rf-radiation-us-media-blackout-on-smart-meter-dangers/5365598.

Student Researchers: Julian Klein (San Francisco State University) and Casey Lewis (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

Wireless phones emit radio-frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMFs) when in use. In May 2011, after the consideration of laboratory studies, studies of long-term use of wireless phones, and data on the incidence of brain tumors, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded RF-EMFs to be a “possible” human carcinogen.54 Other studies have shown an association between long-term mobile and cordless phone use with glioma and acoustic neuroma. In October 2013, Powerwatch, a United Kingdom–based watchdog focused on the health risks posed by electromagnetic fields, reported that two new research articles provide further evidence of mobile phone use as a cause of increased brain tumors.

The first paper showed that RF-EMF exposure from mobile (and cordless) phones should be regarded as a class 1 human carcinogen (cancer-causing agent), as defined by the WHO’s cancer research arm. The study’s authors concluded that current exposure guidelines are in urgent need of revision.55

The second study aimed to assess the relationship between “especially long-term (>10 years) use of wireless phones” and the development of malignant brain tumors. According to the authors, this study “confirmed previous results” of the association between mobile phone use and malignant brain tumors, and supported the hypothesis that RF-EMFs “play a role both in the initiation and promotion stages of carcinogenesis”—in other words, the process by which normal cells are transformed into cancer cells.56

Mobile phones are not the only wireless technology that poses health threats. As James F. Tracy reported, the US has seen a virtual media blackout on the radiation dangers of smart meters. In January 2014, Tracy reported that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer stated that “radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields are possibly carcinogenic to humans based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, associated with wireless cell phone use.”

Smart meters are a central element in the creation of a “smart grid” that President Obama has made a priority.57 In his article, Tracy wrote that the media blackout is likely intended to keep the public unaware of not only the health dangers associated with smart meters, but also potentially hidden agendas, including the meters’ potential for “social control” through “energy rationing and surveillance.” A “more immediate” motivation, he wrote, is “simply profit and continued media monopoly control of public opinion and discourse.”

Tracy reported on a content analysis of US newspapers between May 31, 2011, the date that the WHO declared RF a class 2B carcinogen, and June 2014. Of the 839 articles on the topic published in that time, less than 10 percent (eighty-two articles) mention both “smart meters” and “carcinogen” or “carcinogenic” in the same report. Of these, sixty-five articles appeared in Canadian, Australian, or UK papers. Meanwhile, corporate news coverage in the US reassured the public that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had found smart meters to be within its safety standards, that they impose no danger to one’s health, and that they are “environmental friendly.” “With potential continued revenue growth,” Tracy concluded, the telecommunications industry shows little interest in “raising questions and relaying information that can safeguard public health and allow citizens to ask intelligent questions concerning the health of themselves and their loved ones.”58

15. Reporting Miscarriages, Criminalizing Pregnant Women’s Bodies

Tara Culp-Ressler, “Kansas May Force Doctors to Report Women’s Miscarriages to the State Health Department,” ThinkProgress, March 24, 2014, http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/03/24/3418085/kansas-miscarriage-reporting.

Student Researcher: Alandra Brown (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluator: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

A proposed bill before the Kansas state legislature would require women to report miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy. This has been described as the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to House Bill 2613, doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department, Tara Culp-Ressler reported for ThinkProgress.

The initial purpose of HB 2613 was to provide an alternative to the state’s current stillbirth certificate. Some parents believe the existing law overemphasizes their child’s death in a way that is emotionally painful. Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook, who happens to be among the state’s most active and enthusiastic abortion opponents, added the miscarriage-reporting requirement. The bill’s original author, Kansas representative John Doll, subsequently withdrew his support from the legislation: “I can’t support the bill as it was amended. I think it waters it down and makes it into a political statement. I wanted a bill to help give closure to some families—I didn’t want it to have anything to do with pro-life or pro-choice issues.”

No other state has enacted a mandatory miscarriage reporting law, Culp-Ressler reported, although Virginia considered similar legislation in 2009. “We never see these bills,” said Elizabeth Nash, the states issue manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization that works to advance reproductive health including abortion rights. “The whole point,” Nash explained, “is to further the idea of the fetus as a person. It’s a way of establishing the groundwork for making abortion harder to get, and eventually illegal.”

In addition to adding the mandatory miscarriage reporting amendment to HB 2613, Sen. Pilcher-Cook has also sought to weaken the state’s sex education laws, levy a sales tax on abortion procedures, and prevent the state’s abortion restrictions from including exceptions for rape and incest.

Culp-Ressler reported that National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) has documented “hundreds of cases of women being held criminally liable for decisions they made while pregnant, particularly if they later suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth.”59 Ultimately, Culp-Ressler concluded, enacting additional regulations related to the end of a pregnancy, like Kansas HB 2613, “turn pregnant women into suspects in the eyes of the law.”

16. The Beef Industry’s “Feedlot Feedback Loop”

Brad Jacobson, “They’re Feeding WHAT to Cows?” OnEarth, December 12, 2013, http://www.onearth.org/articles/2013/12/you-wont-believe-the-crap-literally-that-factory-farms-feed-to-cattle.

Paul Solotaroff, “In the Belly of the Beast,” Rolling Stone, December 10, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/feature/belly-beast-meat-factory-farms-animal-activists.

Carey L. Biron, “US Plans to Speed Poultry Slaughtering, Cut Inspections,” Inter Press Service, March 7, 2014, http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/03/u-s-planning-speed-poultry-slaughtering-cut-inspections.

Student Researchers: Brendan Barber and Mitsi Patino (College of Marin), and Jazmine Flores (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators: Susan Rahman (College of Marin) and Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

The beef industry increasingly feeds cattle “poultry litter,” scraped from chicken coop floors, a practice that, as Brad Jacobson reported for OnEarth, “risks the spread of mad cow disease—yet the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] has done nothing to stop it.”

After a string of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) scares in the 1980s and ’90s, many precautions were taken to prevent further outbreaks. Mad cow disease affects humans slowly but fatally, and cooking beef thoroughly does not get rid of the bacteria.

In 1997, the FDA made it illegal to feed dead cows to living cows, the main cause of the disease. In response to those laws, the beef industry teamed up with the poultry industry to exploit a major loophole in the 1997 law. Jacobson describes a “Feedlot Feedback Loop”: first, the poultry industry feeds the dead remains of cattle to chickens and other poultry; the mess created by poultry, known as “litter,” is then sold to the cattle producer who feed it to cattle that the public eventually consumes as beef.

In early 2003, the FDA proposed to ban the use of poultry litter as cattle feed. Big Agriculture opposed this, and the FDA revised its policy. Instead of a permanent ban, the FDA required chicken-feed manufacturers to agree that they would leave out the riskiest, most infectious bovine tissues.

Industry officials assert that there has been no rise in recorded cases of mad cow disease, but the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) tests less than 1 percent of the thirty-five million cattle slaughtered annually for the bacterium that causes mad cow disease, making industry claims especially difficult to assess.

 

Aggravating the lack of adequate third-party inspection of industry practices, the government is now finalizing the decision on whether or not a proposed USDA plan for speeding and cutting the inspection of poultry should be passed. The poultry industry has been seeking these changes for years. The proposed rule would allow the speed in chicken processing to increase from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute. Faster speeds reduce the extent of inspection. In addition, the number of federal inspectors in processing plants would be cut by 75 percent. In place of federal inspectors, company employees—who do not receive the same level of training or have independence—would take on inspection duties.

The proposed plan not only jeopardizes consumer health but also worker safety. With high processing speeds, the probability of accidents and worker injuries also increase. The increased speed will only make the job more dangerous.

At the time of this report, the Obama administration seems to be in favor of the proposed rule.

17. 2016 Will Find Gaza out of Drinking Water

Zander Swinburne, “The Water Is Running out in Gaza: Humanitarian Catastrophe Looms as Territory’s Only Aquifer Fails,” Independent, June 30, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-water-is-running-out-in-gaza-humanitarian-catastrophe-looms-as-territorys-only-aquifer-fails-8679987.html.

Wissam Nassar, “In Pictures: Gaza Water Crisis Worsens,” Al Jazeera, May 12, 2014, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2014/03/pictures-gaza-water-crisis-wors-201432673053211982.html.

“Over 90% of Water in Gaza Unfit for Drinking,” B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), February 9, 2014, http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20140209_gaza_water_crisis.

Student Researcher: Pippa Whelan (College of Marin)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (College of Marin)

In Gaza, 1.7 million Palestinians currently live without clean drinking water. With no perennial streams and low rainfall, Gaza relies on a single aquifer for all of its fresh water. The coastal aquifer, Zander Swinburne reported, is contaminated with sewage, chemicals, and seawater. The Palestinian Water Authority recently determined that 95 percent of the water in Gaza does not meet World Health Organization (WHO) standards for human consumption. The polluted water causes chronic health problems and contributes to high rates of child mortality. One study estimated that 26 percent of disease in Gaza results from contaminated water supplies.60 “A crippling Egyptian-Israeli blockade on Gaza has exacerbated the problem,” Al Jazeera reported.

A recent United Nations report warned that the water situation for Palestinians in Gaza was “critical.” According to that report, “the aquifer could become unusable as early as 2016, with the damage irreversible by 2020.”61 Even with immediate remedial action, the 2012 report stated, the aquifer will take decades to recover; otherwise it would “take centuries for the aquifer to recover.”

As a result of the contaminated water supply, Al Jazeera reported, the Palestinian Ministry of Health recommends that residents boil water before using it for drinking or cooking. However, residents contend that even with boiling, tap water is “not fit to drink,” and, in many cases, is simply unavailable. According to people in the territory, Zander Swinburne reported, “during the summer months water might spurt out of their taps every other day . . . pressure is often so low that those living on upper floors might see just a trickle.”62

Instead, according to United Nations estimates, over 80 percent of Gazans buy their drinking water, with some families paying as much as a third of their household income, according to June Kunugi, a special representative of the UN children’s fund UNICEF. Palestinians purchase more than a quarter of their water from Israel’s national water company, Mekorot, Al Jazeera reported. Mekorot sells Gaza 4.2 million cubic meters of water annually.

Contaminated water also affects agriculture in Gaza. For example, high levels of salinity mean that most citrus crops can no longer be grown.

The Egyptian–Israeli blockade of Gaza intensifies the water problems. Materials needed for repairs of water and waste facilities cannot be imported. Lack of reliable electricity has forced 85 percent of agricultural wells out of operation, contributing to the risk of drought for more than 30,000 square acres of crops.

As B’Tselem—the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories—reported, there is discrimination in water allocation: “Israeli citizens receive much more water than Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”63 Water from shared resources is unequally divided, and in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians have access to only seventy to ninety liters per person per day—fewer than both the WHO-recommended minimum of one hundred liters per person per day and the average Israeli allocation of 100 to 230 liters per person each day.

18. National Database of Police Killings Aims for Accountability

Bethania Palma Markus, “Journalist Calls for Accountability in Police Killings,” Truthout, March 18, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22538-journalist-calls-for-accountability-in-police-killings.

Student Researcher: Shasha-Gaye Santiago (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluator: Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks how many police officers die in the line of duty, it keeps no such record for how many civilians are killed by police each year. Recognizing a significant gap in the public records of civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers, D. Brian Burghart, the editor of the Reno News & Review and a journalism instructor at University of Nevada, decided to create a public database. “In 2014, how could we not know how many people our government kills on our streets every year?” And he launched Fatal Encounters, a website that, as Bethania Palma Markus reported for Truthout, “tracks and tallies when cops take lives” and “invites the public to help build the database.” Burghart has compiled a list of police agencies across the country to facilitate public record requests about fatal incidents.

19. Agribusiness Giants Attempt to Silence and Discredit Scientists Whose Research Reveals Herbicides’ Health Threats

E. Ann Clark, “Orwellian Airbrushing of Scientific Record,” GMWatch, November 30, 2013, http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15192-orwellian-airbrushing-ofscientific-record.

James Corbett, “Genetic Fallacy: How Monsanto Silences Scientific Dissent,” Corbett Report, December 3, 2013, http://www.corbettreport.com/genetic-fallacy-how-monsanto-silences-scientific-dissent.

Rachel Aviv, “A Valuable Reputation,” New Yorker, February 10, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv.

“Silencing the Scientist: Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta,” Democracy Now!, February 21, 2014, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/21/silencing_the_scientist_tyrone_hayes_on.

Student Researcher: Katelyn Parks (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Independent journalists, including E. Ann Clark, James Corbett, Rachel Aviv, and Democracy Now!, document how Big Agriculture giants Monsanto and Syngenta have attempted to silence the findings and destroy the reputations of scientists whose research shows that the companies’ herbicides pose serious threats to human health.

In September 2012, Dr. Gilles-Éric Séralini published research findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology. These findings showed the toxic impact of Monsanto’s herbicide and genetically modified corn—including adverse health effects on rats. However, after publication, the journal made the unprecedented decision to retract the study.

Journal editor Dr. A. Wallace Hayes admitted that none of the established criteria for retracting a study applied to the Séralini paper. However, as Clark and Corbett reported, a new connection between the journal and Monsanto might account for the retraction, as well as another retraction of a similar study from Brazil that demonstrated the toxic effects on mice of an insecticide that forms the basis of the Bt GMO crops. After these papers were published, the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology created a new position: the associate editor for biotechnology. The journal then selected Richard E. Goodman, from the University of Nebraska, to fill the position and preside over such retractions. As it turns out, Goodman worked in regulatory sciences for Monsanto from 1997 to 2004.

Neither the journal’s retraction of Séralini’s research nor its implications were covered by corporate media, reflecting a trend in which science critical of GMOs is sidelined and dismissed by the special interests promoting them.

Monsanto is not alone in trying to silence its critics. As Rachel Aviv of the New Yorker and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! reported, after fifteen years of research, Tyrone Hayes, University of California–Berkeley professor of integrative biology, determined that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs and could cause the same problems for humans. The company now known as Syngenta hired Hayes to research atrazine in 1997. But when his findings ran contrary to their interests, they refused to allow him to publish and instead worked to discredit him. He left Syngenta in 2001, but continued to research the harmful effects of atrazine on the endocrine system.

Court documents from a class action lawsuit against Syngenta show how the company sought to smear Hayes’s reputation and to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from banning the profitable chemical, which is already banned by the European Union. The company’s public relations team drafted a list of four goals. Reporter Rachel Aviv wrote, “The first was ‘discredit Hayes.’ In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could ‘prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.’ He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to ‘exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.’ ‘If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,’ Ford wrote.”

Despite its documented threats to environmental health and public health, atrazine remains on the market.

20. Estonia a Global Example of E-Government, Digital Freedom,
Privacy, and Security

Ben Horowitz and Sten Tamkivi, “Estonia: The Little Country that Cloud,” Ben’s Blog, January 27, 2014, http://www.bhorowitz.com/estonia_the_little_country_that_cloud.

Student Researcher: Ashley Ibarra (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Since Estonia regained independence in 1991, its government has sought to redesign the nation’s entire information infrastructure with goals of openness, privacy, and security. The technology platform that Estonia built to serve its citizens sets an example for the rest of the world. Each citizen has one identification number to use across all systems, from paper passport and bank records to any government office or medical care. This includes giving electronic signatures, filing taxes, and voting. Estonians elect their parliament online, and get their taxes back in two days.

The liquid movement of data, along with privacy and security measures, are of primary importance. Citizens have the ability to choose who can see their information. A citizen cannot block the state from seeing their data, but they can see who has accessed their data and file an inquiry to have an official fired if their information is accessed without valid reason.

Estonia is a world leader in cybersecurity and home of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Cyber Defense Center. The United States can learn a lot from Estonia, Ben Horowitz and Sten Tamkivi have suggested: get the key infrastructure right, instead of building websites to try to manage large public projects (e.g. HeathCare.gov), and respect citizens’ privacy while being transparent and innovative. Estonia shows how this is possible.

21. Questioning the Charter School Hype

Jeff Bryant, “The Truth about Charter Schools: Padded Cells, Corruption, Lousy Instruction and Worse results,” Salon, January 10, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/01/10/the_truth_about_charter_schools_padded_cells_corruption_lousy_instruction_and_worse_results.

James Horn, “KIPP Forces 5th Graders to ‘Earn’ Desks by Sitting on the Floor for a Week,” AlterNet, Education blog, December 17, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/education/kipp-forces-5th-graders-earn-desks-sitting-floor-week.

Stan Karp, “How Charter Schools Are Undermining the Future of Public Education,” AlterNet, November 14, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/education/how-charter-schools-are-undermining-future-public-education.

Ben Chapman and Rachel Monahan, “Padded ‘Calm-Down’ Room at Charter School Drives Kids to Anxiety Attacks,” New York Daily News, December 11, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/padded-calm-down-room-causing-anxiety-kids-article-1.1543983.

Stan Karp, “Charter Schools and the Future of Public Education,” Rethinking Schools 28, no. 1 (Fall 2013), http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/28_01/28_01_karp.shtml.

Student Researchers: Jessie Lina De La O (Sonoma State University) and Jordan Monterosso (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators: Lynn Lowery (Sonoma State University) and Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

Charter schools have been heralded as the antidote to “failed” public schools, especially in poor urban communities with many African-American and Latino/a students. Politicians and celebrities alike now advocate charters schools and preside over their openings. However, as Salon, AlterNet, and other independent media outlets have reported, charter schools have come under fire for not fulfilling the roles or achieving the results that their proponents have claimed. Instead of providing positive teaching and preparing children for the future, recent news reports have indicated that charter schools are subjecting students to padded cells, public shaming and embarrassment, poor instruction, and the negative consequences of financial corruption.

In January 2014, Salon’s Jeff Bryant reported on a five-year-old New York charter school where a student was “occasionally thrown in a padded cell and detained alone for stretches as long as 20 minutes.” Bryant also described students who were made to “earn” their desks by sitting on their classroom floor. Similarly, AlterNet’s James Horn reported on the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which is the largest corporate public charter school program in the United States. “KIPP requires the poorest urban children, those who have received the least in life, to earn everything,” Horn reported. The harsh practices implemented by some charter school instructors result in negative repercussions for all children involved, obstructing their learning and undermining their sense of security in what is supposed to be a positive environment.

KIPP is just one example of the growing number of large, national chains of educational management organizations (or EMOs) that run many of the new charter schools. As Bryant reported, along with the development of EMOs themselves, “nationwide organizations have rapidly developed to lobby for these schools.” One such organization, the Alliance for School Choice, recently received a $6 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation, of Wal-Mart fame.

Stan Karp of Rethinking Schools wrote, “The charter school movement has changed dramatically in recent years in ways that have undermined its original intentions. . . . It’s time to put the brakes on charter expansion and refocus public policy on providing excellent public schools for all.”

22. Corporate News Media Understate Rape, Sexual Violence

Rania Khalek, “Calling Rape by its Right Name,” Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), February 1, 2014, http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/calling-rape-by-its-right-name.

Wasi Daniju, “Dear Mainstream Media: I Believe the Word You’re Looking for is ‘Rape,’” Ceasefire, November 10, 2013, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/dear-mainstream-media-word-rape.

Eleanor J. Bader, “Stoking Fire: How News Outlets, Prosecutors Minimize Sexual Violence with Language,” RH Reality Check, December 9, 2013, http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/12/09/stoking-fire-how-news-outlets-prosecutors-minimize-sexual-violence-with-language.

Student Researchers: Cealia Brannan (Florida Atlantic University), and Laura A. Parada and Christina Sabia (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators: James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University) and Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

Media analysts observe how journalists refrain from using the word “rape” to describe incidents of sexual assault. Instead, news outlets downplay the humiliation and cruelty entailed in these acts by referring to them as “sex crimes,” “inappropriate sexual activity,” or “forced sex,” even though such acts are legally recognized as “rape.”

“‘Rape,’ along with the images it conjures, is an ugly, nasty word,” artist and writer Wasi Daniju observed. “Uglier and nastier still, though, is the experience of each and every person that experiences it. Their experience warrants, at the very least, the respect and truth of being accurately labeled and recognized.”

A report released by Legal Momentum, a New York City–based feminist advocacy law group, titled Raped or “Seduced”? How Language Helps Shape Our Response to Sexual Violence, addressed what it terms the “linguistic avoidance” of such concerns. For example, when the media uses the language of consensual sex—terms like “recruited” rather than “kidnapped” or “took by force,” and phrases like “performed oral sex” or “engaged in sexual activity” instead of writing that “he forcefully penetrated her vagina with his penis”—they do more than use euphemisms to distort reality; they essentially mislead, misdirect, and diminish the violation. Such accounts also suggest that both parties were willing participants.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed to the Los Angeles Times to illustrate one example of this phenomenon. In January 2013, the Times published an important story addressing how two Los Angeles police officers were accused of using the threat of imprisonment to force several women they previously arrested to have sex with them. This is recognized under law as “rape.” “But the Times avoided using that term,” FAIR noted, “inexplicably employing every other word and phrase imaginable—including ‘sex crimes,’ ‘sexual favors’ and ‘forced sex’—to describe what the officers were accused of.”

23. Number of US Prison Inmates Serving Life Sentences Hits New Record

David J. Krajicek, “Hard Time: Prisons Are Packed With More Lifers Than Ever,” WhoWhatWhy, September 18, 2013, http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/09/18/hard-time-prisons-are-packed-with-more-lifers-than-ever.

Ed Pilkington, “More Than 3000 U.S. Prisoners Locked Up for Life Without Parole for Non-Violent Crimes,” Guardian, November 13, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/us-prisoners-sentences-life-non-violent-crimes.

“A Living Death: Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses,” American Civil Liberties Union, November 2013, https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/111813-lwop-complete-report.pdf.

Jessica M. Pasco, “Three Strikes, He’s Out,” Good Times (Santa Cruz, CA), November 6, 2013, http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/santa-cruz-news/santa-cruz-local-news/5182-three-strikes-hes-out.html.

Felicia Gustin, “Can Restorative Justice Save Us? A Look at an Alternative to Mass Incarceration,” War Times, November 4, 2013, http://www.war-times.org/can-restorative-justice-save-us-look-alternative-mass-incarceration.

Student Researchers: Isabella Diaz (Florida Atlantic University), Chelsea Pulver (College of Marin), and Pietro Pizzani, Mia Hulbert, and Fabiola Garcia (Indian River State College)

Faculty Evaluators: James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University), Susan Rahman (College of Marin) and Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College)

A report released by the Sentencing Project, a Washington DC–based nonprofit criminal justice advocacy group, revealed that the number of prisoners serving life sentences in the US state and federal prisons reached a new record of close to 160,000 in 2012.64 Of these, 49,000 are serving life without possibility of parole, an increase of 22.2 percent since 2008. The study’s findings place in striking context the figures promoted by the federal government, which indicate a reduction in the overall number of prisoners in federal and state facilities, from 1.62 million to 1.57 million between 2009 and 2012.

Ashley Nellis, senior research analyst with the Sentencing Project, argued that the rise in prisoners serving life sentences has to do with political posturing over “tough on crime” measures. “Unfortunately, lifers are typically excluded from most sentencing reform conversations because there’s this sense that it’s not going to sell, politically or with the public,” Nellis said. “Legislators are saying, ‘We have to throw somebody under the bus.’”

California is the leader in lifers, with one-quarter of the country’s life-sentenced population (40,362), followed by Florida (12,549) and New York (10,245), Texas (9,031), Georgia (7,938), Ohio (6,075), Michigan (5,137), Pennsylvania (5,104), and Louisiana (4,657).

There are currently 3,281 prisoners in the US serving a life sentence—with no chance of parole—for minor, nonviolent crimes, according to a November 2013 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Louisiana, one of nine states where inmates currently serve life sentences for nonviolent crimes, has the nation’s strictest three-strike law, which states that after three offenses the guilty person is imprisoned for life without parole.

As Ed Pilkington reported in the Guardian, the ACLU study documented “thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed” by this practice. Among those is Timothy Jackson, now fifty-three, who in 1996 was caught stealing a jacket from a New Orleans department store. “It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote the ACLU. “I know that for my crime I had to do some time, but a life sentence for a jacket valued at $159.”

The ACLU study reported that keeping these prisoners locked up for life costs taxpayers around $1.8 billion annually. The study stated that the US is “virtually alone in its willingness to sentence non-violent offenders to die behind bars.” Life without parole for nonviolent sentences has been ruled a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights.

With 2.3 million people imprisoned in the US today, Felicia Gustin of War Times has asked, is locking people away the answer to creating safer communities? She reported on the work of the Restorative Community Conferencing Program, based in Oakland, California. According to the program’s coordinator, Denise Curtis, “restorative justice is a different approach to crime. . . . Our current justice system asks: What law was broken? Who broke it? and How should they be punished? Restorative justice asks: Who has been harmed? What needs have arisen because of the harm? and Whose responsibility is it to make things as right as they can?”

As Gustin reported, the program works with youth cases referred by the district attorney. Some involve felonies such as assault, robbery, and burglary. The Oakland Unified School District has also successfully incorporated restorative justice practices as an alternative to expelling and suspending youth which, according to Curtis, “impact Black and Brown youth disproportionately much more than white youth.”

Variations of restorative justice programs currently operate in Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago and New Orleans, among other cities, and at least one study has shown such programs have been effective in reducing recidivism. Nevertheless, few are aware of restorative justice as a real alternative to mass incarceration and this positive development deserves more news coverage.

24. Restorative Justice Turns Violent Schools Around

Jeff Deeney, “A Philadelphia School’s Big Bet on Nonviolence,” Atlantic, July 18, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/a-philadelphia-schools-big-bet-on-nonviolence/277893.

Fania Davis, “Discipline with Dignity: Oakland Classrooms Try Healing Instead of Punishment,” YES! Magazine, February 19, 2014, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/where-dignity-is-part-of-the-school-day.

Student Researchers: Katie Barretta and Slava Eltchev (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Last year when American Paradigm Schools took over Philadelphia’s infamous, failing John Paul Jones Middle School, they did something a lot of people would find inconceivable. Rather than beef up the already heavy security to ensure safety and restore order, American Paradigm stripped it away. During renovations, they removed both metal detectors and barred windows. The police predicted chaos. But, instead, new numbers seem to show that in a single year the number of serious incidents fell by 90 percent.

The school was known as “Jones Jail” for its reputation of violence and disorder, and because the building physically resembled a youth correctional facility. Situated in the Kensington section of the city, it drew students from the heart of a desperately poor hub of injection drug users and street-level prostitution where gun violence rates are off the charts.

School officials stated it wasn’t just the humanizing physical makeover of the facility that helped. They also credit the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), a noncoercive, nonviolent conflict resolution regimen originally used in prison settings, which was later adapted to violent schools. AVP, when tailored to school settings, emphasizes student empowerment, relationship building, and anger management over institutional control and surveillance.

There are no aggressive security guards in schools using the AVP model; instead they have engagement coaches, who provide support, encouragement, and a sense of safety. AVP recruited its engagement coaches from Troops to Teachers, a program that trains veterans as educators. Trained in nonviolent conflict resolution, the engagement coaches “help mediate disputes rather than dole out punishment,” Jeff Deeney reported in the Atlantic. Because students come to trust their engagement coaches, the school has been able to forestall potential conflicts: For example, “Coaches often get advance word,” Deeney wrote, “when something’s about to go down in the hallways.”

From Oakland, Fania Davis reported for YES! Magazine about Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), which has successfully influenced the local school district to replace “zero-tolerance” policies with restorative justice—and with impressive, positive results. Under the program, high school students with failing grades and multiple incarcerations who were not even expected to graduate now do not simply graduate but also achieve 3.0+ GPAs and earn honors as valedictorians.

As Davis, RJOY’s executive director, wrote, “Today hundreds of Oakland students are learning a new habit.” Instead of resorting to violence, they are being empowered to engage in restorative processes that promote “dialogue, accountability, a deeper sense of community, and healing.” The hallmark of restorative justice is “intentionally bringing together people with seemingly diametrically opposed viewpoints—particularly people who have harmed with people who have been harmed—in a carefully prepared face-to-face encounter where everyone listens and speaks with respect and from the heart no matter their differences.”

A University of California–Berkeley study found that RJOY’s middle school program reduced school suspension rates by 87 percent and referrals for violence by 77 percent.65 Racial disparity in discipline was eliminated, while graduation rates and test scores rose.

25. “Chaptered Out”: US Military Seeks to Balance Budget on Backs of Disabled Veterans

Dave Philipps, “Left Behind, No Break for the Wounded,” Colorado Springs Gazette, May 20, 2013, http://cdn.csgazette.biz/soldiers/day2.html.

Sheila MacVicar, “76,000 Soldiers ‘Chaptered Out’ of Veterans’ Benefits Since 2006,” Al Jazeera America, November 9, 2013, http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/11/11/exclusive-76-000soldierschapteredoutofmilitarybenefitssince06.html.

Student Researchers: Carter Gaskill and Crystal Lau (DePauw University)

Faculty Evaluator: Brett R. O’Bannon and Kevin Howley (DePauw University)

The US military has been engaged in a policy of forcing wounded and disabled veterans out of service to avoid paying benefits and to make room for new able-bodied recruits. Identifying injured combat soldiers as delinquent and negligent has lead to a practice called “chaptering out” which results in those soldiers being forced to leave the military without an honorable discharge. Because of this, thousands of soldiers have been chaptered out, losing federally sponsored benefits including health care, unemployment, and educational programs.

Dave Philipps, a reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette, exposed this practice through his story of Purple Heart recipient Sergeant Jerrald Jensen.

Jensen, a decorated two-tour Afghanistan war veteran and recovering active-duty sergeant, was forced from the army without benefits for what army officials called “a pattern of misconduct.” Jensen failed to pass a urine test after being prescribed drugs for his injuries. He was also written up for being late to an appointment. Jensen made numerous attempts to be retested but was chaptered out by his superiors. “They told me that I didn’t deserve to wear the uniform now, nor did I ever deserve to wear it,” Jensen told Al Jazeera America.

 

Philipps has followed several stories of wounded soldiers who have been kicked out of the military and left with nothing. “Many have been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and some also have traumatic brain injuries (TBI), both of which can influence behavior and judgment,” said Philipps. He estimates that 76,000 soldiers have been chaptered out since 2006, and that number has increased every year since the war in Iraq began.

Although the military declined to be interviewed, denying any policy that targeted disabled soldiers to be forced out without benefits, an insider from the US Army Medical Command confirmed that this does happen. According to Philipps, “These commanders are stuck in this position where if they try to get them out medically, they are still stuck with them, maybe for a long time. If they decide to kick them out for misconduct instead, they could be out in weeks.” Some soldiers like Jensen have had success appealing their discharges, but many others are left without any support from the nation they served.

CENSORED 2015 HONORABLE MENTIONS

Corporate Media Sources on Syrian Crisis Tied to Defense and Intelligence Industries

Gin Armstrong, Whitney Yax, and Kevin Connor, “Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate,” Public Accountability Initiative, October 11, 2013, http://public-accountability.org/2013/10/conflicts-of-interest-in-the-syria-debate.

“The Military Industrial Pundits”, Democracy Now!, October 18, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/18/the_military_industrial_pundits_conflicts_of.

Student Researchers: Grace Quinn and Anne Connelly (DePauw University)

Faculty Evaluators: Kevin Howley and Jeff McCall (DePauw University)

The debate of whether or not America should militarily intervene in Syria was widely covered by corporate American news outlets for several weeks in August and September 2013. This public discourse took place in major news outlets including CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post. However, as a reported by the Public Accountability Initiative, individuals who perhaps should not have been speaking on these delicate issues dominated the corporate media’s coverage of the debate.

The interviewed guests on news broadcasts and authors of newspaper articles regarding military intervention in Syria were presented to the American public as diplomats, generals, and experts with unbiased credibility on the issue. However, the majority of these sources were connected to contracting, investment, or consulting firms with a primary focus on defense and intelligence. These ties were left out of the reporting, despite being clear conflicts of interest due to the personal benefits these sources might derive from US military intervention.

The report made a few key points. It identified twenty-two commentators who spoke on military intervention in Syria, all of whom were linked to defense and intelligence contractors or investment firms. These twenty-two contractors made a total of 111 appearances in newspapers and broadcasts, though only thirteen reports disclosed these links. Some of these “experts” would receive direct financial gain from military intervention, while others had clients who would benefit financially from intervention. Not surprisingly, the majority of the commentators overwhelmingly supported military action in Syria and identified it as an issue of US national security.

By filling the dialogue with individuals holding personal and financial interests in military intervention in Syria, corporate news outlets corrupted public debate over military intervention in the Syria conflict. The corporate media’s failure to disclose such vital information to the American people calls into question its duties. The press has an obligation to truthfully inform the public. They ought to be held accountable for giving individuals with such sizable conflicts of interest the platform to speak on such momentous matters.

Minority Patients Sustain Higher Trauma Center Death Rates

“Trauma Centers Serving Mostly White Patients Have Lower Death Rates for Patients of All Races,” Science Daily, September 11, 2013, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130911125005.htm.

Student Researchers: Maria Gutierrez Muñoz, J. P. Carrillo, Ashley O’Brien, Jessica Lozano, and Ian Levy (Santa Rosa Junior College)

Faculty Evaluator: Susan Rahman (Santa Rosa Junior College)

A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine analyzed data from 181 trauma centers within the US and showed a correlation between trauma centers that serve mainly minority patients and higher than average death rates of those patients they serve.66 Trauma centers that serve mainly white patients have newer and more efficient technology, better trained staff, and more access to specialists and services; these trauma centers have better outcomes and more of their patients are insured or are able to afford the health care costs. In contrast, trauma centers that serve mainly minority patients have fewer economic resources available to them for use in the improvement of equipment, quality of staff, and maintenance; this discrepancy in funding among trauma centers in different neighborhoods leads to unnecessary deaths that could be prevented were trauma centers sufficiently funded.

Adil Haider, an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said that the new research may help answer a long-standing question: is the reason for the disparity found in the biology or history of the patient, or in the hospital treating that patient? The study, he said, suggests that hospitals play the bigger role. “It’s not just differences in the patients,” says Haider. “All patients of all races do better at the trauma centers treating white majority populations, so this research tells us we need to direct attention to hospitals with higher mortality rates to help them improve their outcomes, or we won’t ever be able to turn this around.”67

Haider stated, “It can’t continue to be the case that the color of a patient’s skin determines whether he or she survives a serious injury.” Trauma centers in areas that have a majority of patients who cannot afford the insurance or medical bills—typically people of color—are not discriminating against patients based on race or privilege, but rather they are improperly funded and because of this, patients are dying—deaths that could be prevented with the proper funding.

“Epidemic” of Wage Theft Plagues American Workers

Josh Eidelson, “84 Percent of NYC Fast Food Workers Report Wage Theft in a New Survey,” Nation, May 16, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/blog/174375/84-percent-nyc-fast-food-workers-report-wage-theft-new-survey#.

Caroline Fairchild, “Low-Wage Workers Are Robbed More than Banks, Gas Stations and Convenience Stores Combined,” Huffington Post, October 31, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/low-wage-workers-robbed_n_4178706.html.

Ramy Srour, “Corporations Rewriting US Labor Laws,” Inter Press Service, Nov 1, 2013, http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/11/corporations-rewriting-u-s-labour-laws.

Student Researcher: Ryan Kemp (Florida Atlantic University)

Faculty Evaluator: James F. Tracy (Florida Atlantic University)

A report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds that low-wage workers are robbed far more often than banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined, by employers who fail to adhere to minimum wage laws or pay overtime. “The country suffers an epidemic of wage theft, as large numbers of employers violate minimum-wage, overtime, and other wage and hour laws with virtual impunity,” University of Oregon economist Gordon Lafer wrote in the report.68

Such workplace abuses are occurring as some of the most powerful corporate lobbies attack labor standards and workplace protections, including minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, and even child labor protections. As Ramy Srour reported, EPI researchers found that corporate lobbies have engaged in “an intense attack” on labor standards and workplace protections. According to John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “what is particularly important about this new report is that it emphasizes the recent legislative developments at the state and local levels, which unfortunately have been largely ignored.”

Wage theft is on the increase even in the context of greater worker productivity. According to EPI statistics, from 1983 to 2010 the bottom 60 percent of Americans lost wealth, despite the fact that the overall US economy has grown over this same time period. According to EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey, “this is a remarkable indictment of how the economy is not working for everybody.”

Public Radio International Obscures US Involvement
in Guatemalan Massacre

Keane Bhatt, “This American Life Whitewashes U.S. Crimes in Central America, Wins Peabody Award,” North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), July 29, 2013, http://nacla.org/blog/2013/7/29/this-american-life-whitewashes-us-crimes-central-america-wins-peabody-award.

Keane Bhatt, “How the Media Got Guatemala’s Dos Erres Massacre Wrong,” Real News, August 4, 2013, http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?Itemid=74&id=31&jumival=10519&option=com_content&task=view.

Student Researcher: Karen Griffith (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Nora Wilkins and Andy Lee Roth (Sonoma State University)

In May 2012, Public Radio International’s This American Life partnered with ProPublica and Fundación MEPI to produce a broadcast titled, “What Happened at Dos Erres,” which gave a new account of a 1982 military massacre in that Guatemalan village.69 In March 2013, the broadcast received a prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in electronic journalism. What This American Life failed to mention in its account of “What Happened at Dos Erres,” and what the Peabody board overlooked, Keane Bhatt reported, was prior documentation of the United States’ direct involvement in supporting the murder of over two hundred innocent Guatemalan civilians in that event.

Although This American Life’s Ira Glass reported that state-led massacres “happened in over six hundred villages” and cited a 1999 United Nations–sponsored truth commission report that found “the number of Guatemalans killed or disappeared by their own government was over 180,000,” Glass failed to report that the same commission also concluded that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations,” which resulted in atrocities like those at Dos Erres. As Bhatt noted in his report, the Washington Post and PBS both reported this aspect of the commission’s report at the time.70

Bhatt’s report also clarifies the deep historical context of Guatemalan state-sponsored violence against its civilian population, in ways that the This American Life story failed to explain. In 1954, the US organized a coup d’état against Guatemala’s first democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz. Consequently, a series of US-backed dictators ruled Guatemala. The Dos Erres massacre was part of the Guatemalan military’s ongoing campaign, which the US had supported at least indirectly since the 1954 coup. Under the direction of Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled Guatemala for seventeen months from 1982 to 1983, the state’s security forces escalated their attacks on leftist insurgents. The US helped to train and arm Montt’s troops. Declassified US intelligence documents revealed CIA and Pentagon involvement in the massacre.

During his rule, Montt counted President Ronald Reagan as a close ally. As Bhatt documented, the Reagan administration deliberately obscured “Guatemala’s record of atrocities” under Montt. Although the This American Life episode included commentary by Kate Doyle, an expert on declassified documents at the National Security Archives, as Bhatt also reported the broadcast version of “What Happened at Dos Erres” omitted the portions of Doyle’s in-studio discussion where she spoke about US complicity in the massacre. Similarly, Bhatt noted that the This American Life broadcast also “excluded content from its own media partner, ProPublica,” which would have corroborated US involvement in the massacre.

“One would be hard-pressed,” Bhatt wrote, “to encounter another contemporary mainstream account of that period so thoroughly sanitized of Washington’s involvement in crimes against humanity.”

TOP 25 STORY ANALYSES: STORY CATEGORIES AND
HISTORICAL THEMES

The careful reader has likely noticed that many of the social problems and public issues featured in the Top 25 stories interrelate. Indeed, drawing connections among groups of stories can be an instructive exercise. What common themes link the Top 25 stories of 2013–14? Here is one possible organization of the stories by theme:

• Environment and Health: #1, Ocean Acidification; #14, Wireless Technology Health Hazards; and #16, Beef Industry’s “Feedlot Feedback Loop.”
• US Empire: #2, Top Ten US Aid Recipients All Practice Torture; #11, WHO Suppresses Report on Iraqi Cancers and Birth Defects; #12, Pentagon Awash in Money Despite Serious Audit Problems; #25, “Chaptered Out.”
• Economy: #3, WikiLeaks Revelations on Trans-Pacific Partnership; #5, Bankers Back on Wall Street Despite Major Crimes; and a story receiving an Honorable Mention, “Epidemic” of Wage Theft Plagues American Workers.
• Democracy at Home: #6, The Deep State; #7, FBI Dismisses Murder Plot against Occupy Leaders; #11, Wealthy Donors and Corporations Set Think Tank’s Agendas; and #23, Number of US Inmates Serving Life Sentences Hits New Record.
• News Stories about the News: #8, Corporate News Ignores Connections between Extreme Weather and Global Warming; #9, US Media Hypocrisy on Ukraine; and #22, Corporate News Media Understate Rape, Sexual Violence.
• People and Communities Organizing: #13, Lawsuit Challenges Nuclear Power Industry Immunity; #18, National Database of Police Killings Aims for Accountability; #20, Estonia a Global Example of E-Government, Digital Freedom, Privacy and Security; #21, Questioning the Charter School Hype; and #24, Restorative Justice Turns Violent School Around.

Obviously, some stories could fit in other categories. For example, is the story of wealthy donors and corporations setting think tanks’ agendas (#11) about democracy or the economy? Of course, the two intertwine: so long as there is economic injustice, democracy is eroded. The same could be said for the environment and health. The story of the class action lawsuit challenging the nuclear power industry’s immunity from liability in nuclear power accidents—such as Fukushima (#13)—is at once a story of the environment and health, corporate power and democracy, and people organizing in order to address a gross social injustice. It fits in all of those three categories, but is not completely covered by any one of them.

Creating news categories is an imaginative activity that exposes underlying values and makes clear tacit assumptions. We present one example to illustrate what we mean. As we assembled this year’s Top 25 list, one of the Project’s esteemed judges questioned whether stories such as those included above in the “News Stories about the News” category really belonged in Project Censored’s Top 25 list. Could the corporate media really be expected to report on its own inadequacies? The judge’s insightful question made clear a value judgment on our part about what journalism ought to provide members of a society. Obviously, since they appear in the Top 25 list, we believe that news stories from independent journalists about institutional slant in corporate news coverage are essential to an informed public and, thus, to democracy.71 These stories challenge an assertion so often made by establishment news professionals when faced with charges of excluding important stories: if a story was important or newsworthy, we would have covered it, they say.

This is a form of boundary work, through which corporate news professionals define what counts as news and (more or less explicitly) position themselves as the judges and guardians of those boundaries.72 Think, for example, of the venerable New York Times slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print,” and the boundary work it does. The slogan stipulates what can be understood as an incorrigible proposition, one about which it is impossible to be mistaken. How do corporate journalists—and, more importantly, the public—preserve their trust in corporate news, even when critics can point to facts and events that belie this trust? The process hinges on what the pioneering anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard termed “secondary elaboration of belief.” Believers invoke exceptional circumstances in order to explain away apparent failures.73 In this context, (independent) news stories about the shortcomings of (corporate) news act as crucial counter-evidence when defenders of establishment media and the status quo resort to arguments that effectively stipulate corporate press infallibility.

The goal of grouping the stories into categories is not to arrive at some ultimate scheme that rigidly locates each story; instead, the exercise encourages critical thinking about the underlying dynamics—the social institutions, the cultural values, and the otherwise taken-for-granted assumptions—that link groups of stories. This exercise is important because these dynamics not only connect important but underreported news stories, they also shape US society, its social structure, and its place in the larger world. Spending some time with friends, family, or classmates, and playing with how different stories connect to one another, advocating for different groupings, imagining new categories—these are ways to transform ourselves from passive consumers of media content into active participants in the interpretation of their meanings. If an informed populace is crucial to democracy, then actively interpreting connections among news stories is arguably one way of engaging news that will leave us inspired to act, rather than bored or demoralized.

Readers of past Censored yearbooks may already have observed that, of course, Project Censored has been playing with categorizing and drawing connections among stories in our Top 25 lists for some time. Most recently, in Censored yearbooks from 2012 through 2014, this has taken the form of “Censored News Clusters,” which provided more detailed analyses, based on each year’s Top 25 stories, of topics such as: “Whistleblowers and Gag Laws” and “Human Rights and Civil Liberties” (Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times); “The Police State and Civil Liberties” and “Human Costs of War and Violence” (in Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution); and “Social Media and Internet Freedom” and “Collaboration and the Common Good” (from Censored 2012: Sourcebook for the Media Revolution). But reaching further back, as early as 1994, Carl Jensen and Project Censored were drawing attention to the deeper themes that connected stories featured in the Project’s annual Top 25 lists. The 1994 Censored yearbook identified stories in the following categories: Corporate, Environment, International, Crime, Military, Politics, Education, Health, and Civil Rights.74

Another instructive exercise is to compare stories from Censored 2015’s Top 25 with those from previous decades’ lists. Although some of the bylines and sources change, the topics are remarkably similar and continuous. Examine the lists below to see just how often some of our most censored stories have recurred.

Comparison of Top 25 Story Topics, 1995 and 2015

Censored 1995 Censored 2015

#3 Secret Pentagon Plan to #12 Pentagon Awash in
Subsidize Defense Contractor Money Despite Serious Audit ProblemsMergers

#5 Clinton Administration #1 Ocean Acidification Increasing
Retreats on Ozone Crisis at Unprecedented Rate

#10 News Media Mask Spousal #22 Corporate News Media Understate
Violence in the “Language of Love” Rape, Sexual Violence

#11 The Treasury Department #5 Bankers Back on Wall Street Despite
Ignores S&L Crimes Major Crimes

#13 The Nuclear Regulatory #13 Lawsuit Challenges Nuclear Power
Commission’s Dirty Secret and Industry Immunity from
#14 Faulty Nuclear Fuel Rods Spell Liability in Nuclear Accidents
Potential Disaster

#18 Nationwide Collusion Between #19 Agribusiness Giants Attempt to Silence
Drug Companies and Pharmacists and Discredit Scientists Whose Research
Reveals Herbicides’ Health Threats

#25 Deadly “Mad Cow” Disease #16 The Beef Industry’s “Feedlot
Spreads to North America Feedback Loop”

From 1995 to 2015, the Censored yearbooks alert us to deep continuities in both the social problems that challenge us as a society, and the crucial role that a truly independent press plays in alerting the public to these problems when corporate media fail to do so.

For readers who want to trace for themselves the historical legacies of some of the Project’s recurrent censored news story topics, Project Censored maintains a complete archive of past years’ Top 25 story lists on our website. Older Censored yearbooks are also available in public libraries and can be ordered directly from Project Censored or Seven Stories Press.

Stepping back to take a broader view of the stories covered by this year’s Top 25 list and how they compare with previous Censored yearbooks’ coverage, a simple but powerful pair of themes unites them all. With overwhelming consistency, the stories featured by Project Censored hinge on a combination of (1) abuses of power that run contrary to the authentic spirit and actual practice of democratic government (“We the People”) and (2) organized resistance to those abuses, aimed at creating a more just, inclusive society.

On this point it is worth reflecting briefly on the theme of “People and Communities Organizing,” as proposed above. As noted in previous Censored yearbooks, corporate news media often marginalize, diminish, or ignore what we might consider to be “good” news stories—where “good” refers not to trivial, superficial segments at the end of the evening’s TV news broadcast, but rather to substantive coverage of people and communities organizing in order to resist systemic social injustice or to remedy longstanding social problems.75

It is important for journalism to treat people organizing to create positive change as newsworthy. Of course, news coverage such as this year’s #21 story, “Questioning the Charter School Hype” could easily—and accurately—be identified as a story about education. But it may be more consequential to link it with other stories that are not necessarily limited to the domain of education, but in which groups of people, within and across communities, have organized to protect common interests and public goods from private predation. Because corporate news so often reflects and, more or less subtly, promotes corporate interests, it should come as no surprise that establishment news either marginalizes or excludes stories suggesting that people might live more fulfilling lives when they decline the limiting, default roles of “consumer” and “spectator” in favor of more meaningful alternatives, such as “community member” or “activist.”

A good example of this comes from Censored 2013, which featured “2012: The International Year of Cooperatives” as its #7 story.76 It is not surprising that corporate-owned news media might be reluctant to cover a story indicating that worker-owned and worker-run businesses not only promise to become the fastest growing business model by the year 2025, but that they also promote more equitable distribution of wealth and genuine connection to the workplace, two key components of a sustainable economy. The story, originally reported by Jessica Reeder for YES! Magazine, made clear that an alternative to the corporate model was not only possible, but also quickly becoming a robust challenger. Promoting awareness of that reality runs contrary to corporate interests, of course.

As we hope Censored 2015’s Top 25 story list makes powerfully clear, independent news media expand our conceptions of what is newsworthy and who counts as an authoritative source of information and opinion. In terms of Stuart Hall’s analysis, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, at its best the independent press provides an alternative to the status quo assumptions and ideologies of the corporate media. The areas of consensus that the corporate media take for granted and reinforce come under question by independent journalists; and independent media redefine the areas of conflict, in which establishment journalists safely marginalize and even vilify any group whose members challenge the political culture’s built-in definitions and sacred values.77

Through their courageous openness, independent journalists—and, of course, the organizations that publish and broadcast their dispatches—provide us with new kinds of knowledge, and new dimensions of meaning, beyond those sanctioned by current systems of power. New kinds of knowledge, new dimensions of meaning—these, we respectfully suggest, are wellsprings that should inspire We the People to continue to strive together for the free development of our best capacities.

Footnotes:

36 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), “AMAP Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment: Summary for Policy-Makers,” AMAP, Oslo, Norway, May 13, 2013, http://www.amap.no/documents/doc/amap-arctic-ocean-acidification-assessment-summary-for-policy-makers/808. This document presents the executive summary of the 2013 Arctic Ocean Acidification (AOA) Assessment, which can be accessed here: http://www.amap.no/documents/doc/AMAP-Assessment-2013-Arctic-Ocean-Acidification/881.

37 Nina Bednaršek et al., “Limacina helicina Shell Dissolution as an Indicator of Declining Habitat Suitability Owing to Ocean Acidification in the California Current Ecosystem,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281, no. 1785 (April 30, 2014), http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1785/20140123.abstract.

38 See, for example, Astrid C. Wittmann and Hans-O. Pörtner, “Sensitivities of Extant Animal Taxa to Ocean Acidification,” Nature Climate Change, August 25, 2013, http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1982.html.

39 Susan B. Epstein, Alex Tiersky, and Marian L. Lawson, “State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs: FY2014 Budget and Appropriations,” Congressional Research Office, January 16, 2014, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R43043.pdf. See, in particular, Table 4, “Top 10 Recipients of U.S. Foreign Assistance, FY2012 Actual and FY2014 Request,” 14.

40 Adam Withnall, “Israel Government ‘Tortures’ Children by Keeping Them in Cages, Human Rights Group Says,” Independent (UK), January 1, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-government-tortures-children-by-keeping-them-in-cages-human-rights-group-says-9032826.html.

41 Amnesty International, “Annual Report 2013: Iraq,” http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/iraq/report-2013 - section-67-4; “Egypt three years on, wide-scale repression continues unabated,” Amnesty International, January 23, 2014, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/egypt-three-years-wide-scale-repression-continues-unabated-2014-01-23.

42 Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2014: Jordan,” http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/jordan?page=3.

43 22 U.S. Code § 2151n, Human rights and development assistance, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2151n.

44 See, e.g., http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/100296.pdf.

45 Timothy B. Lee, “Leaked Treaty Is a Hollywood Wish List. Could it Derail Obama’s Trade Agenda?,” The Switch (blog), Washington Post, November 13, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/13/leaked-treaty-is-a-hollywood-wish-list-could-it-derail-obamas-trade-agenda.

46 See, for example, Jim Puzzanghera, “FCC Floats its Net Plan,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2014, B1; http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fcc-net-neutrality-20140516-story.html - page=1.

47 See, for example, Bret Swanson, “Why Broadband Consumers Are the Likely Winners in Verizon v. FCC,” Forbes, September 25, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bretswanson/2013/09/25/why-broadband-consumers-are-the-likely-winners-in-verizon-v-fcc.

48 Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, “Three Former Financial Services Executives Sentenced to Serve Time in Prison for Roles in Conspiracies Involving Investment Contracts for the Proceeds of Municipal Bonds,” October 18, 2012, http://www.stopfraud.gov/iso/opa/stopfraud/2012/12-at-1258.html.

49 James Hansen et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” PLOSOne, December 3, 2013, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0081648.

50 Noam Chomsky has written about the US occupation of Guantánamo in Cuba as another instance of the contradiction between the US position toward Russia and its own lack of respect for national sovereignty. See Chomsky, “The Politics of Red Lines,” In These Times, May 1, 2014, http://inthesetimes.com/article/16631/russia_ukraine_noam_chomsky.

51 Robert Perry, “Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis,” Consortium News, March 30, 2014, http://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/30/ukraines-inconvenient-neo-nazis.

52 Savabieasfahani’s ZNet article cites this study, of which she is the corresponding author, as evidence for the claim that “Iraq is poisoned”: M. Al-Sabbak et al., “Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities,” Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxology 89, no. 5 (November 2012): 937–44; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3464374/pdf/128_2012_Article_817.pdf.

53 The Guardian article that Savabieasfahani cited is by John Pilger. See Pilger, “We’ve Moved on from the Iraq War—but Iraqis Don’t Have that Choice,” Guardian, May 26, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/26/iraqis-cant-turn-backs-on-deadly-legacy

54 “IARC Classifies Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Fields as Possibly Carcinogenic to Humans,” press release no. 208, International Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization, May 31, 2011, http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf.

55 Lennart Hardell and Michael Carlberg, “Using the Hill Viewpoints from 1965 for Evaluating Strengths of Evidence of the Risk for Brain Tumors Associated with Use of Mobile and Cordless Phones,” Rev. Environmental Health 28, no. 3 (November 2013): 97–106.

56 Lennart Hardell et al., “Case-Control Study of the Association between Malignant Brain Tumors Diagnosed between 2007 and 2009 and Mobile and Cordless Phone Use,” International Journal of Oncology 43, no. 6 (September 2013): 1833–45, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3834325.

57 “President Obama Announces $3.4 Billion Investment to Spur Transition to Smart Energy Grid,” White House, October 27, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-obama-announces-34-billion-investment-spur-transition-smart-energy-grid.

58 For previous coverage by Project Censored of this topic, see both chapter 2 of this volume and “Wireless Technology a Looming Health Crisis,” Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, eds. Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013), 54–55, 131–32.

59 Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin, “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005: Implications for Women’s Legal Status and Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 38, no. 2 (2013): 299–343, http://advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/main/publications/articles_and_reports/executive_summary_paltrow_flavin_jhppl_article.php.

60 ANERA, “Water in the West Bank and Gaza,” ANERA Reports on the Ground in the Middle East 2 (March 2012), http://www.anera.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ANERAWaterReport.pdf.

61 United Nations Country Team, “Gaza in 2020: A Liveable Place?,” August 2012, http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/gaza-2020-liveable-place

62 For detailed testimony by Gaza residents, see “Over 90% of Water in Gaza Unfit for Drinking,” B’Tselem, February 9, 2014, http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20140209_gaza_water_crisis.

63 Ibid. See also “Undeniable Discrimination in the Amount of Water Allocated to Israelis and Palestinians,” B’Tselem, February 12, 2014, http://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20140212_discrimination_in_water_allocation.

64 Ashley Nellis, “Life Goes On: The Historic Rise in Life Sentences in America,” Sentencing Project, September 2013, http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Life Goes On 2013.pdf.

65 Michael D. Sumner, Carol J. Silverman, and Mary Louise Frampton, “School-Based Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Zero-Tolerance Policies: Lessons from West Oakland,” Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, University of California–Berkeley School of Law, November 2010, http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/11-2010_School-based_Restorative_Justice_As_an_Alternative_to_Zero-Tolerance_Policies.pdf.

66 Adil H. Haider et al., “Minority Trauma Patients Tend to Cluster at Trauma Centers with Worse-Than-Expected Mortality: Can This Phenomenon Help Explain Racial Disparities in Trauma Outcomes?,” Annals of Surgery 258, issue 4 (October 2013): 572–81, http://journals.lww.com/annalsofsurgery/Abstract/2013/10000/Minority_Trauma_Patients_Tend_to_Cluster_at_Trauma.7.aspx. See also “Higher Death Rates in Centers Treating More Minority Patients May be Due to Financial Strains,” Johns Hopkins Medicine, September, 12, 2013, http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_shows_trauma_centers_serving_mostly_white_patients_have_lower_death_rates_for_patients_of_all_races.

67 Ibid.

68 Gordon Lafer, “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012,” Economic Policy Institute, October 31, 2013, http://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards.

69 “What Happened at Dos Erres,” This American Life, May 25, 2012, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/465/what-happened-at-dos-erres. See also Sebastian Rotella and Ana Arana, “Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala,” ProPublica, May 25, 2012, http://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre-memory-and-justice-in-guatemala.

70 Douglas Farah, “War Study Censures Military in Guatemala,” Washington Post, February 26, 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/feb99/guatemala26.htm.

71 We also deem it newsworthy when the independent press exhibits institutional biases of its own. See, for example, Peter Phillips, “Left Progressive Media Inside the Propaganda Model,” Project Censored, May 2, 2010, http://www.projectcensored.org/left-progressive-media-inside-the-propaganda-model.

72 Sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn developed the concept of boundary work to analyze how scientists create, advocate, dispute, and maintain divisions among different (and sometimes competing) fields of knowledge, including, especially, distinctions between “science” and “non-science.” Subsequently, scholars have extended the concept of boundary work to examine other professions, including journalism. See, for example, Samuel P. Winch, Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism: How Journalists Distinguish News from Entertainment (Westport CT: Praeger, 1998).

73 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). For those who would restrict incorrigible propositions and secondary elaboration of belief to “primitive” or “superstitious” people and cultures only, Melvin Pollner’s Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday Life and Sociological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) provides challenging examples and analyses, drawn from everyday contemporary life. For a cogent overview of Pollner’s revolutionary work, see John Heritage and Steven Clayman, “Mel Pollner: A View from the Suburbs,” American Sociologist 43, no. 1 (March 2012), 99–108; http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/heritage/Site/Publications_files/MELVIN_POLLNER.pdf.

74 Carl Jensen and Project Censored, Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News: The 1994 Project Censored Yearbook (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), 32–33.

75 See, for example, the foreword by Sarah van Gelder on “solutions journalism,” the introduction by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff, and “The New Story: Why We Need One and How to Create It” by Michael Nagler in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013); Kenn Burrows and Michael Nagler’s chapter, “The Creative Tension of the Emerging Future: Facing the Seven Challenges of Humanity,” in Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012); and the “Stories of Hope and Change” chapters, produced by Kate Sims in collaboration with YES! Magazine in the 2008–10 Censored yearbooks, and authored by Kenn Burrows in Censored 2011 and 2012.

76 See Censored 2013, 79–81, and, online, http://www.projectcensored.org/7-2012-the-international-year-of-cooperatives.

77 On identifying areas of consensus, conflict, and toleration as a means of mapping unwitting bias in news coverage, see 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), 88.