Project Censored—Forty Years Of American News
Censorship And Propaganda Exposed
Dr. Carl Jensen founded Project Censored in 1976. A former public relations-advertising executive, Carl Jensen earned a PhD in sociology midlife and was hired to teach at Sonoma State University in 1973. Jensen taught classes in media and journalism. In one of these, his students asked him, “How did Richard Nixon get re-elected in 1972, given public knowledge about Watergate?” Jensen went back and checked the “mainstream” media and found that it paid little attention to Watergate before the election. So he began to wonder what else the popular press was not covering. This led to the idea of researching an annual list of the most important news stories not covered in what passed as US mainstream media, and drawing greater public attention to those underreported stories. The first censored news press release was in 1976. Alternative media throughout the US, especially newsweeklies like the San Francisco Bay Guardian, published the annual censored news lists. Today, all forty years of Project Censored’s annual lists of underreported news stories are archived on the Project Censored website at www.projectcensored.org. Project Censored defines censorship as “anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that purports to have a free press.”
In 1993 Carl Jensen released his first annual yearbook, titled Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News. Jensen wrote and edited four Censored yearbooks up to 1996, his twentieth anniversary with the Project. Continuing the tradition, in 1997 the Project’s new director, Dr. Peter Phillips, completed the annual release of the censored list and the yearbook, and continued to edit both for the next fourteen years, through 2011. Dr. Andy Roth coedited the 2008 and 2009 yearbooks, and Mickey Huff coedited the 2010 and 2011 yearbooks. The 2017 yearbook marks Project Censored director Mickey Huff and associate director Andy Lee Roth’s sixth time coordinating the Censored yearbook since taking on leadership roles in Project Censored in 2010.
Early in the Project’s history, some news reporters, editors, and execu-tives lampooned Jensen for claiming that they “censored” news stories. They argued that the stories were not censored, but that, due to time and space constraints, they could not report every potentially newsworthy story. Responding to these claims, starting in 1984, Jensen began to track the annual range of trivial and non-newsworthy items the press covered, dubbing these reports “junk food news.” “Junk Food News” became a regular feature in the annual Censored books. Each year’s Junk Food News study was added to the annual edition of Censored.
The forty-year history of Project Censored closely parallels the consolidation of media ownership in the US. In 1983 Ben H. Bagdikian, former editor of the Washington Post, and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, published his first book, The Media Monopoly, documenting how fewer than fifty major media companies dominated the media in the US. In five subsequent editions, up through 2004, Bagdikian showed how increasing media consolidation, combined with deregulation, left just six corporations in control of over 90 percent of US media content. The resulting corporate media failed to cover their own consolidation as a consequential news story. Project Censored featured Bagdikian’s work as its #1 Censored story in 1987, and returned to his theme of media monopoly in several variations over the next thirty years. (See chapter 2 in this volume for an update on our #1 story from 1987, “The Information Monopoly.”)
The top-down corporate nature of media led Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to write their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, in which they developed a “propaganda model” of corporate media. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model specified the social, political, and economic forces that led the corporations trusted with informing Americans about news and public affairs to be more concerned with maximizing revenues and avoiding flak than with informing the public.
In line with Bagdikian’s and Herman and Chomsky’s critical insights, since 2000 Project Censored has used the term “corporate media”— instead of the more familiar name, “mainstream media”—to emphasize consolidated corporate ownership and its impacts on news content.
Project Censored organized the Alternative News Media Expo and Press Freedom Conference at San Francisco State University in April 2001. Over two thousand people attended, networking around infor-mation booths from nearly one hundred independent, grassroots media outlets, and attending two days of panels and speeches, which featured Amy Goodman, John Stauber, Laura Flanders, and many more.
The ongoing Iraq War and legacy of 9/11 inspired Project Censored to help organize a Truth Emergency Summit in Santa Cruz, California, in January 2008. Organizers gathered key media constituencies to devise coherent decentralized models for distribution of suppressed news, synergistic truth telling, and collaborative strategies to disclose, legitimize, and popularize deeper historical narratives on power and inequality in the US. In Censored 2009, Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff wrote, “In the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has reached its end. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literal Truth Emergency. Americans cannot access the truth about the issues that most impact their lives by relying on the mainstream corporate media.”
In 2000, Project Censored came under the oversight of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, Inc., founded by Peter Phillips to ensure the Project’s independence and to promote the involvement of students and faculty members from college and university campuses beyond Sonoma State University. Faculty at several universities began incorporating Project Censored research into their courses as early as 2003.
Professor Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College became director of Project Censored in 2010. Working with associate director Dr. Andy Lee Roth, he has helped to extend the Project’s educational reach well beyond Sonoma State University. The campus affiliates program now connects hundreds of faculty and students at colleges and universities across the US and around the world in a collective, networked effort to identify and research each year’s top Censored news stories, Junk Food News, and News Abuse. Campuses now affiliated with Project Censored include Burlington College, California State University–East Bay, California State University–Maritime Academy, Citrus College, College of Marin, Diablo Valley College, Fordham University, Frostburg State University, Indian River State College, Ohlone College, Purdue University, Sacred Heart University, San Francisco State University, SUNY– Buffalo State, Syracuse University, University of Regina, University of San Francisco, University of Vermont, and more.
In addition to its campus affiliates, Project Censored continues to foster relations with numerous independent media groups and free speech organizations. Since 2010, Project Censored’s weekly radio show originating at KPFA in Berkeley has been broadcast on thirtyfive Pacifica Network stations across the US from Maui to New York.
Corporate media today are highly concentrated and fully global. Their primary goal is the promotion of product sales and political propaganda through psychological control of human desires, emotions, beliefs, fears, and values. Corporate media do this by manipulating human thought and emotion on a global scale, and by promoting entertainment as a diversion from global inequality and organized efforts to counter it.
To challenge corporate media hegemony, Project Censored is expanding critical media literacy training to thousands of students. Our new Global Critical Media Literacy Project (GCMLP) is scheduled to launch in October 2016. The GCMLP is a social justice education project cosponsored by Project Censored, Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME), and Sacred Heart University’s graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture. The GCMLP is the first of its kind to use a service-learning-based media literacy education model to teach digital media literacy and critical thinking skills, as well as to raise awareness about corporate and state-engineered news media censorship around the world.
We could not have persisted in our mission for forty years without your abiding support. With your continued backing, we look forward to sustaining the Project’s mission to promote media freedom in service to a more just, equitable, and peaceful world.
Sincerely,
Peter Phillips, PhD
President, Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored PO Box 750940
Petaluma, CA 94975
(707) 874-2695