Media Watch

Media Watch

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PROJECT CENSORED REVEALS
NEWS STORIES THE MEDIA
REFUSED TO COVER

By Miriam Raftery

“Censorship has definitely gotten worse,” Project Censored
Director Peter Phillips told Our Back Fence during a visit to San Diego
on July 25th. “It’s more overt now.”

For thirty years, Sonoma State University faculty and students have
compiled “Project Censored,” an annual list of the most important news
stories published by independent news outlets—stories that major media
failed to report. Praised by former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite as an
organization “we should listen to, to be sure that our newspapers and our
broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism,” Project
Censored’s hundreds of entries annually have been judged by luminaries
including newscaster Mike Wallace, columnist/author Norm Solomon, and
historian Howard Zinn

Speaking in San Diego, sociology professor Phillips painted a chilling
portrait of a powerful, corporate-owned national news media wielding
increasing censorship of stories that impact our daily lives, our freedoms,
and our national security.

“Three PR (public relations) firms have consolidated since 9/11,” he said.
“They have 175,000 employees worldwide to create the news.” PR firms
orchestrated phony testimony before Congress about babies dumped out of
incubators by Iraqis in order to fuel support for the Iraq invasion and staged the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue, Phillips said,
adding that the “rescue” of hostage Jessica Lynch was delayed a full day to allow camera crews to arrive.

In the past, Project Censored stories were primarily subjects simply overlooked by the mainstream media. Today, Phillips revealed, “It has
gone into deliberate manufacturing and creation of the news.”

The U.S. had fifty major news corporations when Project Censored first began. But consolidation of the media has resulted in just ten
powerful media conglomerates controlling our major TV, newspaper and radio news outlets today. Clear Channel owns 1,200 radio stations.
Most American cities have just one daily newspaper—and many of those are now owned by national chains.

Profit-driven, corporate-owned media focuses more on entertainment than news; Fox news ran 56 headlines about Paris Hilton’s arrest in
three weeks, while ignoring many stories of national or international importance.

Board members from the nation’s largest defense contractors also sit on corporate boards of major media outlets such as NBC, where they
may wield undue influence in determining war-related coverage.   Corporate media relies heavily on pre-packaged“ news” from government
agencies and PR firms. Worse, some prominent journalists have been exposed for being on the payroll of the administration as paid
propagandists.

“There is a symbiotic relationship between those who seek to control the news and those who would report,” Phillips said.

The top 25 censored stories of 2006 are well-documented and researched. Topics include civilian deaths in Fallujah, distorted election
coverage, a lawsuit filed by American Indians seeking compensation, and the Bush administration’s move to eliminate open government. (To
read the top 25 censored stories of 2006, visit http://projectcensored.org/publications/index.html.)

How bad is the censorship?

“In October 2005, the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] released copies of 44 autopsy reports of civilians who died in Afghanistan and
Iraq in U.S. custody, under control of various forces,” Phillips said. “For 23, the cause of death was listed as `homicide.’ They were
murdered while in custody…This proved that people were tortured to death. Their bodies were in horrendous condition. Others died of
heart failure while tortured.”

Although the ACLU distributed a press release along with the damning documents to thousands of media outlets, only 12 newspapers ran the
story – less than 1% of all newspapers nationwide. “Ninety-nine out of 100 editors decided that the American public didn’t need to know that
the U.S. was torturing people to death,” concluded Phillips, who was raised in a Republican Catholic family in Lodi, a conservative farming
town. But the actions of Republican leaders currently running our country do not reflect traditional conservative values, he believes.

Another under-reported story is passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows for suspension of habeus corpus.   The Act
now allows the government to put any person –citizen or not—in jail indefinitely without the right to an attorney solely because the
government designates you an enemy combatant. “You just disappear,” Phillips said. “Non-citizens can be locked up even pending the
designation. You can be locked up—literally forever.” Elimination of habeus corpus, a right dating back to English common law, is “missing
from the public dialogue,” he observed.

Another act signed by President Bush allows suspension of posse comitatus, a law enacted after the Civil War. Eliminating this projection
“makes martial law absolutely easy,” warned Phillips.

Project Censored has also revealed unprecedented mass arrests that have gone virtually unreported. “960 federal agencies were coordinated
through Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, with police and swat teams,” Phillips told a spellbound audience locally, “arresting
simultaneously over 10,000 people in the first time that the federal government ever coordinated all police agencies in the country. This has
been done three times.”

Equally troubling to historians and civil libertarians, Halliburton received a no-bid contract to build $385 million worth of detention centers,
ostensibly to hold immigrants or terrorists. “There are thousands of people living in these prisons,” Phillips said. “Now, our government is
contracting for a blimp 17 times bigger than the Goodyear blimp to take high-resolution images of a 600 square-mile area. It will be watching
where people are going.”

Halliburton has also authored a study on how to privatize the military, he revealed, citing the rise of Blackwater and other private contractors
that now have as many members in Iraq as the U.S. military. Blackwater also operates a private air fleet, helicopter gunships, armored
personnel carriers and will soon have its own surveillance blimp. “It’s the first private military service that can be hired by anybody in the
world to kill people, protect people, or whatever it chooses to do.”

Another recently passed law, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, contains language so broad that anyone accused of interfering with a
business and its profits off animal goods could be charged as a terrorist. “This could make terrorists out of boycotters of a grocery store,”
Phillips noted.

Project Censored’s director finds the loss of civil liberties deeply troubling, particularly given the current government leadership by
neoconservatives who founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and ex-Cheney aide Scooter Libby (recently pardoned by Bush for his role in outing the identity of CIA
agent Valerie Plame). PNAC, a plan created over a decade ago, laid out strategies on its website for aggressive military expansion and U.S.
military dominance of the world over the next 100 years.

Phillips likened the current forces controlling the government to the military-industrial complex of which Republican President Dwight D.
Eisenhower warned in his farewell address. “One of our stories for 2008 will be the U .S. establishment in Africa of a U.S. military
command structure primarily to control China’s advancement in the area,” he noted. Another new story will cover development of
electromagnetic weapons capable of “frying our brains.”

Perhaps the most important under-reported story is the growing movement calling for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President
Cheney. Phillips, co-editor of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, makes a compelling argument that the commander-
in-chief is building an imperial presidency. Evidence that false evidence was knowingly presented to Congress and the American people to
justify invading Iraq are now “quite clear,” he added.

He also faulted media for failing to report that U.S. orders for free-fire zones in Iraq has resulted in bombings that killed 650,000 civilians as
of a year ago, according to a British Medical Society survey. “We’re talking about 10,000 civilian deaths a month. That’s a big reason to
impeach,” Phillips said, adding that he believes it is “morally bankrupt” for Democrats in Congress to delay impeachment proceedings for fear
of unpopularity.

Support for impeachment has grown dramatically in recent months. A July poll by American Research Group found that 54% of the public
now favors impeachment of Cheney (40% oppose, and 6% are undecided). On impeachment of the President, Americans are split (45%
support, 46% oppose, 9% undecided).

In addition, 80 cities have passed resolutions calling for impeachment, along with the state of Vermont, Democratic parties in numerous states
(including California) and two states’ Green Parties.

“We’ve got a movement,” Phillips told the crowd at the First Uniterian Universalist Church, drawing applause.   “We can’t wait on
impeachment, because the Imperial presidency is in place.”

The most compelling reason for impeachment, he suggested, is to restore the humanity of America.

“It goes to our hearts. We know that torture is not right. We know that 10,000 civilian deaths a month is not right.” Instead of pouring
money into weapons of war, he concluded, Americans should use funds saved to end poverty or improve healthcare. “We want to put our
money into bettering the world—not fueling the war machinery.”

Miriam Raftery, a national award-winning journalist and author, serves as Media Watch Chair of San Diego for Democracy.

Peter Phillips