Censored 2012 (4 page)

The final section of the book is Project Censored International, which is a collection of various studies and media commentary that not only look at problems of global media censorship but also examine how these important issues are handled, or ignored, in the US corporate press. This section brings us a diverse group of scholars and activists and also introduces our work on the Fair Share of the Common Heritage awards. This year, we welcome Mary Lia, Cynthia Boaz, Ann Garrison, Jon Elmer, Robin Andersen, Margaret Flowers, and Ina May Gaskin. The significant issues in this section include the Fair Sharing of the Common Heritage, on moving toward an embrace of the human commons; understanding nonviolence and how media depict such movements for peace and social justice; and the deconstruction of various myths—from the incredibly biased reporting on Africa to distorted views of recent disaster coverage, plus the ongoing skewed coverage concerning Israel/Palestine. This section continues on issues of health with an analysis of the top-down denial of mass public support for single payer health care, and we round out
Censored 2012
by looking at how corporate media distort life itself, from birth, by either ignoring or demonizing the efficacy of natural childbirth and midwifery in the US, despite facts surrounding home birth culture that clearly refute the mass media’s biased coverage.

All in all, this is a work in progress (all thirty-five years of it), and it involves hundreds of dedicated scholars, students, activists, and people from all walks of life across the globe who have at least one thing in common: the belief in democracy and the role a free press plays in the creation, protection, and maintenance of it. Thanks to all who made
this work possible, to all the tireless and selfless contributors, to all the readers and supporters of a free and vibrant people’s press, one that is always and only uncensored. Please pass it on …

Mickey Huff
Berkeley, CA
June 2011

1
. Robert McChesney,
Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media
(New York: New Press, 2007), 221.

2
. Alex S. Jones,
Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston,
When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

3
. Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard, eds.,
Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done to Fix It
(New York: New Press, 2011); and Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols,
The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again
(New York and Philadelphia: Nation Books, 2010).

4
. Robert W. McChesney,
The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 74.

5
. See Peter Phillips, Mickey Huff, et al., “Truth Emergency Meets Media Reform,” chap. 11 in
Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007–08
, eds. Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 281–95. Also see Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “Truth Emergency: Inside the Military Industrial Media Empire,” chap. 5 in
Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008–09
, eds. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 197–220.

by Peter Phillips

The international concentration of wealth and military power is endangering not only the personal freedoms and life chances of billions of people, but the potential for life on earth to simply exist. The US-NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in support of transnational corporations and the central banks primarily as the enforcer of the International Monetary Fund’s and World Bank’s fiscal policies, and as the protector of transnational capital flow. Considering capital’s need for constant growth and profits, the combination of the private owners of production in partnership with empire enforcers—military and police, both public and private—is resulting in a tragic decline of humanity into a freedomless state of global corporate fascism.

The alarmists featured in
Censored 2012
, with their Paul Revere voices, are echoing the warnings of global catastrophe. Chris Hedges and Cord Jefferson raise the issue of the human costs of the 9/11 empire wars. Peter Dale Scott and Allen Roland astound us with documentation regarding the preparation for marshal law and military control in the US. Tim Reid and Michael Evans document the worldwide deep penetration of empire forces deployed in seventy-five countries. Tina Mather, Kimberly Daniels, and Shannon Pence disclose the systemic waste of food by corporate capitalism. Nick Fielding, Ian Cobain, Darlene Storm, and Stephen Webster warn of the immediate penetration of empire enforcers into cyberspace for propaganda control. Regionally, we are reminded of the ongoing apocalypse in central Africa by Keith Harmon Snow, while E. Eduardo Castillo and Martha Mendoza address the massive US involvement in Mexico’s war on drugs.

The overall environmental disasters of empire expansion featured in
Censored 2012
are seemingly beyond comprehension, ranging from new diseases to massive life-threatening pollution of the oceans, air, and earth. We, in our bodies, are all Fukushima, Gulf oil, plastics, and
electromagnetic waves. No one is safe, including the children of our children. Without immediate mass interventions, humankind is in danger of permanent extinction.

Also documented in
Censored 2012
are the very human efforts around the world to counter the empire of destruction. There are movements to ban plastic bags, protect the environment, develop local banks, and establish community-based budgeting, as well as many other efforts to protect the commons and encourage collaborations. The democracy movements of young people in the Middle East, Greece, and Spain are inspiring other attempts to counter the empire of destruction. These social movements in resistance to power, crossing ideological lines, are a manifestation of grassroots radical democracy. They are community-based reality checks by human beings sharing inequality in the face of overwhelming power.

During the movement’s May 15, 2011, protests in Madrid, Spain, Project Censored affiliate professor Concha Mateo wrote from the M15 camp in the Puerta del Sol (“Gate of the Sun”), just before it was taken down on June 12:

While we can be encouraged by the emerging awareness of the need for democratic challenges to empire, we cannot ignore the extreme danger of total economic collapse, chaos, and environmental
destruction that potentially undermines human rights and civil societies everywhere. This empire of destruction seems to many to be unstoppable. Over a million civilians have died in Iraq since the US invasion. US-NATO wars continue in Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan, with alarming daily civilian death rates. Over three billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Human misery expands inside the empire of destruction, while the transnational corporate class—less than 1 percent of the world’s population—relishes in wealth, opulence, and greed protected by both private and public military forces and cooperative governments doing the bidding of empire.

But, we can draw strength through mutual recognition of our resistance movements. Iara Lee’s new film,
Cultures of Resistance
, is a heartwarming look at the daily efforts of people worldwide to protect humanness in the face of fascism and repression, and is symbolically representative of the efforts that need to be manifested in real life, around the world, as well. Without strong democratic movements of resistance worldwide, the chaos resulting from the empire of destruction will inevitability move from Kabul and Palestine to Paris and San Francisco.

Time and again,
Censored 2012
heeds the call for the global truth and justice movement to become self-informed, radically democratic, and culturally resistant to the empire of destruction.

We are not going to reform the empire of destruction globally through corrupt capital-protecting legislative bodies controlled by millionaires and corporate money. We are not going to change the propaganda messages of corporate media—as they are just as deeply embedded in the destructive empire of power as the transnational corporate elite.

Corporate media (singular) is the information control wing of the global power structure. The corporate media systematically censors news stories that challenge the propaganda of empire. Some of the mythologies of empire are that we live in democratic societies with fair elections, that governments are primarily transparent and seek to protect the public, that evil lurks in the world waiting to challenge our freedoms, that we fight fairly and morally while the others are evil terrorists, that governments would never do anything to harm their own citizens, that wealth trickles down, that we are all trying to be green, and that capitalism will save us.

Many of the stories that Project Censored has covered over the past thirty-five years have challenged the core myths of empire. These are stories about election fraud, transnational elite planning and control, 9/11, torture, extensive civilian deaths in wars, state crimes against democracy, massive military misspending, corporate tax evasion and misappropriation or economic resource (capital flight), unsustainable practices and environmental damage, and the denegation of world leaders who fail to cooperate with neoliberal economic policies. We are in an era of total information control and top-down managed news throughout the empire. It is not against the law to lie to the public or to prepackage news to match empire propaganda myths.

The time is right for democracy movements to build their own news, and their own systems of decision-making from the bottom-up. We no longer need a majority to make change inside the empire. We need only active, informed populations in the 10 to 20 percent range of society to initiate change producing social movements of resistance and noncooperation with empire.

Individually and collectively we can disconnect from employment that supports the empire of destruction, and we can instead keep our work with community-based efforts at local sustainability, economic development, and caring. We can shop locally and never enter the Walmarts of empire. We can organize for resistance to counter the billions of dollars a year spent by the military to deceive our children into serving the empire of destruction. We can turn off the corporate media filled with its propaganda and lies and seek our own sources of news from within democracy movements worldwide.

We can un-censor the news, utilizing the efforts of our colleges and universities validating independent news within the Project Censored/Media Freedom network. We can invite activists and those concerned with the empire of destruction to speak truth to power with news and stories of the abuses of empire and the successes of our efforts of resistance. Telling our stories openly and transparently will be vital to a global democratic movement. We will share the wealth of humanness to build democratic change to save our grandchildren’s grandchildren and ourselves. We are all protégé of the Sol.

PETER PHILLIPS
is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and recent past director of Project Censored (1996–2010). He teaches classes in Media Censorship, Investigative Sociology, Sociology of Power, Political Sociology, and Sociology of Media. He has published fourteen editions of the
Censored
yearbooks with Seven Stories Press. He has also published, with Seven Stories Press, the books
Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney
(2006) and
Project Censored Guide to Independent Media and Activism
(2003).

Peter Phillips co-hosts the Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio and is a frequent writer and blogger on numerous websites worldwide. In 2009, Phillips received the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications. Dallas Smythe is a national award given to researchers and activists who, through their research and/or production work, have made significant contributions to the study and practice of democratic communication.