Censored 2014 (59 page)

Media Freedom Foundation (MFF) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation that sponsors Project Censored and all its various programs. MFF has a ten-person board of directors that is responsible for monitoring the budget and setting policy for our operations. Mickey Huff is director of Project Censored and has overall responsibility for its day-to-day management and for production of the annual
Censored
yearbook. Associate Director Andy Lee Roth serves in a similar administrative capacity and has been heavily involved in writing and researching
Censored 2014
and earlier yearbooks. This report details some of Project Censored's daily work and annual endeavors on behalf of media democracy in action.

We each are regularly invited speakers at community events, college campuses, academic conferences, and independent bookstores, addressing the issues of media censorship, propaganda, and the importance of accurate independent media in society. To arrange for a member of our speaking team to come to your community or campus, see
ProjectCensored.org/speakers
.

We are approaching our third year of producing and hosting the weekly one-hour
Project Censored Show
on
The Morning Mix
for KPFA/Pacifica Radio.
The Project Censored Show
presents original content every Friday at 8:00 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, at 94.1 FM in the San Francisco Bay region and online at
KPFA.org
. Our affiliate stations include the Progressive Radio Network, No Lies Radio, and several Pa-cifica Radio stations around the country. Please ask your local /files/12/14/76/f121476/public/ nonprofit radio station to air our weekly shows. See
ProjectCensored.org/radio-archive
for a listing of past broadcasts and guests. These archived public affairs broadcasts—available at no charge—make excellent classroom listening for high school and college classes.

We currently have students and faculty from nearly twenty colleges and universities researching and posting Validated Independent
News stories (VINs), which are news stories reported in the independent media that have been ignored by corporate media. Students and professors affiliated with Project Censored vet and research these stories, which Project Censored then posts on its website. These VINs become the candidates for our annual list of the Top 25 censored news stories. Reading independent news and comparing it to corporate media coverage is an important part of many high school and college critical thinking classes. Teaching college classes, helping students to learn about alternative news outlets, and mentoring them in writing VINs are hands-on components of our effort to create a more media literate society. We welcome inquiries from faculty and students at college and university campuses interested in becoming Project Censored affiliates.

MFF/Project Censored continues to maintain a website,
CensoredNews.org
, with daily RSS newsfeeds from approximately twenty sources that we trust for quality news. Helping the public identify and evaluate trustworthy sources of daily news is an important part of freedom of information, which is vital to all democratic societies. Adam Armstrong continues to serve as the webmaster for all the MFF/Project Censored websites, including our Spanish-language site,
ProyectoCensurado.org
. We have around 400,000 unique views each month, with millions of monthly hits. Adam also founded and maintains the blog
DailyCensored.com
, which has over fifty regular writers posting news stories and opinion. As we redesign and upgrade all our websites to state-of-the-art status, we will have movie-and book-downloading capabilities and increasingly stronger daily news and information. Adam is a vital part of the Project Censored team.

We are pleased to announce that MFF board member Abby Martin of Media Roots is continuing her program
Breaking the Set
on
Russia Today
in Washington DC. In addition to her duties at RT, she remains on the MFF board, and continues to update video content for Project Censored and Media Roots (
MediaRoots.org
).

Another MFF board member, Nora Barrows-Friedman, staff editor and reporter with
Electronic Intifada,
is currently working on a book focusing on how college students in the United States are organizing for justice in Palestine and are using direct action to protest their
universities' complicity in Israel's occupation. The book will be published by Just World Books, due out in fall 2014.

We were saddened to learn this winter of the passing of our good friend and supporter Elisabeth Sherif.

In Memoriam
Elisabeth Anne Sherif
Social Justice Activist, Friend of Project Censored,
Artist, and Poet
June 28, 1933–February 11, 2013

Over the past three years, MFF/Project Censored has engaged in developing the idea of a fair share of the common heritage. With special funding from Dorothy Andersen of Santa Rosa, California, in honor of her late husband Alfred Andersen's beliefs, MFF has held public events, organized essay contests, produced radio shows, and maintained a website, all highlighting the importance of acknowledging that the world's material resources and cultural wealth belong to all living beings. For full information of the philosophy of the fair share of the common heritage, see
FairShareCommonHeritage.org
.

In addition to our longstanding relationship with our book publisher Seven Stories Press, Project Censored has extended its influence over the past five years through weekly radio broadcasts, development of the campus affiliates program, and improved websites. This year, we add an incredible new Project Censored documentary to our set of outreach tools.
Project Censored: The Movie—Ending the Reign of Junk Food News
hit the film festival circuit this summer and is slated for full release in fall 2013. Produced and directed by former Project Censored student and Sonoma State University alum Doug Hecker, and longtime Project Censored supporter Christopher Oscar, the film features original interviews about the Project and media censorship with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Greg Palast, Oliver Stone, Daniel Ellsberg, Peter Kuznick, Cynthia McK-inney, Nora Barrows-Friedman, John Perkins, Jonah Raskin, Khalil Bendib, Pacifica and KPFA Free Speech Radio personalities, Abby
Martin of
Breaking the Set,
and many more Project-affiliated faculty and students. It also highlights Project founder Dr. Carl Jensen, former director and president of the Media Freedom Foundation Dr. Peter Phillips, current director Professor Mickey Huff, and associate director Dr. Andy Lee Roth. Watch for
Project Censored: The Movie
screenings in your area (
ProjectCensoredTheMovie.com
).

MFF/Project Censored is primarily affiliated with colleges, universities, independent media, and social justice organizations. In this capacity, we are constantly writing, researching, and promoting important human rights issues and news. As we enter our thirty-seventh year, the team at Project Censored has not only been looking back at how much we have done, but also ambitiously planning ahead. In efforts to broaden our impact, we are partnering with other outstanding organizations in our endeavors to fight media censorship. These include the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Union for Democratic Communications as well as film projects on solutions-based journalism like What the World Could Be.

We all know that the establishment news media in the US is in woeful condition; to address this, we at Project Censored continue to do all we can to support independent journalism, promote media literacy, and teach critical thinking skills—not only on college and university campuses across the country but also in the communities beyond those campuses.

These efforts and others too numerous to list engage us everyday. We currently do all of this on less than $80,000 a year. In order to stabilize our expanded affiliates program and to extend our influence in the future, we really need your help. Those who already subscribe to our electronic e-mail list know that we do not do a great deal of mass appeal fundraising. But, we have to be more honest with our readers and our supporters: we cannot continue to do all that we do unless we increase our budget.

Project Censored currently receives no funding of any kind from foundations or universities. For thirty-seven years, we have relied on support from personal donors, monthly subscribers, and book sales. (In past years when we have had some small foundation grants, that funding only augmented the individual donations that have always been the Project's economic lifeblood.) We hope that you will con
sider us among the most important nonprofits that you support, and we ask you to consider helping in any way or amount that you can. Increased revenues will help us meet our goals of doubling the size of our campus affiliates program in the next two years, hiring a part-time staff person to help with daily administrative tasks, and expanding our Internet content.

A new option this year has been for donors to pledge five dollars or more a month. In return, monthly subscribers receive our great appreciation and a copy of the annual
Censored
yearbook. Over 200 of you have so far joined as monthly subscribers. If you have not yet done so, please consider making a monthly pledge online at
Project-Censored.org
. If you are affiliated with a nonprofit foundation, or can make a larger gift in support of one or all of our activities, we would sincerely appreciate hearing from you and we would welcome the opportunity to tell you in more detail how you can be a crucial supporter in helping the Project to realize our future plans.

We humbly thank you for considering our appeal, and we are grateful for your support as we continue to fight censorship, deconstruct propaganda, and support fearless speech in fateful times.

Peter Phillips, PhD
President—Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
June 2013
PO Box 571
Cotati CA 94931
(7O7) 874–2695
[email protected]

NOMINATE A STORY

To nominate a
Censored
story, send us a copy of the article and include the name of the source publication, the date that the article appeared, and page number. For news stories published on the Internet, forward the URL to
[email protected]
;
[email protected]
; and/or
[email protected]
. The deadline for nominating
Censored
stories is March 15 of each year.

Criteria for Project Censored news story nominations:

A
Censored
news story reports information that the public has a right and need to know, but to which the public has had limited access or exposure.

The news story is recent, having been first reported no more than one year earlier. For
Censored 2014,
the Top 25 list includes stories reported between April 2012 and March 2013. Thus, stories submitted for consideration in
Censored 2015
should be no older than April 2013.

The story has clearly defined concepts and solid, verifiable documentation. The story's claims should be supported by evidence—the more controversial the claims, the stronger the evidence necessary.

The news story has been published, either electronically or in print, in a publicly circulated newspaper, journal, magazine, newsletter, or similar publication from either a domestic or foreign source.

MAKE A TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION

Project Censored is supported by the Media Freedom Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. We depend on tax-deductible donations to continue our work. To support our efforts on behalf of independent journalism and freedom of information, send checks to the address below or call (707) 874–2695.

Donations can also be made online at ProjectCensored.org.

Please consider helping us fight news censorship and promote media literacy.

Media Freedom Foundation

PO Box 571

Cotati CA 94931

Phone: (707) 874–2695

Mickey Huff:
[email protected]

Andy Lee Roth:
[email protected]

Peter Phillips:
[email protected]

Marcia Annenberg, cover artist for
Censored 2014
www.mannenberg.com

It is not an overstatement to say that American journalism is endangered. In the 1990s, it was simply a question of the insertion of entertainment news into the news hour. By 2012, the news hour had shrunk—on some stations—to eighty seconds around the world. Does market research really find that the average American citizen can maintain interest in world news for only eighty seconds?

With media consolidation came the closing of news bureaus overseas, to increase profit margins. What if Osama bin Laden's articles, published in London, were publicized in 1998, instead of Monica Lewinsky's blue dress stains? Would our national security apparatus have been more focused? Probably. Where is the news that informs, instead of titillates? More recently, it is the underreporting of domestic news that should concern us. My artwork,
No News Is Good News,
grew out of an inadvertent discovery of a critically important news story that was omitted from national news—namely, the signing of the NDAA, on New Year's Eve, by the president in 2012. I was startled to discover on the Internet, a week after the signing, that it had in fact taken place the prior week.

Why does this matter? A bill, which even FBI Director Robert Mueller objected to, gave the army the same power as the police—to arrest terrorism suspects. Since when did the army become an adjunct police force? This news caused barely a ripple in the national press. I couldn't believe that I had missed this news, so I started to send away for national newspapers, for example, the
New York Times,
the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Washington Post,
the
Philadelphia Enquirer,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
Dallas Free Press,
the
Detroit Free Press,
and the
Tampa Bay Times.
What I found was that it simply wasn't reported—except for
page 22
in the
New York Times
and the front page of the
Dallas Free Press.
How did it come to this?

As our Fourth Amendment protections slip away, against unreason
able search and seizure, under the cover of the war on terror, with warrantless access to our e-mail and phone calls—allowing the gathering of data without encryption—we have to wonder why the press has acquiesced, without protest. As investigative journalism moves into the web of the Internet, the American people are left in a state of unknowing. Not only do we not know what the government is doing on our behalf in the fight against terrorism, due to the absence of reporting, we don't know that we don't know what it is that we are missing.

In this bubble of mostly entertainment and crime news the public is fed on a daily basis, how can we make critical judgments on policy without any background in world affairs? Political contests become sound bites. Photogenic leaders are given scripts that play to designated interest groups. Perhaps the greatest deceit of our time is the obfuscation of the science behind global warming. As the level of greenhouse gas rises above 400 parts per million, will any politician take to the floor of Congress to demand action? How many newspapers and how many newscasts reported the implications of that number? When the greatest threat to our future has been suppressed for years—can we still say that America has a free press?