Project Censored's State of the Free Press 2024

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS PROJECT CENSORED YEARBOOKS

Project Censored has shined the light for more than forty years on those critical stories and investigative reports that government officials, major media companies, and assorted gatekeepers of ‘respectable’ journalism too often ignore.

—juan gonzález, co-host of Democracy Now! and professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University

Project Censored provides critical media literacy tools to survive this ‘post-truth’ era.

—mnar adley, editor-in-chief, MintPress News

Today we mostly shut out news about our darker side, which is why we need Project Censored. Someone has to remind us to look in the mirror.

—matt taibbi, author of Hate Inc.

Now, more than ever, press freedom is at stake. In opposition to the undemocratic censorship of information, I proudly stand with Project Censored.

—sharyl attkisson, Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist and host of Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson

Project Censored and its annual book represent a vitally important tool, highlighting the crucial issues to know and struggles to follow.

—abby martin, The Empire Files

Project Censored sets the standard for the Fourth Estate.

—ted rall, syndicated cartoonist and columnist

If you want a break from ‘fake news’ and wish instead to witness real journalism revealing important stories rarely, if ever, covered in the establishment press, read this book!

—dan kovalik, author of Cancel This Book and The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela

Today’s fake news becomes tomorrow’s fake history. If journalism is the rough draft of history, [Project Censored] goes a long way to getting the record right the first time.

—peter kuznick and oliver stone, co-authors of The Untold History of the United States book and documentary series

Project Censored is our watchdog on the establishment media, casting its eye on how the information that we receive—and don’t receive— shapes our democracy. We need it more than ever today!

—christopher finan, executive director, National Coalition Against Censorship

A crucial contribution to the hope for a more just and democratic society.

—noam chomsky

Project Censored is a clarion call for truth telling.

—daniel ellsberg, The Pentagon Papers

"Project Censored is a national treasure in American life.

—henry a. giroux, author of American Nightmare

Project Censored rescues the most important stories you should have read but probably never saw from oblivion.

—chris hedges, Pulitzer Prize award–winning author and journalist

The systematic exposure of censored stories by Project Censored has been an important contribution.

—howard zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

A deep and utterly engrossing exercise to unmask censorship and propaganda in the mass media.

—ralph nader, consumer advocate, lawyer, and author

Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.

—walter cronkite, anchor, CBS Evening News, 1962–1981

One of the most significant media research projects in the country.

—i.f. stone, American muckraker

a joint production of the censored press and seven stories press

Copyright © 2024 by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Alan MacLeod

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

isbn 978-1-64421-332-2 (paperback)

isbn 978-1-64421-333-9 (electronic)

issn 1074-5998

College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email [email protected].

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA

Book design by Jon Gilbert

DEDICATION

To Daniel Ellsberg

April 7, 1931 – June 16, 2023

Photo by Christopher Michel

A fearless and inspiring truth teller,

Daniel Ellsberg advocated for peace,

freedom of information,

and civil courage.

Contents

FOREWORD by Alan MacLeod

INTRODUCTION: What If Journalism Disappeared?

by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff

CHAPTER 1: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2022–23

Compiled and edited by Libby Meagher, Grace Harty, Amy Grim Buxbaum, Steve Macek, and Andy Lee Roth

Introduction: Light Through the Slats

by Andy Lee Roth and Steve Macek

Note on Research and Evaluation of Censored News Stories

1. Forever Chemicals in Rainwater a Global Threat to Human Health

2. Hiring of Former CIA Employees and Ex-Israeli Agents Blurs Line Between Big Tech and Big Brother

3. Toxic Chemicals Continue to Go Unregulated in the United States

4. Stalkerware Could Be Used to Incriminate People Violating Abortion Bans

5. Certified Rainforest Carbon Offsets Mostly Worthless

6. Unions Won More Than 70 Percent of Their Elections in 2022, and Their Victories Are Being Driven by Workers of Color

7. Fossil Fuel Investors Sue Governments to Block Climate Regulations

8. Proximity to Oil and Gas Extraction Sites Linked to Maternal Health Risks and Childhood Leukemia

9. Deadly Decade for Environmental Activists

10. Corporate Profits Hit Record High as Top 0.1% Earnings and Wall Street Bonuses Skyrocket

11. Tribal Towns Forced to Relocate Due to Climate Crisis

12. Fossil Fuel Money Skews University Climate and Energy Research

13. Accidents Reveal US Biolab Vulnerabilities

14. Study Exposes Electric Utilities’ Climate Disinformation Campaigns

15. Black Americans Seven Times More Likely Than Whites to Be Wrongfully Convicted of Serious Crimes

16. Municipalities in Puerto Rico Sue Fossil Fuel Giants Under Organized Crime Law

17. Leaks Reveal Homeland Security Plans to Regulate Disinformation Online

18. Debt Crisis Looms for World’s Poorest Nations

19. Economic Consequences of US Gun Violence Far Costlier Than Previously Known

20. Derailment Furor Ignores Alarming Frequency of Toxic Chemical Spills

21. Nearly Half of Unhoused People Are Employed

22. Public Health Threatened by Beef Suppliers’ Continued Use of Critically Important Antibiotics

23. Informal Removal Policies Deny Educational Opportunities for Students with Disabilities

24. Twitter Files Reveal US Government Pressure on Social Media Platform to Suppress Alternative Views

25. Activism Targets Outdated State Laws That Criminalize HIV

HONORABLE MENTIONS

CHAPTER 2: Déjà Vu News: What Happened to Previous Censored Stories

by Grace Harty, Kathleen Minelli, Nicole Mendez-Villarrubia, and Steve Macek

CHAPTER 3: Repurpose, Recycle, Reuse: All the Junk Food News We Couldn’t Refuse . . . So Here’s a Buffet!

by Jen Lyons, Sierra Kaul, Reagan Haynie, Marcelle Levine Swinburne, Gavin Kelley, and Mickey Huff

CHAPTER 4: Lies, Misdirection, and Propaganda: News Abuse in Service of Elite Interests

by Robin Andersen

CHAPTER 5: Media Democracy in Action

with contributions by Maria Armoudian and Olivia Guyodo (University of Auckland), Christine Emeran (National Coalition Against Censorship), Jen Senko (The Brainwashing of My Dad), and Rebecca Vincent (Reporters Without Borders)

introduced by Mischa Geracoulis

CHAPTER 6: Call It What You Want: Journalism, Truth, and Making Media That Empowers Working People

by Maximillian Alvarez

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HOW TO SUPPORT PROJECT CENSORED

ABOUT THE EDITORS

INDEX

Foreword

ALAN MACLEOD

We are swimming in an ocean of propaganda—not that we usually call it that. We like to think of propaganda as something that exists largely in enemy nations, such as China or North Korea. But what else to call the thousands of misleading advertisements, news snippets, or politicized messages we see every day?¹ Given the prevalence of PR, spin, and bias out there, added to the fact that US schools seldom teach media literacy adequately, it is little wonder that many Americans are drowning in propaganda—even if they don’t recognize it as such.

Trust in journalism is at an all-time low. A 2022 Gallup poll found that just one-in-nine Americans had confidence in TV news, and fewer than one-in-six believed in the printed press.² A subsequent survey released in February 2023 revealed that half of Americans believe national news organizations intentionally deceive the public in order to suit their own agendas.³

As a former media studies academic who is now a journalist, all I can say is they are right to be skeptical. The industry is every bit as deceitful, nefarious, and corrupt as most Americans suspect. Establishment media, in short, is not our friend. For the most part, media are gigantic for-profit corporate structures with their own interests—interests that are often antithetical to those of the public. With some notable exceptions, corporate news outlets have largely abandoned their professed role as the fourth estate. In other words, corporate media do not challenge power; they are power, the voice of the powerful. And power deserves to be scrutinized.

Today, a handful of huge corporations controls the vast majority of what Americans see, read, or hear daily. Unlike much of the world, the United States does not have a large state media empire. We are taught to see state media as inherently untrustworthy, something enemy states use to propagandize their populations. But if corporations have captured our government, isn’t corporate media state media by default? After all, the same people and organizations that fund our politicians also own and bankroll our press.

This collapse in media trust is part of a generalized decline of faith in institutions. Even if members of the public do not express it as succinctly as the philosopher and public intellectual John Ralston Saul, who described the country as going through a corporate coup d’état in slow motion, people see how their nation is being hollowed out for profit, as jobs are sent abroad and corporations are allowed to pillage the state.

America rarely hears it framed like this on the news, however. Nearly half the independent news stories highlighted in Chapter 1 of State of the Free Press 2024 demonstrate how corporate news media have ignored crucial news stories of this sort.

Unfortunately, while distrust is high, Americans often see media bias through a highly partisan lens. Audiences are hyper-polarized: 93 percent of Fox News viewers are or lean Republican, while 91 percent of New York Times readers and 95 percent of MSNBC’s audience skew Democrat.⁴ This leads to a shallow understanding and scrutiny of the corporate press; our media is honest, theirs is propaganda and fake news.

This superficial, partisan framework of understanding was on show when billionaire plutocrat Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022. Liberals were aghast, while conservatives cheered him on as a supposed warrior for free speech. Few seemed interested in what the implications of the (then) world’s richest man taking over one of the planet’s chief arteries of communications would be, beyond whether it was good for Team Red or Team Blue.

Putting our faith in one or another oligarch to save us is a recipe for disaster. For the most part, the internet and social media suffer from the same problems as legacy media. Only a handful of monopolistic profit-seeking mega-corporations dominate online. These companies are also intimately connected to the US national security state, which has leaned on them to suppress speech and content that challenges their interests, as I explored in the #2 story featured in Chapter 1 of this volume. With a quiet tweak of their algorithms, companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook wield the power to boost or throttle media content. In the wake of the 2016 election and ensuing moral panic around fake news, big social media companies reoriented their algorithms to promote what they called authoritative reporting content and suppress borderline content.

The effect was to invisibly suffocate high-quality independent media outlets and channel people back to corporate legacy media, in effect, turning the internet back into a place safe for advertisers who call the shots. Overnight, Democracy Now! lost 36 percent of its Google traffic, The Intercept, 19 percent.⁵ MintPress News, where I work, saw its Google traffic fall by around 90 percent.

The solution to navigating this confusing media landscape is developing what philosopher and media critic Noam Chomsky long ago called a course of intellectual self-defense.⁶ And the answer to the problem of an unrepresentative media is to build new structures, outlets and organizations that can provide an alternative and an antidote to the establishment.

On both of these issues, Project Censored is leading the way. For decades, their excellent research and output has helped develop a critical media literacy among their readers, providing a crucial framework to aid people in scrutinizing what they are consuming. Just as Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living so an unexamined article is not worth reading.

Year-on-year, Project Censored’s meticulously compiled list of the top Censored news stories has become essential reading for media critics, scholars, and forward-thinking individuals wishing to inform themselves about the biggest issues corporate media are not talking about. Meanwhile, their weekly radio show keeps listeners up to date on crucial questions and debates the corporate press ignore in favor of serving up junk food news. It is, therefore, an honor to be asked to pen this foreword.

As you will find out, sometimes, stories are too important to cover—meaning that their ramifications would be too wide-reaching or their consequences too damaging to the powerful interests that hold sway over most all of our means of communication. In these cases, they are either back-paged, downplayed, or simply ignored. Thankfully, Project Censored is on the case, showing the way where corporate media fear to tread.

alan macleod, phd, is Senior Staff Writer and Podcast Producer for MintPress News. The editor of Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent and author of Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting, he has also contributed to a number of media outlets, including FAIR, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Salon, Jacobin, and Common Dreams.

Notes

1 For one example of what this looks like, see Jon Simpson, Finding Brand Success in the Digital World, Forbes, August 25, 2017.

2 Jeffrey M. Jones, Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low, Gallup, July 5, 2022.

3 American Views 2022: Part 2, Trust Media and Democracy, Knight Foundation, February 15, 2023.

4 Elizabeth Grieco, Americans’ Main Sources for Political News Vary by Party and Age, Pew Research Center, April 1, 2020.

5 Andre Damon and David North, Google’s New Search Protocol Is Restricting Access to 13 Leading Socialist, Progressive and Anti-war Web Sites, World Socialist Web Site, August 2, 2017.

6 Noam Chomsky, False, False, False, and False, Talk of the Nation (NPR), interview by Ray Saurez, January 20, 1999.

INTRODUCTION

What If Journalism Disappeared?¹

ANDY LEE ROTH and MICKEY HUFF

In 1995, early in the development of the global internet, sociologist Michael Schudson imagined how people might process information if journalism were to suddenly disappear. An expert on the history of US news media, Schudson speculated that peoples’ need to identify the day’s most important and relevant news from the continuous torrent of available information would eventually lead to the reinvention of journalism.²

Beyond daily gossip, practical advice, or mere information, Schudson contended, people desire what he called public knowledge, or news, the demand for which made it difficult to imagine a world without journalism.

Nearly thirty years later, many Americans live in a version of the world remarkably close to the one Schudson pondered in 1995—because either they lack access to news or they choose to ignore journalism in favor of other, more sensational content.

By exploring how journalism is increasingly absent from many Americans’ lives, we can identify false paths and promising routes to its reinvention.

THE RISE OF NEWS DESERTS

Many communities across the United States now suffer from limited access to credible, comprehensive local news. Northwestern University’s 2022 State of Local News report determined that more than half of the counties in the United States—some 1,630—are served by only one newspaper each, while another two hundred or more counties, the homes of some four million people, have no newspaper at all.³ Put another way, seventy million Americans—a fifth of the country’s population—live in news deserts, communities with very limited access to local news, or in counties just one newspaper closure away from becoming so.

Not surprisingly, the study found that news deserts are most common in economically struggling communities, which also frequently lack affordable and reliable high-speed digital service—a form of inequality known as digital redlining.⁴ Members of such communities are doubly impacted: lacking local news sources, they are also cut off from online access to the country’s surviving regional and national newspapers.

Noting that credible news feeds grassroots democracy and builds a sense of belonging to a community, Penny Abernathy, the report’s author, wrote that news deserts contribute to the malignant spread of misinformation and disinformation, political polarization, eroding trust in media, and a yawning digital and economic divide among citizens.

DIVIDED ATTENTION AND NEWS SNACKING

While the rise of news deserts makes credible news a scarce resource for many Americans, others show no more than passing interest in news. A February 2022 Gallup/ Knight Foundation poll found that only 33 percent of Americans reported paying a great deal of attention to national news, with even lower figures for local news (21 percent) and international news (12 percent).⁵

With the increasing prevalence of smartphone ownership and reliance on social media, news outlets now face ferocious competition for peoples’ attention.⁶ Following news is an incidental activity in the lives of many who engage in news snacking. As communications scholar Hektor Haarkötter described in a 2022 article, Discarded News, mobile internet use has altered patterns of news consumption: News is no longer received consciously, but rather consumed incidentally like potato chips.⁷ Instead of intentionally seeking news from sources dedicated to journalism, many people now assume the viral nature of social media will automatically alert them to any truly important events or issues, a belief that is especially prominent among younger media users, Haarkötter noted. A 2017 study determined that the prevalence of this news-finds-me perception is likely to widen gaps in political knowledge while promoting a false sense of being informed.⁸

SIGNS OF REINVENTION?

With journalism inaccessible to the growing number of people who live in news deserts, or only a matter of passing interest to online news snackers, the disappearance of journalism that Schudson pondered hypothetically in 1995 is a reality for many people today. If journalism as we have known it is on the verge of disappearing, are there also—as Schudson predicted—signs of its reinvention? Examining the profession itself, the signs are not all that encouraging.

Consider, for example, the pivot by many independent journalists to Substack, Patreon, and other digital platforms in order to reach their audiences directly. Reader-supported journalism may be a necessary survival reflex, but we are wary of pinning the future of journalism on tech platforms controlled by third parties not necessarily committed to principles of ethical journalism, as advocated by the Society of Professional Journalists.⁹

Media companies—including the tech website CNET and BuzzFeed—have experimented with using artificial intelligence programs, including the infamous ChatGPT bot, to produce content.¹⁰ Noting that there would be nothing surprising about AI technology eventually threatening jobs in journalism, Hamilton Nolan of In These Times suggested that journalists have two key resources in the looming fight with AI, unions and "a widely accepted code of ethics that dictates how far standards can be pushed before