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Censored!
By Camille T. Taiara
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
01-08 September 2004 Edition
The 10 big stories the national news media ignore.
In late July more than 600 people showed up in
Monterey to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on
ownership concentration in the news media. The participants were a
diverse group, young and old, activists and workers, but they had a
single consistent message: the mainstream news media have been doing
a deplorable job of covering the day's most important stories.
That's no surprise: consolidation of the media in the
hands of a few corporate Goliaths has resulted in fewer people
creating more of the content we see, hear, and read. One impact has
been a narrower range of perspectives. Another is the virtual
disappearance of hard-hitting, original, investigative reporting.
"Corporate media has abdicated their
responsibility to the First Amendment to keep the American
electorate informed about important issues in society and instead
serves up a pabulum of junk-food news," says Peter Phillips,
head of Sonoma State University's Project Censored.
Every year researchers at Project Censored pick
through volumes of print and broadcast news to see which of the past
year's most important stories aren't receiving the kind of attention
they deserve. Phillips and his team acknowledge that many of these
stories weren't "censored" in the traditional sense of the
word: No government agency blocked their publication. And some even
appeared briefly and without follow-up in mainstream journals.
But every one of this year's picks merited prominent
placement on the evening news and the dailies' front pages. Instead
they went virtually ignored.
This list speaks directly to the point FCC critics
have raised: stories that address fundamental issues of wealth
concentration and big-business dominance of the political agenda are
almost entirely missing from the national debate. From the dramatic
increase in wealth inequality in the United States, to the wholesale
giveaway of the nation's natural resources, to the Bush
administration's attack on corporate and political accountability,
events and trends that ought to be dominating the presidential
campaign and the national dialogue are missing from the front pages.
Here are Project Censored's 10 biggest examples of
major stories that have been relegated to the most obscure corners
of the media world.
1. Wealth inequality in 21st century threatens
economy and democracy.
As the mainstream news media recite the official line
about the nation's supposed economic recovery, a key point has been
missing: wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled
over the past 30 years.
In fact, the Federal Reserve Board's most recent
"Survey of Consumer Finances" supplement on high-income
families shows that in 1998, the richest 1 percent of households
owned 38 percent of the nation's wealth. The top 5 percent owned
almost 60 percent of the wealth.
"We are much more unequal than any other
advanced industrial country," New York University economics
professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.
But that's just part of the problem. "Most
Americans believe we take from people at the top to benefit those
below," Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative
reporter David Cay Johnston said in a BuzzFlash.com interview. But
our tax system is actually set up such that "people who make
$30,000 to $500,000 ... give relief to those who make millions, or
tens and hundreds of millions, of dollars a year."
The United States isn't alone: Today, almost
one-sixth of the world's population 940 million people
"already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without
water, sanitation, public services, or legal security," John
Vidal wrote in the U.K. Guardian. A recent United Nations report
predicted that, absent drastic change to reverse "a form of
colonialism that is probably more stringent than the original,"
one in every three people worldwide will live in slums within 30
years. That's a bigger threat to democracy and global stability than
al-Qaeda and international terrorism.
Sources: "The Wealth Divide" (interview
with Edward Wolff), Multinational Monitor, May 2003. "A
BuzzFlash Interview, Parts I and II" (with David Cay Johnson),
BuzzFlash staff, BuzzFlash.com, March 26 and 29, 2004. "Every
Third Person Will Be a Slum Dweller within 30 Years, UN Agency
Warns," John Vidal, Guardian (U.K.), Oct. 4, 2003.
"Grotesque Inequality," Robert Weissman, Multinational
Monitor, July-August 2003.
2. Ashcroft versus human rights law that holds
corporations accountable.
For decades the United States has trained right-wing
insurgents and torturers, toppled democratically elected
governments, and propped up brutal dictatorships abroad all in
the interest of corporate profits. But rarely are the agents of
repression ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of deaths
and the brutal cycles of poverty, subjugation, environmental
destruction, and violence they leave in their wake. Indeed, many
foreign tyrants go on to enjoy plush retirement right here in the
United States.
But recently lawyers have found a way to seek at
least a modicum of justice for victims. The Alien Tort Claims Act, a
215-year-old law originally passed to prosecute pirates for crimes
committed on the high seas, allows noncitizens to sue any individual
or corporation present on U.S. soil.
Human rights lawyers have pursued 100 cases under the
ATCA since 1980. Defendants have included former high-ranking
government and military officials from El Salvador, Guatemala,
Argentina, Paraguay, the Philippines (including ex-president
Ferdinand Marcos), Indonesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. And
although the law can only be used to pursue monetary damages rather
than prison time, it has often resulted in victims being awarded
millions of dollars and in the perpetrators sometimes fleeing the
country rather than paying up.
Ten years ago victims began using the act to go after
corporate profiteers too: it was thanks to the ATCA, for example,
that Holocaust survivors were able to seek redress from the Swiss
banks and companies that profited from the slave labor of
concentration camp internees during World War II.
But Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice
Department has set its sights on the act, claiming in a brief last
year that the law threatens "important foreign policy
interests" associated with the war on terrorism. Yet hardly a
word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush
administration's attack on the main legal recourse left in the
United States for victims to seek redress for human rights
violations carried out abroad.
Source: "Ashcroft Goes after 200-Year-Old
Human Rights Law," Jim Lobe, OneWorld.net and Asheville Global
Report, May 19, 2003.
3. Bush administration manipulates science and
censors scientists.
Tampering with data that threatens corporate profits
is much more widespread under Bush than we've been led to believe.
And the Environmental Protection Agency has emerged as one of the
administration's primary targets.
One of the first White House moves on the day Bush
was inaugurated was to fire engineer Tony Oppegard, the leader of
a federal team investigating a 300-million-gallon slurry spill at a
coal-mining site in Kentucky. "Black lava-like toxic sludge
containing 60 poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100
miles of rivers and creeks," environmental lawyer Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. wrote in the Nation. The EPA dubbed it "the
greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern
United States."
Bush then appointed industry insiders to top EPA
posts in charge of mine safety and health.
In another case, a week after the EPA released a
study to congressional staff about the toxic effects on groundwater
of hydraulic fracturing a process of injecting benzene into the
ground to extract oil and gas, used by Halliburton, Vice President
Dick Cheney's former company the agency revised its findings in
response to "industry feedback" to indicate that the
practice posed no threat after all.
In the days and months following the World Trade
Center attack, the EPA released more than a dozen statements
claiming the air quality in the surrounding "control zone"
was safe despite evidence that asbestos dust was present in
quantities well above the 1 percent safety benchmark. The agency
opened up the area to the public a mere week after the attack,
allowing Wall Street to reopen and cleanup activities to begin. As a
result, 88 percent of rescue workers suffered ear, nose, and throat
ailments, and 78 percent suffered lung maladies, according to a Mt.
Sinai School of Medicine study. Half suffered persistent respiratory
problems up to a year later.
In November the EPA arranged for Syngenta, the Swiss
manufacturer of Atrazine, to take over federal research of its
product, the most widely used weed killer in the United States. This
occurred despite evidence that high concentrations of Atrazine in
groundwater may be responsible for 50-percent-below-normal semen
counts in men in U.S. farming communities, is associated with high
incidences of prostate cancer, and has resulted in grotesque
deformities in frogs when present "at one-thirtieth the
government's 'safe' three parts per billion level," Kennedy
wrote.
The administration has also suppressed scientific
findings on global warming in a dozen major government studies over
the past two years, according to Kennedy.
The problem isn't limited to the EPA. In fact,
government interference in scientific research has gotten so bad
that 60 of the country's top scientists including 20 Nobel
laureates issued a statement in February citing the ways the Bush
administration has distorted scientific data "for partisan
political ends" and calling for regulatory action.
There have been dozens of scientists willing to blow
the whistle normally a reporter's dream come true. But news
coverage hasn't come close to reflecting the gravity of the problem.
Sources: "The Junk Science of George W.
Bush," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Nation, March 8, 2004.
"Censoring Scientific Information," Censorship News: The
National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, fall 2003.
"Ranking Scientists Warn Bush Science Policy Lacks
Integrity," Environmental News Service correspondents,
OneWorld.net, Feb. 20, 2004. "Politics and Science in the Bush
Administration," Committee on Government Reform minority
staff, office of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, August 2003 (updated Nov. 13,
2003).
4. High uranium levels found in troops and
civilians.
Last year Project Censored included the United
States' and Great Britain's continued use of depleted-uranium
weapons despite ample evidence of their acute health effects
among its top 10 underreported stories. Almost 10,000 U.S. troops
died within 10 years of serving in the first Gulf War, researchers
had found. And more than a third of those still alive had filed Gulf
War Syndrome-related claims.
In study after study, research pointed to the use of
depleted uranium in U.S. and British weaponry as the culprit. But
authorities concentrated their efforts into obfuscating the problem
downplaying its reach, discrediting scientists and ailing
military personnel, and erecting a smoke screen around the root
causes of the "syndrome."
More recently, the Uranium Medical Research Center,
an independent group of U.S. and Canadian scientists that has
conducted studies of Afghan civilians, found overwhelming evidence
that the United States is also using nondepleted uranium in its
weapons, which is far more radioactive than depleted uranium.
"If the use of NDU indicates experimental application of new
nuclear weapons, as the UMRC suggests, then it should alert the
public that proliferation of small nuclear weaponry, proposed for
some future use, has in fact already begun," Stephanie Hiller
wrote in Awakened Woman.
At the International Criminal Tribunal for
Afghanistan in Tokyo in December, a team of attorneys from Japan,
the United States, and Germany indicted Bush on a number of war
crimes charges among them the use of depleted-uranium weapons.
Leuren Moret, president of Scientists for Indigenous People,
testified at the trial and later reported that a U.S. government
study conducted on the babies of Gulf War veterans conceived after
the soldiers returned home found that a full two-thirds suffered
from serious birth defects or illnesses, including being born
without eyes or ears, or with missing or malformed organs or limbs.
In Iraq, Moret said, the defects are even worse. But those are just
some of the images of war we never see on the evening news.
Sources: "UMRC's Preliminary Findings from
Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom" and "Afghan
Field Trip #2 Report: Precision Destruction, Indiscriminate
Effects," Tedd Weyman, UMRC Research Team, Uranium Medical
Research Center, January 2003. "Scientists Uncover Radioactive
Trail in Afghanistan," Stephanie Hiller, Awakened Woman,
January 2004. "There Are No Words ... Radiation in Iraq Equals
250,000 Nagasaki Bombs," Bob Nichols, Dissident Voice, March
2004. "Poisoned?," Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News,
April 2004. "International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan at
Tokyo: The People vs. George Bush," Niloufer Bhagwat J.,
Information Clearinghouse, March 2004.
5. Wholesale giveaway of our natural resources.
Adam Werbach, executive director of the Common Assets
Defense Fund and former Sierra Club president, reviewed the Bush
administration's environmental policy record and came to a
disturbing conclusion: the record is not only bad it's "akin
to an affirmative action program for corporate polluters," he
wrote in In These Times.
Cheney's infamous, secretive, industry-laden energy
task force produced what can be boiled down to two main
recommendations, "lower the environmental bar and pay
corporations to jump over it," Werbach wrote.
For example, Congress has promised $3 billion in tax
cuts to mining corporations to help them access natural gas embedded
in underground coal deposits in Georgia's Powder River Basin. The
Bureau of Land Management has calculated that miners will waste a
full 700 million gallons of publicly owned water a year in the
process thereby sucking the region's underground aquifers dry and
decimating local farms and wildlife.
The Bush administration's Healthy Forests Initiative
essentially entails granting logging companies access to old-growth
trees and then subsidizing them for brush clearing. And even the
giant sequoias former president Bill Clinton sought to protect, by
creating a 327,000-acre national monument in the southern Sierra
Nevada just four years ago, are at risk for being logged at a rate
of 10 million board-feet of lumber a year a higher rate than
allowed on surrounding national forest lands in the name of
"forest management."
All in all, the administration has launched the
greatest giveaway of public natural resources in more than a
century. Yet few in the mainstream media have bothered to analyze
these plans and uncover the lies behind the administration's
rhetorical manipulations.
Sources: "Liquidation of the Commons,"
Adam Werbach, In These Times, Nov. 23, 2003. "Giant Sequoias
Could Get the Ax," Matt Weiser, High Country News, June 9,
2003.
6. Sale of electoral politics.
The Help America Vote Act required that states submit
their blueprints for switching over to electronic voting systems by
Jan. 1, 2004, and implement those plans in time for the 2006
elections. Some regions are already using the machines. But those
who've bothered to look into the new systems are sending up serious
warning flares. Critics say that if Americans don't want a repeat of
the 2000 Florida election fiasco on a much grander scale the
administration's plans must be halted in their tracks.
A switch to electronic voting might seem innocent
enough at first until you look at who's implementing it, and how.
Indeed, the transfer represents the privatization of the voting
process in the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who've
insisted on keeping their operating systems and codes a trade secret
meaning they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting
process, including ballot counting and oversight. There's no paper
trail.
One prime example is Diebold, one of the nation's top
electronic voting machine manufacturers, whose equipment was
responsible for the Florida debacle. Diebold already operates more
than 40,000 machines in 37 states across the country. Many of these
are in Georgia, which in November became the first state to conduct
an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly enough,
incumbent Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican
candidate Sonny Perdue, 46 percent to 51 percent "a swing
from as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion
polls," Andrew Gumbel wrote in the U.K. Independent. In the
same election, incumbent Democratic senator Max Cleland lost to his
Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, thanks to "a
last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points." And in and around
Atlanta, 77 memory cards went missing or were otherwise temporarily
unaccounted for before the votes they'd registered could be counted.
Similar upsets occurred "in Colorado, Minnesota,
Illinois, and New Hampshire all in races that had been flagged as
key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican
Party," Gumbel continued.
"It makes it really hard to show their product
has been tampered with if it's a felony to inspect it," Rebecca
Mercuri, a voting systems specialist and research fellow at
Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, told the
Independent.
The other top two electronic voting machine
manufacturers, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software, are
equally suspect. Several of their executives have troubling track
records of corruption and conflict of interest. All three companies
are prominent Republican Party donors.
Sources: "Voting Machines Gone Wild,"
Mark Lewellen-Biddle, In These Times, December 2003. "All the
President's Votes?," Andrew Gumbel, Independent (U.K.), Oct.
13, 2003. "Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver G.W.
Another Election?," Amy Goodman and the staff of Democracy
Now!, Sept. 4, 2003.
7. Conservative organization drives judicial
appointments.
Ever since the Reagan administration, the
neoconservatives have pursued an aggressive campaign to stack the
federal courts with right-wing judges. Their main vehicle: the
Federalist Society of Law and Public Policy, an organization founded
in 1982 by a small group of radically conservative law students at
the University of Chicago.
The effort has been a resounding success. With the
help of Republicans in Congress, 85 extra federal judgeships were
created under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; 9 were
created under Clinton. Now 7 out of 12 circuit courts are
antiabortion. Seven of the 9 Supreme Court justices are Republican
appointees and it's been 11 years since a post has opened up,
meaning another right-winger or two could be appointed sometime
soon. During Bush Sr.'s tenure, one White House insider boasted that
no one who wasn't a Federalist ever received a judicial appointment
from the president.
One of George W.'s earliest moves in office was to
consolidate the Federalist Society's power even further: he
"simply eliminated the long-standing role in the evaluation of
prospective judges by the resolutely centrist American Bar
Association, whose ratings had long kept extremists and incompetents
off the bench," Martin Garbus wrote in the American Prospect.
"Today the Federalists have more influence in judicial
selection than the ABA ever had."
The Federalist Society now counts Sen. Orrin Hatch
(R-Utah), Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and prominent
members of the conservative American Enterprise Institute among its
leadership. Ashcroft, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, Solicitor
General Theodore Olson, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez
charged with approving judicial nominations before passing them on
to Congress are all members.
As one might expect, the Federalists have
consistently acted in favor of business deregulation, creationist
teachings, property rights over the rights of individuals, and much
of the rest of the right-wing agenda. But one of the principal
victims has been the democratic process itself: remember, it was the
Supreme Court that stopped a hand count of 175,000 uncounted
(largely Democratic) ballots in Florida, which could have cost Bush
the 2000 presidential election. Conservative jurists have interfered
with redistricting efforts to reverse the deliberate segregation of
African American and Latino voters and have erected barriers to the
participation of third-party candidates in the electoral process.
Unless liberals miraculously bring about a radical
turnaround in how federal judges who enjoy lifetime terms are
appointed, one of George W.'s most long-standing legacies may very
well be a hard-right judiciary that lasts for decades to come.
Sources: "A Hostile Takeover: How the
Federalist Society Is Capturing the Federal Courts," Martin
Garbus, American Prospect, March 1, 2003. "Courts vs.
Citizens," Jamin Raskin, American Prospect, March 1, 2003.
8. Secrets of Cheney's energy task force come to
light.
As the Bush administration continues to protect the
iron wall of secrecy it's erected around Cheney's energy task force,
at least two documents confirm long-standing suspicions that the
administration's foreign policy is being driven by the dictates of
the energy industry.
When Bush took office in January 2001, he said
tackling the country's energy crisis would be a top priority. The
United States faced nationwide oil and natural gas shortages, and a
series of electrical blackouts were rolling across California. The
president established the National Energy Policy Development Group
and appointed former Halliburton CEO Cheney as its head.
One of the big issues on the table was oil, which
accounted for 40 percent of the nation's energy supply and provided
fuel for the vast majority of the country's transportation as
well as its expansive war machine. And for the first time in
history, the United States had become reliant on foreign imports for
more than 50 percent of its oil supply.
But rather than lay the groundwork for converting the
economy to alternative, renewable sources, the task force's report,
later released by Bush as the "National Energy Policy"
report in May 2001, promoted a central goal of "mak[ing] energy
security a priority of our trade and foreign policy." In other
words, Cheney's group wanted to find additional sources of oil
overseas and ensure U.S. access to that oil whatever it took.
Documents recently obtained from the task force as
the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by public
interest group Judicial Watch indicate Cheney and his colleagues had
their sights on the black gold under the Iraqi desert well before
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In July 2003 the Commerce Department finally turned
over records that included "a map of Iraqi oilfields,
pipelines, refineries, and terminals, as well as two charts
detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi
Oilfield Contracts,' " according to Judicial Watch's subsequent
press release. There were also similar maps and charts for Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents were dated March
2001.
"The major news media are beginning to pay much
closer attention to the links between political turmoil abroad and
the economies of oil at home," Michael Klare wrote in Censored
2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories. "Still, the media remains
reluctant to explain the close link between the energy policies of
the Bush Administration and US military strategy."
Sources: "Cheney Energy Task Force Documents
Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields," Judicial Watch staff, Judicial
Watch, July 17, 2003. "Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring
the Rest of the World's Oil," Michael Klare, Foreign Policy in
Focus, January 2004.
9. Widow brings RICO case against U.S. government
for 9/11.
As the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon
the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, completed its
first year, Ellen Mariani and her attorney held a press conference
on the steps of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Pennsylvania to announce her own startling conclusions. Mariani,
wife of Louis Neil Mariani, who died when terrorists flew United
Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center's south tower, had
come to believe top American officials including Bush, Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others had
foreknowledge of the attacks, purposefully failed to prevent them,
and had since taken pains to cover up the truth.
The administration, she argues in a federal lawsuit,
allowed 9/11 to happen so Bush and company could launch their
seemingly endless, global "war on terror" for their own
personal and financial gain. The suit uses the Racketeer Influenced
and Corrupt Organization Act a law created to go after the Mafia
to charge the nation's leaders with conspiracy, obstruction of
justice, and wrongful death.
Her lawyer, Philip J. Berg, a former deputy attorney
general of Pennsylvania, filed a 62-page complaint that included 40
pages of evidence. "Compelling evidence ... will be presented
in this case through discovery, subpoena power by this Court, and
testimony at trial," he wrote in a press release sent to 3,000
print and broadcast journalists announcing the lawsuit and a press
conference on the court steps that day.
At the very least, the case has the potential to
uncover and publicize critical documents and testimony about the
Bush administration's handling of the al-Qaeda threat and its
aftermath. But only Fox News showed up to the press conference, and
it never ran anything on the topic.
Sources: "911 Victim's Wife Files RICO Case
Against GW Bush," Philip Berg, Scoop (scoop.co.nz), Nov. 26,
2003. "Widow's Bush Treason Suit Vanishes," W. David
Kubiak, Scoop, Dec. 3, 2003.
10. New nuke plants: taxpayers support, industry
profits.
If you thought nuclear energy was dead, think again:
the Bush administration's energy bill yet another product of
Cheney's industry-stacked energy task force provides taxpayer
cash for companies that build new nukes.
A secretly crafted provision of the bill, released
late on a Saturday night in November, offers energy companies as
much as $7.5 billion in tax credits to build six nuclear reactors.
This is in addition to almost $4 billion set aside for other nuclear
energy programs.
"Nuclear power already has had 50 years of
subsidy totaling over $140 billion," Nuclear Information and
Resource Service's Cindy Folkers reported.
The administration also removed terrorism protection
provisions included in the House version of the bill and reversed a
previous ban on the export of enriched uranium, which may be used to
construct nuclear bombs.
The press has been "woefully silent on the
bill's nuclear provisions" Folkers and Michael Mariotte wrote
in their update for Project Censored's new book, Censored 2005: The
Top 25 Censored Stories. And while both Democrats and Republicans
managed to defeat the version of the bill NIRS warned about last
fall, supporters particularly Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) are
still trying to push those provisions through, in some cases as
riders on other bills. Estimates on the amount of tax credits being
considered have since risen to "as much as $15 or even $19
billion."
Sources: "Nuclear Energy Would Get $7.5
Billion in Tax Subsidies, US Taxpayers Would Fund Nuclear Monitor
Relapse If Energy Bill Passes," Cindy Folkers and Michael
Mariotte, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Nov. 17, 2003.
"US Senate Passes Pro-Nuclear Energy Bill," Cindy Folkers
and Michael Mariotte, WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, Aug. 22, 2003.
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