September 1, 2004
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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