Project Censored
Thirty years of digging up important news that was buried in the back pages.

BY GREG CAHILL

“What we need in this country—along with a disaster relief agency—is a Media Accountability Day. One precious day out of the entire year when everyone in the news media stops reporting on what’s wrong with everyone else and devotes a complete 24-hour news cycle to looking at our own failures. How’s that for a great idea? Happily, the perfect news peg, as we say in the biz, for Media Accountability Day already exists—it’s Project Censored…”—Molly Ivins

“The corporate media is top-down propaganda,” says Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, “—and I don’t use that word lightly—because their content is carefully selected for two big purposes: to put eyeballs to advertisers by keeping people addicted with highly emotional content; and to work in cooperation with the sources of news—the White House, the Pentagon, the corporations—to get their message out.

“Stenographers to power, as journalist David Barsamian likes to call them.

“I like to say that the independent press is the mainstream, those are the outlets that are reporting the mainstream stories that people need to know about, the stories that are impacting their lives,” says Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at Sonoma State University who has headed Project Censored for 10 years.

For the past 30 years, Project Censored has challenged the status quo by drawing attention to what the program dubs “all the news that didn’t make the news.” That milestone will be marked on March 11 at a gala benefit dinner featuring Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, best known for his hit fast-food exposé Super Size Me, as the keynote speaker.

While the media landscape has changed considerably during those three decades, especially with the introduction of Internet blogs as well as the consolidation of some TV news and network entertainment departments, Project Censored’s primary goal has remained unchanged: to champion investigative journalism.

“Investigative journalism is just about gone,” Phillips laments. “Even where it is still possible, which isn’t very many places, journalists themselves become concerned because they know about reporters who have taken on powerful institutions—the Gary Webbs, the Jane Averys, the Steve Wilsons—and lost their jobs over it. Midlife career crisis. Boom!

“Your corporate media group doesn’t back you up and you get fired.”

FORMER SONOMA STATE University communications professor Carl Jensen conceived Project Censored in 1976 as an assignment to his mass-media seminar, hoping to convince publishers and editors that the public needs more hard news. The program’s annual Top 25 most-censored stories list became ready fodder for the then-emerging alternative press. In 1991, Jensen’s ambitious classroom exercise stepped into the national spotlight when public television aired a Project Censored documentary hosted by Bill Moyers, who over the years has served as one of the project’s advisers.

Each year, SSU faculty and students cull though hundreds of candidates nominated for the year’s most-censored, or least publicized, stories. Those entrants are submitted by journalists, educators, librarians and the general public. The top 25 are then submitted to an advisory panel that has included Noam Chomsky, the media critic and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of linguistics and philosophy; Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; Jonathan Alter, senior writer at Newsweek; Judith Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association; and Rhoda H. Karpatkin, executive director of Consumers Union, among others.

The list is compiled into an annual book and used as a text for SSU’s Sociology 435: Media Censorship course and as a fund-raising source for the nonprofit media-watch project.

About 25,000 copies are sold each year.

That process has just gotten underway with the spring class. At Project Censored’s modest campus office, Phillips and 80 students are winnowing the field, doing research to make sure the stories haven’t been covered too extensively. By early April, faculty and students will vote to pick the top 25 most-censored stories, which will be ranked by the advisory panel of media professionals. Afterwards, the students will further research the stories, interviewing the authors and checking facts before writing a synopsis for each.

The next list will be published in the early fall.

For Project Censored the media menu is bountiful these days, both in terms of important-but-neglected stories and a steady diet of junk-food news that fills airwaves, cablecasts and print editions. Rest assured, Phillips says, you can expect to read, see and hear more about Angelina Jolie’s orphan adoptions and missing coeds than you will about the Bush administration spying on U.S. citizens or the corrupting influence of lobbyists on public officials.

(Those frivolous junk-food stories also are compiled by Project Censored students and placed on the Internet to be ranked by the public.)

After a 20-year career in social work and management of nonprofits, Phillips, 58, earned a “midlife Ph.D.” at the University of California at Davis, studying political sociology with a focus on how elites rule. He joined the SSU faculty full-time in 1994. Jensen already had retired and was looking for someone to take the helm at Project Censored. “He had read a piece that I’d written about elites,” Phillips recalls, “so he took me to lunch and five minutes into my burrito asked me if I wanted to take over Project Censored. I really had to think about it for a while because I was just a junior faculty member—I wasn’t even tenured yet—and wasn’t sure if I wanted to jump into this arena of media and controversy.

“I mean every year we put out stuff that someone doesn’t like. There’s always somebody wagging at you in some capacity. It’s an interesting and fun process—95 percent of the time.”

Project Censored has sustained its share of criticism during his tenure. Right-wing critics charge that Project Censored is biased to the left. Progressive publications have complained that some of the most censored stories have gotten plenty of play in such major media outlets as the New York Times. “Even Mother Jones, a paragon of lefty journalism, has slammed the list in an article headlined ‘The Unbearable Lameness of Project Censored,’ “ the SF Weekly opined.

Phillips takes the criticism in stride.

“It’s extremely rare that one of our story selections was covered by the New York Times, and if it was then the coverage was probably piecemeal and the context was left out,” he says. “For instance, when the ACLU issued its press release last year about the results of autopsies on 44 dead Iraqi detainees, which the ACLU obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Associated Press put the story on the wire saying that 22 of those deaths were listed as homicides while in U.S. custody. In most cases, those prisoners had been tortured to death. Every newspaper in the country had a chance to run that story. Twelve did, the largest being the L.A. Times, which ran it on page four. Two other regional papers buried the information inside their daily Iraq updates, you know, like in paragraph 20. That’s it. The Washington Post, the New York Times didn’t cover it.

“Since then, that story has just gone away. Torture has been talked about a lot; the McCain Bill was discussed, for instance, and the CIA’s extraordinary renditions were discussed. But the discussion of the actual physical nature of torture and the proof that the United States killed 22 people using it gets ignored.”

Without widespread discussion of these types of stories, he adds, the vast majority of the American public is left in the dark, unable to formulate an informed opinion in order to participate intelligently in a public debate about U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

“You don’t have a very good democracy unless people know what’s going on,” Phillips says. “Every dictator, every fascist, every centralized government knows that you want to be able to spin the news and control propaganda in ways that will make them look good and you want to diminish those stories that make you look bad.

“It’s always been the media and the Fourth Estate’s job to seek out the truth, to offer transparency to what powerful people are doing, and particularly when it comes to those things that have a negative impact on others—that’s why we have a First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.”

ASK PHILLIPS THE greatest challenge of his job and he doesn’t miss a beat: fund-raising. “We don’t get general fund money from the university, though we get a lot of overhead expenses: office space, Internet service and so on. But the staff salaries, the mailings, the production costs require us to raise about $100,000 a year. We’ve built a base of donors from a mailing list of several thousand who buy books from us and send us $25 a year. Building that base is an ongoing challenge.

“We raise those funds to keep the books going, keep the Web site up, but there is so much more that the students want to do and be engaged with but that we’re not adequately funded for.”

Still, since assuming directorship at Project Censored, Phillips has broadened the scope of the project and involved many more students. He has established a Project Censored Web site that gets millions of hits each month, supervises students in the production of the annual Project Censored book (published in English and Italian, and, for the first time this year, Spanish), created a student-run radio series of recorded segments spotlighting censored stories (funded by a grant from Working Assets), and helped create a short-lived public television series with host Jonathan Blease that aired in Northern California on KRCB-TV.

In addition, a second film documentary, 1999’s Project Censored: Is the Press Really Free?, hosted by Martin Sheen, aired nationally on public television.

Phillips would like to produce an updated documentary to help reach a new generation of media consumers. Given the corporate media’s short attention span, which allows key stories to come and go with unerring and chilling frequency, he believes that Project Censored is more relevant than ever.

“I think the corporate media is leaving out a huge amount,” he says. “The whole story just isn’t there. Finding independent sources and other ways of communication and building on that is what the whole media-democracy movement is all about. We believe in that. So Project Censored is a mechanism that continually reminds people, not so much about a specific story, because there are so many, but that the corporate media isn’t doing the full job of keeping us informed about what we ought to know about our government, our corporations and the powerful in society.

“I think it’s been very effective in that regard—we’ve seen a real reversal of trust in corporate media over the past 30 years.”

Project Censored’s 30th anniversary gala dinner will take place Saturday, March 11, at 6pm, at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, 5409 Snyder Lane in Rohnert Park. Admission is $50 (group rates available). For reservations, call 707/664-2500.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK POUTENIS

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