In late July, more than 600 people showed up in Monterey, California, 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 were 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, 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 year’s most important stories aren’t receiving the attention they deserve. Phillips and his team acknowledge that many of these stories weren’t “censored” in the traditional sense—that is, no government agency blocked their publication.
But, according to Project Censored, every one of this year’s picks merited prominent placement on the evening news and the front pages of daily newspapers. Instead, they went virtually ignored.
This year’s Project Censored 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 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 nowhere to be seen.
1. Wealth inequality in twenty-first century threatens economy and democracy
As the mainstream news media recite the official line about the nation’s supposed economic recovery, they neglect to mention that wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled over the past thirty 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 one percent of households owned 38 percent of the nation’s wealth.
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. 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.”
Today, almost one-sixth of the world’s population—940 million people—already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, often without water, sanitation or legal security. A recent U.N. 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 thirty years. Sources: Multinational Monitor, BuzzFlash.com, The Guardian
2. Ashcroft vs. the human rights law that holds corporations accountable
For decades, the United States has trained insurgents and torturers, toppled democratically elected governments, and propped-up brutal dictatorships abroad. But rarely are the agents of repression ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of deaths and the brutal cycles of poverty, subjugation, and violence they leave in their wake. Indeed, many foreign tyrants go on to enjoy plush retirement right here in the United States.
Lawyers have found a way to seek at least a modicum of justice for foreign victims, however. The Alien Tort Claims Act, a 215-year-old law originally passed to prosecute pirates for crimes committed on the high seas, allows non-citizens to sue any individual or corporation present on U.S. soil.
Human rights lawyers have pursued one hundred cases under ATCA since 1980. Defendants have included former high-ranking government and military officials from El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines (including ex-president Ferdinand Marcos), Indonesia, Bosnia, 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—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, allowing Nazi Holocaust survivors to seek redress from the Swiss banks and companies that profited from concentration camp slave labor, for example.
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.” Hardly a word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush administration’s attack on the one main legal recourse to seek redress for human rights violations. Sources: OneWorld.net, Asheville Global Report
3. Bush administration manipulates science and censors scientists
One of the Bush administration’s first moves—on the very 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 sixty poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to one hundred miles of rivers and creeks,” wrote environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy 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 posts at the EPA in charge of mine safety and health.
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 one-percent safety benchmark. The agency opened up the area to the public a mere week after the attacks, 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.
Last 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, despite evidence that high concentrations of Atrazine in groundwater may be responsible for semen counts 50 percent below normal 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,” wrote Kennedy.
Government interference in scientific research has gotten so bad that sixty of the country’s top scientists—including twenty Nobel laureates—issued a statement last February citing the ways the Bush administration has distorted scientific data “for partisan political ends” and calling for regulatory action. Sources: The Nation, National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, OneWorld.net, Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman
4. High Uranium levels found in troops and civilians
Researchers have found that almost ten thousand U.S. troops died within ten years of serving in the first Gulf War. And more than a third of those still alive have filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims.
In study after study, research pointed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) in American 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 “syndrome’s” root causes.
More recently, the Uranium Medical Research Center, an independent group of U.S. and Canadian scientists that’s conducted studies of Afghan civilians, found overwhelming evidence that the U.S. is also using non-depleted uranium (NDU) in its weapons, which is far more radioactive than DU.
At the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Tokyo last December, a team of attorneys from Japan, the United States, and Germany indicted President Bush on a number of war crimes charges—among them the use of DU weapons.
Leuren Moret, president of Scientists for Indigenous People, testified that a U.S. government study conducted on the babies of Gulf War I 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. In Iraq, Moret said, the defects are even worse. Sources: Uranium Medical Research Center, Awakened Woman, Dissident Voice, New York Daily News, Information Clearinghouse
5. The 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 the conclusion that Bush’s record is not only bad, it’s “akin to an affirmative action program for corporate polluters.”
Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous, secretive, industry-laden energy task force produced what can be boiled down to two main recommendations, to “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 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 that former president Bill Clinton sought to protect by creating a 327,000-acre national monument in the Southern Sierra Nevada just four years ago risk being logged at a rate of 10 million board-feet of lumber per year—a higher rate than allowed on surrounding national forest lands—in the name of “forest management.” Sources: In These Times, High Country News
6. The sale of electoral politics
The nationwide switch to electronic voting systems—mandated by Congress in an effort to avert another Florida recount fiasco—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 into the hands of a select few fervent GOP supporters who’ve insisted on keeping their operating systems and computer codes a trade secret, meaning they enjoy absolute control over the entire voting process, including ballot counting and oversight.
One prime example is Diebold, Inc., one of the nation’s top e-voting machine manufacturers. Diebold already operates more than 40,000 machines in thirty-seven states across the country. Many of these are in Georgia, which last November became the first state to conduct an election entirely with touch-screen machines. Oddly, incumbent Democratic Governor Roy Barnes lost to Republican candidate Sonny Perdue, 46 percent to 51 percent—a swing from as much as sixteen percentage points from the last opinion polls. In the same election, incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland likewise lost to his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, thanks to a last-minute swing of nine to twelve points.
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. Sources: In These Times, The Independent, Democracy Now!
Ever since the Reagan administration, Republicans have pursued an aggressive campaign to stack the federal courts with right-wing judges through 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.
With the help of Republicans in Congress, eighty-five extra federal judgeships were created under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the first), while Bill Clinton got nine. Now, seven out of twelve circuit courts are anti-abortion, and seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices are Republican appointees. 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, by eliminating the longstanding 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.
As one might expect, the Federalists have consistently acted in favor of property over individual rights, business deregulation, creationist teachings, and much of the rest of the right-wing agenda. One of this President Bush’s most longstanding legacies may very well be a hard-right judiciary that lasts for decades to come. Source: The American Prospect
8. Secrets of Cheney’s energy task force come to light
When George W. Bush first took office, he said the country’s energy crisis would be a top priority. The U.S. 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 (NEPDG) and appointed Vice President and former Halliburton CEO Dick 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. For the first time in history, the U.S. 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, NEPDG’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.
Documents recently obtained from Cheney’s Energy Task Force as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the public-interest group Judicial Watch indicate that Cheney and his colleagues had their sights on the black gold under the Iraqi desert well before the September 11 attacks.
Last July, 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. Sources: Judicial Watch, Foreign Policy in Focus
9. Widow brings RICO case against U.S. government for 9/11
As the 9/11 Commission completed its first year, Ellen Mariani and her attorney held a press conference 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 that top American officials—including President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—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 September 11 to happen so that Bush and Co. could launch their seemingly endless, global “War on Terror” for their own gain. The suit uses the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) 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 sixty-two-page complaint that included forty pages of evidence. He sent a press release announcing the lawsuit and press conference to 3,000 print and broadcast journalists. Only Fox News showed up at the conference, however, and they never covered the topic. Source: Scoop.co.nz
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—doesn’t offer any incentives for companies to switch to renewable energy sources. But it does provide for taxpayer cash for companies that build new nukes.
A secretly crafted provision of the bill, released late on a Saturday night last November, offers energy companies as much as $7.5 billion in tax credits to build six new nuclear reactors. Shockingly, the administration that’s so concerned with winning the “War on Terror” 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—bombs that could eventually be sent back here.
And while both Democrats and Republicans managed to defeat the most troubling version of the bill last fall, supporters—particularly New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici—are still trying to push those provisions through, in some cases as riders on other bills. Sources: Nuclear Information and Resource Service, WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor
