Time Up For Project Censored?

By Kevin Uhrich, Pasadena Weekly. Posted June 1, 2006.

[Editor's Note: In the following article, I'm quoted extensively about the role Project Censored plays in our media pantheon. I would like to clarify with a couple of points. First, corporate media is worse than ever as evidenced by the terrible job they did leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the preponderance of fake news, and the rampant bias everywhere you look. Second, there is no doubt that various forms of systemic censorship operate all the time in the corporate media system.

But my beef with Project Censored is that it is more important to focus on the specific obstacles to getting information out and overcome them -- to celebrate success, not be victimized by the corporate media. At this point, with the Internet, blogs, and other independent media of all sorts, there is no excuse for not getting millions of eyeballs and ears to see and hear important information that the corporate media ignores ... and they ignore stuff all the time. Lastly, my critique of Project Censored is in no way critical of the many fine journalists whose work has been celebrated by the Project.
-- Don Hazen, Executive editor, AlterNet]

If there has been one fixture in an industry that's on a never-ending quest for the next great idea, it's been Project Censored, the brainchild of a university professor who combined academic research techniques with some standard journalistic practices to dig out stories that Americans didn't hear or read much about in the popular media.

When Professor Carl Jensen started the Project as a 400-level course through Sonoma State University's Sociology Department 30 years ago, alternative newspapers -- many of them in their infancies with young writers wary of institutional authority and hungry to shake up the system -- devoured the muck that Jensen and his team of student researchers raked up and dished out each year.

Tainted baby food and banned pesticides being sold by greedy American corporations to needy Third World countries and the influence of the Trilateral Commission on the Carter administration were hot topics in the early years of Project Censored.

In the Reagan era, exposés on government-backed death squads in El Salvador's bloody civil war, the equally bloody and not-so-secret war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government by the CIA-backed Contras, and US and European countries using African nations as toxic ashtrays were some of the stories people didn't know much about, that is until reading them in alternative papers like The Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the LA Weekly.

Three decades is a long time to survive in any business, and for nearly a quarter-century most of the stories published by Project Censored went mostly unquestioned, if also largely unnoticed by most consumers of mainstream news.

But over the past six years, the playing fields in both journalism and politics have changed dramatically. For starters, mainstream news is now being controlled by giant corporations and the government like never before. For its part, the federal government has been literally buying good press by co-opting real journalists to write and broadcast the equivalent of press releases for Bush administration policies and passing that off as "real" news. And as that is happening, daily mainstream newspapers are being swallowed up by bigger news companies and being transformed into little more than advertising vehicles.

In the alternative journalism world, which some media watchers believe has now become really nothing more than an extension of the mainstream press, both the once staunchly liberal Village Voice and the LA Weekly, along with a host of other papers in major markets across the country, are now owned by the politically ambivalent former New Times chain of papers, a Phoenix-based national publishing company that is now known as Village Voice Media and assumes a largely libertarian political persona in its writing, a hard-knuckled approach to reporting and generally eschews liberal and party-line politics at all of its 17 weekly newspapers.

But more to the point -- and more than partially because of the perceived extreme left-leaning bent that editors with Project Censored have assumed over the years in selecting, writing and publishing its stories -- some in the alternative press, who themselves mostly leaned hard to the political left and once unconditionally supported Project Censored, aren't so sure anymore: sure if the information being offered is really censored, if the information being reported is actually correct, and if Project Censored is still relevant, at least from a journalistic perspective.

Friends and foes

While the Project has attracted its share of criticism over the years, it definitely has its supporters, some from unlikely places, like columnist Molly Ivins, who wrote a rare piece praising the Project that appeared recently in the Chicago Tribune, and Bryce Nelson, a USC journalism professor and former reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Kevin Uhrich is the editor of Pasadena Weekly.

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