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Beyond Project Censored: It's Time for a New Award
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
I'm an American Worker and I'm Tired of Getting Screwed
Rick Kepler
Democracy and Elections:
Consensus Builds for Universal Voter Registration
Project Vote
DrugReporter:
Beaten, Tortured and Sentenced 25-to-Life for Minor Drug Offense
Randy Credico
Election 2008:
Obama's Latino Mandate
Steve Cobble, Joe Velasquez
Environment:
How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth
Herve Kempf
ForeignPolicy:
Arab Americans Should Be Worried About Rahm Emanuel
Remi Kanazi
Health and Wellness:
Meditation May Protect Your Brain
Michael Haederle
Hurricane Katrina:
From the Bayou to Baghdad: Mission Not Accomplished
Amy Goodman
Immigration:
Border Fence to Carve up Nature Reserve
Enrique Gili
Media and Technology:
Glenn Beck Wonders Why He's Resented as a Bigot
Steve Rendall
Movie Mix:
Honeytrap Lies and Women Spies
Rosie White
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
The Push to Appoint Women to Obama's Cabinet Is Threatened
Allison Stevens
Rights and Liberties:
In Stunning Ruling, D.C. Judge Orders Release of Five Gitmo Prisoners
Sex and Relationships:
Is It Wrong to Talk About Michelle Obama's Body?
Tamura Lomax
War on Iraq:
Theater of War: Portrait of a Homeland Security State [Photo Slideshow Included]
Lindsay Beyerstein
Water:
The Tide Is Changing on Bottled Water
Wendy Williams
The media world has changed dramatically over the past decade. The Internet is increasingly delivering more information in new, faster and more efficient ways. As a result, the alternative media has more opportunities to break through the corporate media's traditional stranglehold on information. At no time was this more apparent than at the WTO protests in Seattle, when the alternative media reached international audiences with fresh, dynamic information.
In fundamental ways, we in the progressive, independent media world are stuck in the past, with very little capacity to make effective use of new media. A case in point is Project Censored, which compiles a list of the Top Ten censored stories every year. Flawed in its process to begin with, Project Censored tends to reinforce fundamentally self-marginalizing, defeatist behavior while ignoring the role new media is playing in communicating information. Instead of honoring timely, investigative-oriented, break-out stories that move from the alternative press to mainstream media, Project Censored chooses to recognize only those stories that remain buried. Part of the problem with Project Censored is the procedure by which stories are selected. PC's excellent panel of judges do not select the stories; rather they are asked only to rate a list of 25 picked by students and faculty from Sonoma State University.
I've personally been a supporter of PC over the years. But I finally got shocked into reconsidering a couple of years ago when the then publisher of In These Times, Paul Obst, started calling the PC awards the Alternative Pulitzers. Without overly burnishing the Pulitzers, let's think about this for a moment: Obst was celebrating, as the most important stories our community can produce, an ad hoc collection of articles that weren't rated for their writing quality, their strength of argument or their documentation. And, of course, many were stories that very few people ever read. Yet these stories, year in and year out, receive our highest plaudits. This process -- for the most part the sole recognition for independent journalism -- demeans our standards. We can do better.
Absolutely, there are some very important stories among the PC content every year, written by incredibly good journalists about terribly important subjects. And there are some lame ones as well. But the point is, we should not be celebrating the failure to get those stories out to larger audiences.
We need new awards. Let's call them the Project Big Audience Awards -- recognition for stories dug out, documented, brilliantly rendered and expertly promoted so that they got through the corporate media haze and became part of the public knowledge. That's worth a celebration.
Let's not be naive here -- we're dealing with a mainstream media system that exists to protect a wide range of corporate interests and to make a lot of money. There are more PR agents than journalists writing the news. Billions of dollars are spent to get some messages into the mainstream and keep others out. In this media world the law of the jungle rules, and journalist and editors must fight tooth and nail, organizing, seducing, threatening, haranguing, to get their stories to center stage.
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The Push to Appoint Women to Obama's Cabinet Is Threatened Reproductive Justice and Gender: Women's rights advocates are scrambling to make up for an unexpected shortage of cash to fund a push for female appointees to Obama's Cabinet. By Allison Stevens, Women's eNews. November 23, 2008. |
Meditation May Protect Your Brain Health and Wellness: Research is confirming the medicinal effects that advocates have long claimed for meditation. By Michael Haederle, Miller-McCune.com. November 22, 2008. |
The Dirty Secret of the Financial Crisis: Our Banking System's Broken Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: No more free money from Washington. No more masters of the universe. No more business as usual. Time for a banking holiday. By William Greider, The Nation. November 22, 2008. |