CENSORED NEWS: 10 BEST OF '96

By Allan R. Andrews, Editor,

Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

The two stories top a list of 10 released by Project Censored, a media-monitoring activist group located at California's Sonoma State University.

It's not that these stories are invisible; the Cassini space probe and resulting protests have been reported by The Baltimore Sun, The Christian Science Monitor, and Florida Today, Gannett's major newspaper in the heart of ``Space Country'' near Cape Canaveral.
Project Censored, however, says the major media have shied away from these important stories.

Censored may be too strong a word for many journalists, but Project Censored describes what it considers censorship of stories that are under-reported.

In its newsletter, the organization's director, Peter Phillips, outlines three forms of censorship:

The first, Phillips notes, is ideological censorship, where news that sullies the image of an organization or person is suppressed, and investigation is hampered by limiting access to documents and events.

A second type of censorship comes, Phillips writes, when media organizations, putting a premium on profits, choose not to offend advertisers with news that might contain critical material.

A subtle third form of censorship takes place, Phillips argues, with the increased consolidation of news organizations and the resultant downsizing of staffs. This leads to increased dependence on external sources. Phillips calls this PR censorship.

Calling attention to these poisons to the free flow of information and ideas, Project Censored collects the stories it believes have gone under-reported in the previous year and urges wider coverage.
Its list for 1996 begins with the story of NASA's Cassini space probe launch sometime around October, 1997. That launch will also carry 72 pounds of lethal plutonium-238.

Critics claim a planned fly-by of earth and the reentry of the space probe pose great risks that poisonous plutonium could be released into the atmosphere.

Second on Project Censor's list is the story of Nigeria's military government executing nine Ogoni tribe activists who were protesting the environmental devastation of their homeland on the Niger River delta by an oil production facility of the Royal Dutch/Shell Oil Company.

That project, which began in 1956, has made Nigeria one of the world's richest oil producing nations, and 90 percent of its oil comes from Ogoniland.

Critics claim the oil company's standards for pollution and clean-up are far below what it is held to in other regions of the world and that repeated oil spills in the Niger delta have devastated the natives' farmland without any reasonable compensation.

Time and space won't allow me to detail all 10 of Project Censored's stories on the list, but here's a capsule of the rest, almost all of which carry some allegation about a corporate or government agency acting counter to the public good:

• provisions for a minimum wage in the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996 aim to provide huge profits for other than small businesses and their employees;
• major corporate public relations firms influence and manipulate public opinion and policy with tactics that include defamation and deception, especially aimed at activist critics;
• the Justice Department neglects regulating and prosecuting so-called ``white-collar crime,'' which costs taxpayers and society 10 to 15 times more than the more actively pursued and publicized crime in the streets;
• banks have been merging into huge behemoths that result in higher costs for consumers and increased taxpayer liability in the event of a needed public bail-out;
• some corporations are profiting immensely without regulation or investigation from the ``industry of poverty'' through price gouging and lending and marketing practices that are nothing short of predatory;
• as high technology filters to the ordinary citizen through e-mail and the internet, groups are forming that practice unregulated and unwarranted routine surveillance of world citizens, raising sticky questions of privacy;
• the Pentagon and the CIA are culpable for failing to warn U.S. troops about the dangers of handling depleted uranium munitions during the Persian Gulf War, a factor that may be associated with the symptoms reported as the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome;
• the World Bank and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization are projecting overly optimistic reports about the global food supply, masking the possibility of famine in parts of the globe.

Project Censored, of course, releases this list in the hope that major media will probe these stories.

It cites the tiny, Washington-based magazine, Covert Action Quarterly, as a champion of these under-reported stories. Four of the 10, Project Censored notes, were first reported by CAQ.

Project Censored, which puts its listing into book form and tries to distribute it widely, does get some attention in the wider media.

The Los Angeles Times, calls the book form of Project Censored's stories ``required reading'' for informed citizens as well as for journalists, and The American Journalism Review has hailed Project Censored as ``a distant early warning system for society's problems.''

Apparently, in years past, producers from both ``60 Minutes'' and ``20/20,'' have admitted to using Project Censored as a ``tip sheet'' to latch on to important stories.

Project Censored simply wants all journalists to be so attuned.

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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at allan.andrews@reporters.net