September 17, 2004

Censored!
Top Ten Stories the American News Media Ignored
First in a Two Part Series

By Camille T. Taiara
Alternative News Reporter

     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, but they had a single consistent message: The mainstream news media were doing a deplorable job of covering the day’s most important stories.
     “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 kinds of attention they deserve. These stories weren’t “censored” in the traditional sense of the word: No government agency blocked their publication. And some even appeared—briefly, and without follow-up — in mainstream journals. But according to Project Censored, every one of this year’s picks merited prominent placement on the evening news and the daily’s front pages. Instead, they went virtually ignored.
     This year’s 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 wholesale giveaway of the nation’s natural resources 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 missing from the front pages.
     Here are Project Censored ten biggest examples of major stories that have been relegated to the most obscure corners of the media world.

Wealth Inequality in 21^{st Century Threatens Economy and Democracy.}

     ^{As the mainstream news media recite the official line about the nation’s sup-posed economic recovery, a key point has been missing: wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled over the past 30 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. The top five percent owned almost 60 percent of the wealth.
     “We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country,” New York University economics professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.
     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 in a BuzzFlash interview. 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, mostly without water, sanitation, public services, or legal security,” wrote John Vidal in The Guardian. A recent UN 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 30 years.}

Sources:
     “The wealth divide” (an interview with Edward Wolff), Multinational Monitor, May 2003.
      ^{“A BuzzFlash interview, parts I and II” (with David Cay Johnson), BuzzFlash staff, buzzflash.com, March 26 and 29, 2004.
     “Every third person will be a slum dweller within 30 years, UN agency warns,” John Vidal, The Guardian(UK), Oct. 4, 2003.
     “Grotesque inequality,” Robert Weissman, Multinational Monitor, July-Aug. 2003}

Ashcroft vs. The Human Rights Law that Holds Corporations Accountable.

     ^{For decades, the United States has trained right-wing insurgents and torturers, toppled democratically elected governments, and propped up brutal dictatorships abroad—all in the interest of corporate profits. But rarely are the agents of repression ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of deaths and the brutal cycles of poverty, subjugation, environmental destruction, and violence they leave in their wake. Indeed, many foreign tyrants go on to enjoy plush retirement right here in the United States.
     But recently, lawyers have found a way to seek at least a modicum of justice for victims. 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 100 cases under ATCA since 1980. Ten years ago, victims began using the act to go after corporate profiteers, too: under ATCA, Nazi Holocaust survivors were able to seek redress from the Swiss banks and companies that profited from the slave labor of concentration camp internees during World War II.
     But Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has set its sites on the act, claiming in a brief last year that the law threatens “important foreign policy interests” associated with the war on terrorism. Yet hardly a word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush Administration’s attack on the one, main legal recourse left in the U.S. for victims to seek redress for human rights violations.}

Source:
     ^{“Ashcroft goes after 200-year-old human rights law,” Jim Lobe, OneWorld.net and Asheville Global Report, May 19, 2003.}

Bush Administration manipulates science and censors scientists.

     ^{Tampering with data that threatens corporate profits is much more widespread under Bush than we’ve been led to believe. And the Environmental Protection Agency is one of the administration’s primary targets.
     One of the first White House 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 60 poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 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 another case, a week after the EPA released a study to Congressional staff about the toxic effects on groundwater of hydraulic fracturing— a process of injecting benzene into the ground to extract oil and gas, used by Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company—the agency revised its findings in response to “industry feedback” to indicate that the practice posed no threat after all.
     Following the World Trade Center attack, the EPA released more than a dozen statements claiming that 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 St. to reopen and cleanup activities to begin. Eighty-eight percent of rescue workers suffered ear, nose, and throat ailments, and 78 percent suffered lung maladies, as a result, 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—the most widely used weed killer in the US—to take over federal research of its product, despite evidence that high concentrations of Atrazine in groundwater may be responsible for 50 percent below-normal semen counts 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.
     The Administration has also suppressed scientific findings on global warming in a dozen major government studies over the past two years.
     Government interference in scientific research has gotten so bad that 60 of the country’s top scientists—including 20 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 Junk Science of George W. Bush,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Nation, March 8, 2004
     “Censoring scientific information,” (no author listed),Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, #91
     “Ranking scientists warn Bush science policy lacks integrity,” Environmental News Service correspondents, OneWorld.net, Feb. 20, 2004
     “Politics and science in the Bush Administration,” Committee on Government Reform—Minority staff, Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, Aug. 2003 (updated Nov. 13, 2003)}

High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians.

     ^{Last year, Project Censored included the U.S. and UK’s continued use of depleted uranium weapons—despite ample evidence of its acute health effects—among its top ten underreported stories. Almost 10,000 U.S. troops had died within 10 years of serving in the first Gulf War; more than a third of those still alive had filed Gulf War Syndrome-related claims. Study after study points to depleted uranium (DU) in American and British weaponry as the culprit.
     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)weapons, which are far more radioactive.
     At the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Tokyo last December, a team of attorneys from Japan, the U.S., 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, or with missing or malformed organs or limbs.}

Sources:
     ^{“UMRC’s preliminary findings from Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom” and “Afghan field trip #2 report: Precision destruction, indiscriminate effects,” Tedd Weyman, UMRC Research Team, Uranium Medical Research Center, January 2003.
     “Scientists uncover radioactive trail in Afghanistan,” Stephanie Hiller, Awakened Woman, January 2004.
     “There are no words … Radiation in Iraq equals 250,000 Nagasaki bombs,” Bob Nichols, Dissident Voice, March 2004.
     “Poisoned?” Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News, April 2004.
     “International Criminal Tribune for Afghanistan at Tokyo: The People vs. George Bush,” Niloufer Bhagwat J., Information Clearinghouse, March 2004.}

     ^{Adam Werbach, executive director of the Common Assets Defense Fund and former Sierra Club president, reviewed the Bush Administration’s environmental record and came to a disturbing conclusion: Bush’s record is “akin to an affirmative action program for corporate polluters.”
     Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous, secretive, industry-laden energy task force produced what amounts to two main recommendations—“lower the environmental bar and pay corporations to jump over it,” Werbach wrote.
     For example, Congress has promised $3 billion in tax cuts to help mining corporations 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 a full 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 grants logging companies access to old-growth trees—and then subsidizes them for brush clearing. 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—faster than allowed on surrounding national forest lands—in the name of “forest management.”}

Sources:
     ^{“Liquidation of the commons,” Adam Werbach, In These Times, Nov. 23, 2003.
     “Giant sequoias could get the ax,” Matt Weiser, High Country News, June 9, 2003.}

Illustration: Becky Cloonan.