Ever since 1976, Project Censored has called attention to a carefully considered list of the most significant stories that somehow failed to reach the vast majority of Americans. There is no central censor in the American media and yet, year after year many similar sorts of stories show up again and again on Project Censored’s list — similar themes with variations, evolving slowly over time. Despite journalism’s call to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, it is primarily the inequalities of race, class and gender that serve to stifle stories across the years, and that can be seen once again here, in our second installment on this year’s top 10 list of Project Censored stories.
Those inequalities structure whose stories get told, and from whose perspective, as well as for what purpose. The inequalities of both race and gender are obvious in #7. “Underreporting of Missing and Victimized Black Women and Girls” — an underreporting that media complicity is part of, which helps explain why the story continues unfolding as it does. So clearly, there’s a class element here as well. But the class element comes to the fore in two other stories covered here: #4. “Congressional Investments and Conflicts of Interest” and “#5 Inequality Kills: Gap between Richest and Poorest Americans Largest in 50 Years.” The former deals with the frequent intersection of money and political power — both of which have repeatedly proven able to buy silence about stories that need to be told — while the latter inevitably has both race and gender inequalities inextricably woven through it.
There are new wrinkles in these stories as well. The depth of economic inequality is widening, as story #5 highlights, and part of the conflicts in story #4 involve complicity with the fossil fuel industry in perpetuating climate change. But the most striking new wrinkle can be seen in #6, “Shadow Network of Conservative Outlets Emerges to Exploit Faith in Local News.” Local newspapers have suffered dramatic losses over the last two decades — over 1800 papers have closed since 2004. Yet, despite lack of revenue, local media retain high levels of public trust: the perfect situation for fakers to exploit, which is precisely what has happened here. And so, without further ado, here’s the second installment of Project Censored’s Top 10 Stories for this year.
4. Congressional Investments and Conflicts of Interest
Exposition, political corruption and conflicts of interest are age-old staples of journalism. So, it’s notable that two of the most glaring, far-reaching examples of congressional conflicts of interest in the Donald Trump era have been virtually ignored by corporate media: Republican’s support for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and bipartisan failure to act on catastrophic climate change.
“The cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings,” Peter Cary of the Center for Public Integrity reported for Vox in January 2020.
It was sold as a middle-class tax cut that would benefit everyone.
“Promises that the tax act would boost investment have not panned out,” he noted. “Corporate investment is now at lower levels than before the act passed, according to the Commerce Department.”
Once again, ‘trickle down tax cuts’ didn’t trickle down.
“The tax law’s centerpiece is its record cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35 percent to 21 percent,” Cary wrote. “At the time of its passage, most of the bill’s Republican supporters said the cut would result in higher wages, factory expansions, and more jobs. Instead, it was mainly exploited by corporations, which bought back stock and raised dividends.”
Buybacks exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever, the year after the cuts were passed, and dividends topped a record $1.3 trillion high.
The benefits to Congressional Republicans were enormous.
“The 10 richest Republicans in Congress in 2017 who voted for the tax bill held more than $731 million in assets, almost two-thirds of which were in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other instruments,” which benefitted handsomely as a result of their votes that “doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings in 2018 alone,” Cary noted. “All but one of the 47 Republicans who sat on the three key committees overseeing the drafting of the tax bill own stocks and stock mutual funds.
“Democrats also stood to gain from the tax bill, though not one voted for it,” he wrote. “All but 12 Republicans voted for the tax bill.”
Two special features deserve notice. First is a newly created 20% deduction for income from ‘pass-through’ businesses, or smaller, single-owner corporations.
“At least 22 of the 47 members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees have investments in pass-through businesses,” Project Censored noted.
Second was a provision allowing real estate companies with relatively few employees — like the Trump Organization — to take a 20% deduction usually reserved for larger businesses with sizable payrolls.
“Out of the 47 Republicans responsible for drafting the bill, at least 29 held real estate interests at the time of its passage,” Project Censored pointed out.
As to the second major conflict, “Members of the U.S. Senate are heavily invested in the fossil fuel companies that drive the current climate crisis, creating a conflict between those senators’ financial interests as investors and their responsibilities as elected representatives,” Project Censored wrote.
“Twenty-nine U.S. senators and their spouses own between $3.5 million and $13.9 million worth of stock in companies that extract, transport, or burn fossil fuels, or provide services to fossil fuel companies,” Donald Shaw reported for Sludge in September 2019.
While unsurprising on the Republican side, this also includes two key Democrats. Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, is the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has “up to $310,000 invested in more than a dozen oil, gas, and utility companies, as well as mutual funds with holdings in the fossil fuel industry,” Shaw reported.
But his record is not nearly as questionable as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who “owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of non-public stock in a family coal business, Enersystems,” and reported earning “between $100,001 and $1 million” in reported dividends and interest in 2018, plus $470,000 in ‘ordinary business income,” Shaw reported.
His support for the industry was significant:
Manchin was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling in 2017, and he was one of just three Democrats to vote against an amendment to phase out taxpayer subsidies for coal, oil and gas producers in 2016. Manchin has also voted to approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, expedite the approval process for natural gas pipelines, and override an Obama administration rule requiring coal companies to protect groundwater from toxic coal mining waste.
While there has been critical coverage of 2017 tax cuts, this has not included coverage of lawmakers personal profiting, Project Censored noted.
“In addition, despite the significant conflicts of interest exposed by Donald Shaw’s reporting for Sludge, the alarming facts about U.S. senators’ massive investments in the fossil fuel industry appear to have gone completely unreported in the corporate press.”
5. Inequality Kills: Gap between Richest and Poorest Americans Largest in 50 Years
“In public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills,” DePaul University sociologist Fernando De Maio wrote for Truthout in December 2019.
Even before COVID-19, his research added fine-grained evidence of broad trends highlighted in three prominent governmental reports: the gap between rich and poor Americans had grown larger than ever in half a century, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 annual survey, with dramatic evidence of its lethal impact: people in the poorest quintile die at twice the rate as those in the richest quintile, according to a report by the Congressional General Accounting Office. And, this is partly because job-related deaths are increasingly rooted in the physical and psychological toll of low-wage work, as opposed to on-the-job accidents, as documented by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization.
All these conditions were made worse by COVID-19, but they could have been seen before the pandemic struck — if only the information hadn’t been censored by the corporate media, as Project Censored noted:
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality, or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
The August 2019 GAO report was based on health and retirement surveys conducted by the Social Security Administration in 1992 and 2014, looking at those between 51 and 61 years old in 1992, and dividing them into five wealth quintiles.
“[T]he GAO found that nearly half of those (48%) in the poorest quintile died before 2014, when they would have been between 73 and 83 years old. Of the wealthiest quintile, only a quarter (26%) died,” explained Patrick Martin, writing for the World Socialists Website.
Death rates increased for each quintile as the level of wealth declined.
It’s at the level of cities and communities “that the most striking links between inequality and health can be detected,” De Maio wrote. “At the city level, life expectancy varies from a low of 71.4 years in Gary, Indiana, to a high of 84.7 in Newton, Massachusetts — a gap of more than 13 years.”
And at the community level, “In Chicago, there is a nine-year gap between the life expectancy for Black and white people. This gap amounts to more than 3,000 ‘excess deaths’” among Black Chicagoans due to “heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease. All of these are conditions that an equitable health care system would address,” he concluded.
“The poorest Americans are also more likely than their rich counterparts to face illness or premature death due to the inherent dangers of low-wage work,” Project Censored noted.
“In 2019, you no longer have to hang from scaffolding to risk your life on the job,” María José Carmona wrote for Inequality.org. “Precariousness, stress, and overwork can also make you sick, and even kill you, at a much higher rate than accidents.”
She reported on an ILO story that found that less than 14% of the 7,500 people who die “due to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every day” die from workplace accidents.
The greatest risk comes from “increasing pressure, precarious contracts, and working hours incompatible with life, which, bit by bit, continue to feed the invisible accident rate that does not appear in the news,” Carmona wrote. “The most vulnerable workers are those employed on a temporary or casual basis, those subcontracted through agencies and the false self-employed. ILO data shows the rate of accidents for these employees to be much higher than for any others.”
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality, or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
6. Shadow Network of Conservative Outlets Emerges to Exploit Faith in Local News
In late October 2019, Carol Thompson reported in the Lansing State Journal that, “Dozens of websites branded as local news outlets launched throughout Michigan this fall … promising local news but also offering political messaging.” The websites’ ‘About us’ sections “say they are published by Metric Media LLC, a company that aims to fill the ‘growing void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media.’” Thompson wrote, but it soon emerged that they weren’t filling that void with locally-generated news, and the 40 or so sites Thompson found in Michigan were just the tip of the iceberg.
A follow-up investigation by The Michigan Daily reported that “Just this past week, additional statewide networks of these websites have sprung up in Montana and Iowa,” which was followed by a December 2019 report by the Columbia Journalism Review, revealing a network of 450 websites run by five corporate organizations in 12 states that “mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations” in order to “manipulate public opinion by exploiting faith in local media.”
All were associated with conservative businessman Brian Timpone.
“In 2012, Timpone’s company Journatic, an outlet known for its low-cost automated story generation, which became known as ‘pink slime journalism,’ attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism,” CJR’s Priyanjana Bengani reported. Journatic was later rebranded as Locality Labs, whose content ran on the Metric Media websites.
“The different websites are nearly indistinguishable, sharing identical stories and using regional titles,” Michigan Daily reported. “The only articles with named authors contain politically skewed content. The rest of the articles on the sites are primarily composed of press releases from local organizations and articles written by the Local Labs News Service.”
“Despite the different organization and network names, it is evident these sites are connected,” Bengani wrote. “Other than simply sharing network metadata as described above, they also share bylines (including ‘Metric Media News Service’ and ‘Local Labs News Service’ for templated stories), servers, layouts, and templates.”
Using a suite of investigative tools, CJR was able to identify at least 189 sites in 10 states run by Metric Media — all created in 2019 — along with 179 run by Franklin Archer (with Timpone’s brother Michael as CEO).
“We tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites,” over a period of two weeks, Bengani wrote, “and found over fifteen thousand unique stories had been published (over fifty thousand when aggregated across the sites), but only about a hundred titles had the bylines of human reporters.” That’s well below 1% with a byline — much less being local. “The rest cited automated services or press releases.”
“Their architecture and strategy is useful to understand the way they co-opt the language, design and structure of news organizations,” Bengani explained.
Automation can make them seem far more prolific than they really are, and can help build credibility.
“Potentially adding to the credibility of these sites is their Google search ranking: in the case of some of the websites set up in 2015-2016, we observed that once sites had gained ample authority, they appeared on the first page of Google Search results just below the official government and social media pages.”
So, the sites aim to fool people locally about the source of their “news,” and Google helps fool the world.
Although the New York Times did publish an article in October 2019 that credited the Lansing State Journal with breaking the story about pseudo-local news organizations, Project Censored notes that, “Corporate coverage has been lacking …. The Columbia Journalism Review’s piece expands on the breadth and scope of previous coverage, but its findings do not appear to have been reported by any of the major establishment news outlets.”
7. Underreporting of Missing and Victimized Black Women and Girls
Black women and girls go missing in the United States at a higher rate than that of their white counterparts. And, that very fact goes missing, too.
“A 2010 study about the media coverage of missing children in the United States discovered that only 20% of reported stories focused on missing Black children despite it corresponding to 33% of the overall missing children cases,” Carma Henry reported for the Westside Gazette in February 2019.
But it’s only getting worse.
“A 2015 study discussed in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender and Social Justice found that the disparity listed in the 2010 study between the reportage and the reality of missing Black children had increased substantially,” Project Censored noted: 35% of missing children cases vs. just 7% of media stories.
That discussion appeared in a paper that made two other pertinent points. First, that Black criminal perpetrators are over-represented in the media, while Black victims are underrepresented, and second, that “because racial minorities are identified as criminals more often than not, non-minorities develop limited empathy toward racial minorities who are often perceived as offenders.”
Non-minorities in the media are obviously not exempt.
“Media coverage is often vital in missing person cases because it raises community awareness and can drive funding and search efforts that support finding those missing persons,” Project Censored noted.
It went on to cite an illustrative extreme case: In October 2019, “The Atlanta Black Star shed light on perhaps the most prolific offender against Black women and girls in recent history, Jason Roger Pope, who has been indicted on charges relating to human trafficking and child sex crimes,” Project Censored wrote. “Pope, a white South Carolina promoter and popular disc jockey better known as DJ Kid, has made claims suggesting he may have participated in the trafficking, assault and/or rapes of nearly 700 African American girls — primarily underaged — right up until his arrest in August 2019.”
The arrest didn’t come out of the blue.
“Pope has police records going as far back as 2011 relating to sexual misconduct with minors. Yet, outside of a few local news outlets, the corporate media has been silent on Pope’s crimes.”
Blacks are also over-represented as victims of sex trafficking, according to statistics from Human Trafficking Search: they account for more than 40% of confirmed victims compared to 13.1% of the population.
While there is some coverage from small independent sources, “this gap in coverage of missing Black women and girls has gone widely underreported,” Project Censored noted.
It cited two exceptions (one from ABC News, another from CNN).
“But, broadly, U.S. corporate media are not willing to discuss their own shortcomings or to acknowledge the responsibilities they neglect by failing to provide coverage on the search for missing and victimized Black women and girls.”