Every year since 1976, Project Censored has identified the most significant stories that most Americans never heard about. Most are stories of wrongdoing by those with power, taking advantage of those without. As noted in our last issue, “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.” Although those patterns are the dominant ones shaping which stories are stifled, they aren’t the only ones, because scattered throughout the lists of censored stories over the years another kind of story can also be found: positive stories about signs of hope, opportunities to make a better world and people working to realize that possibility. As we turn to the last three stories in Project Censored’s top 10 stories this year, we find that two of them fall into this less common, but vitally important category.
First, #8 “The Public Banking Revolution,” deals with a new wave of interest in replicating North Dakota’s 100-year-old publicly-owned state bank, the Bank of North Dakota. A new California law will enable 10 such publicly-owned banks to be opened by cities or counties in the next few years, and other states are poised to follow. The difference BND has made in North Dakota and the potential similar banks hold in California and elsewhere does not fit well into the landscape of most existing stories about banking, finance, or economic inequality, although it is relevant to all of them and more. That’s because its very existence enables things that just aren’t possible otherwise, such as green investments whose “profits slowly accumulate and are widely shared across a community,” as described below.
The same thing can be said about #10. Revive Journalism with a Stimulus Package and Public Option. As Project Censored notes, there’s been significant corporate reporting about “the ongoing demise of newspapers and especially local news sources,” but almost total neglect for proposals to revitalize journalism through public funding. The proposals discussed draw on previous or existing models, so they’re not just wishful fantasies. But the whole of the proposals is more than the sum of the parts, and would similarly create new possibilities that the landscape of uncensored stories simply has no place for.
The third of our last three stories, #9 “Rising Risks of Nuclear Power Due to Climate Change,” is a more commonplace kind of Project Censored story, but can also be seen as a kind of mirror-image of the other two. In this case, an existing model — nuclear power — is so familiar that the larger landscape of looming problems described in the story is not perceived as such, but only in a piecemeal fashion that fails to register the true depth of the risks involved. In short, what all three of the last Project Censored stories this year highlight is the vital importance of being able to see things whole. And that, of course, is why all Project Censored stories are important: because without the missing pieces they provide us with, we can never see anything whole.
8. The Public Banking Revolution
The year 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the USA’s first publicly-owned state bank, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), and in October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Public Banking Act, authorizing up to 10 similar such banks to be created by California’s city and county governments. In response, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles both announced plans to do so. It was the culmination of a decade-long effort that began in the wake of the Great Recession that’s also been taken up in nearly two dozen other states. Beyond the benefits North Dakota has reaped in the past, such banks could have greatly assisted in responding to COVID-19’s economic devastation, and could yet help fund a just transition to a decarbonized future, along the lines of a Green New Deal.
Yet, despite California’s agenda-setting reputation, Project Censored notes that, “No major corporate media outlets appear to have devoted recent coverage to this important and timely topic.”
“The Bank of North Dakota was founded in 1919 in response to a farmers’ revolt against out-of-state banks that were foreclosing unfairly on their farms,” Ellen Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute wrote for Common Dreams. “Since then it has evolved into a $7.4 billion bank that is reported to be even more profitable than JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, although its mandate is not actually to make a profit but simply to serve the interests of local North Dakota communities.”
“The state of North Dakota has six times as many financial institutions per capita as the rest of the country and it’s because they have the Bank of North Dakota,” Sushil Jacob, an attorney who works with the California Public Banking Alliance told The Guardian. “When the great recession hit, the Bank of North Dakota stepped in and provided loans and allowed local banks to thrive.”
As a result, “North Dakota was the only state that escaped the credit crisis,” Brown told Ananya Garg, reporting for Yes! magazine. “It never went in the red, [had] the lowest unemployment rate in the country, the lowest foreclosure rate at that time.”
“There are two ways in which a state bank can fund state investment for a greener future,” Eric Heath wrote in an op-ed for The Hill. “First, the bank can provide loans, bonds and other forms of financing for investments to the state government and private organizations on better terms than those available in regular markets.”
Some such projects might not even be considered.
This is not because green investments are unprofitable, “but because their profits slowly accumulate and are widely shared across a community,” Heath explained. “Second, a public bank will improve a state’s fiscal health. By holding state deposits as assets, the bank’s profits can be returned to state coffers to fund direct state investment. Additionally, the activity of the state bank – which will prioritize investing state assets and extending credit within the state for the benefit of the state – will improve the state economy,” just as has happened in North Dakota.
A new surge of interest in public banking came out of the Standing Rock movement’s Dakota Access Pipeline protests. While individuals could easily withdraw from doing business with fossil fuel-financing banks — Wells Fargo, in this case — governments have no such similar options to meet all their banking needs.
In short, “From efforts to divest public employee pension funds from the fossil fuel industry and private prisons, to funding the proposed Green New Deal, and counteracting the massive, rapid shutdown of the economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public banking has never seemed more relevant,” Project Censored wrote.
It’s a time-tested practical solution the corporate media refuses to discuss.
9. Rising Risks of Nuclear Power Due to Climate Change
As early as 2003, 30 nuclear units were either shut down or reduced power output during a deadly European summer heatwave in Europe.
But almost two decades later, the corporate media has yet to grasp that “Nuclear power plants are unprepared for climate change,” as Project Censored notes. “Rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact power plants’ infrastructure, posing increased risks of nuclear disasters, according to reports from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Truthout from September 2019,” they explain. Yet, “Tracking back to 2013, corporate news media have only sporadically addressed the potential for climate change to impact nuclear power plants.”
“Nuclear power is uniquely vulnerable to increasing temperatures because of its reliance on cooling water to ensure operational safety within the core and spent fuel storage,” Christina Chen wrote for NRDC.
In addition, Karen Charman, reporting for Truthout, noted that “nuclear reactors need an uninterrupted electricity supply to run the cooling systems that keep the reactors from melting down,” but this will be “increasingly difficult to guarantee in a world of climate-fueled megastorms and other disasters.”
Sea level rise — combined with storm surges — represents the most serious threat. That was the focus of a 2018 report by John Vidal from Ensia, a solutions-focused media outlet, which found that “at least 100 U.S., European and Asian nuclear power stations built just a few meters above sea level could be threatened by serious flooding caused by accelerating sea-level rise and more frequent storm surges.”
There have been more than 20 incidents of flooding at U.S. nuclear plants, according to David Lochbaum, a former nuclear engineer and director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The most likely [cause of flooding] is the increasing frequency of extreme events,” he told Vidal.
Yet, in January 2019, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, decided to weaken staff recommendations to reassess the adequacy of hazard preparations. In dissent, Commissioner Jeff Baran wrote that NRC would allow power plants “to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced.”
“As of September 2019, 444 nuclear reactors are operating in the world, with 54 under construction, 111 planned and 330 more proposed,” Charman reported.
“Many of the world’s new nuclear plants are being built on the coasts of Asian countries, which face floods, sea-level rise and typhoons,” Vidal wrote. “At least 15 of China’s 39 reactors in operation, and many of the plants it has under construction, are on the coast.”
“Nuclear stations are on the front line of climate change impacts both figuratively and quite literally,” leading climate scientist Michael Mann told Vidal. “We are likely profoundly underestimating climate change risk and damages in coastal areas.”
10. Revive Journalism with a Stimulus Package and Public Option
In late March, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue package, including direct payments of $1,200 per adult and more than $500 billion for large corporations. Before passage, Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, argued that a stimulus package for journalism was also urgently needed. “In the face of this pandemic, the public needs good, economically secure journalists more than ever … separating fact from fiction, and holding politicians and powerful institutions accountable,” Aaron wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Aaron’s organization, Free Press, placed journalism’s needs at $5 billion in immediate emergency funds, “less than half of one percent of a trillion-dollar recovery package” and asked that “Congress put a foundation in place to help sustain journalism over the long term.”
Aaron presented a three-pronged plan: First, “Doubling federal funds for public media,” not for Downton Abbey reruns, but “earmarked specifically for emergency support, education, and especially local journalism.” For example, “The Los Angeles Unified School District teamed up with PBS SoCal/KCET to offer instruction over the airwaves while kids are out of school, with separate channels focused on different ages.”
Second, “Direct support for daily and weekly newsrooms,” which have lost tens of thousands of jobs over the past three decades. “Direct, emergency subsidies of say $25,000 per newsgathering position could make sure reporters everywhere stay on the local COVID beat,” he wrote. “Just $625 million would help retain 25,000 newsroom jobs.”
Third, “New investments in the news we need … for a major investment in services that provide community information [and] to support new positions, outlets, and approaches to newsgathering, [which could] prioritize places and populations that the mainstream outlets have never served well.”
Arguing that a “resilient and community-centered media system” is necessary to get through the pandemic, Aaron concluded, “Now is the time to act. We need significant public investments in all corners of the economy, and journalism is no exception.”
In an article in Jacobin, media scholar Victor Pickard advanced a more robust proposal, for $30 billion annually (less than 1.4% of the coronavirus stimulus package, Project Censored noted).
“On the question of cost, we must first remind ourselves that a viable press system isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity,” he wrote. “Similar to a classic ‘merit good,’ journalism isn’t a ‘want,’ but a ‘need. … Democratic nations around the globe heavily subsidize the media while enjoying democratic benefits that put the U.S. to shame.”
Writing for The Guardian, just after the McClatchy newspaper chain bankruptcy was announced, Pickard noted that, “For many areas across the US, there’s simply no commercial option. The market has failed us.” And thus, “With market failure, journalism’s survival requires public options.”
The need was fundamental.
“All foundational democratic theories – including the first amendment itself – assume a functional press system. The fourth estate’s current collapse is a profound social problem.”
And he suggested a broad range of funding possibilities:
We could raise funds from taxing platforms like Facebook and Google, placing levees on communication devices, and repurposing international broadcasting subsidies. Other sources include spectrum sales and individual tax vouchers. We could leverage already-existing public infrastructures such as post offices, libraries, and public broadcasting stations to provide spaces for local news production.
“While corporate news outlets have reported the ongoing demise of newspapers and especially local news sources, they have rarely covered proposals such as Aaron’s and Pickard’s to revitalize journalism through public funding,” Project Censored wrote.
