Peter Phillips and Project Censored (2003)
New York: Seven Stories, £12.99
Project Censored is a centre for research and campaigning related to freedom of information, set up in 1976 at Sonoma State University in California. Every year since 1994 (with a break in 2002), the project has produced a survey of the year’s ‘most censored’ news stories, collated with the help of Sonoma ‘media censorship’ students. The latest yearbook is the biggest yet, coming with a series of essays by media watchers including representatives of FAIR and Index on Censorship.
My problems with this collection start with the word ‘censored’. For Project Censored, a ‘censored’ story is a significant news story that has been ‘publicly published, either electronically or in print’ but to which ‘the United States population …… has had limited access’. If it mattered and it didn’t make the mass media, in other words, it was censored — no ‘might have beens’ or even ‘must have beens’. This is a fairly drastic — and emotive — oversimplification of the issues of media control. Phillips and co. can’t really think like that — but if not, it’s not clear what they do think.
The supplementary essays in this collection complicate the picture usefully, as well as showing that things are getting steadily worse in the US media: more corporate consolidation, more government intervention, more editorial timidity. But the ‘Top 25 censored stories’ themselves aren’t very good evidence of these processes. Call me a cynic, but I can’t imagine ‘US Military’s War on the Earth’ or ‘The Effort to Make Unions Disappear’ ever playing big on network news. Mainstream news outlets are turning out ever less news and ever more froth and propaganda, and it would be nice to have this trend reversed; that said, some stories are only ever going to appear in magazines with committed readerships. (Widely available magazines with large committed readerships, ideally.) Paradoxically, the ‘censorship’ model errs on the side of optimism. Censorship is something somebody does — and they could always stop doing it. For many of the stories presented here, I’m not sure they could — or not without some pretty sizeable changes to US society beforehand.
Still, I’m all in favour of celebrating stories that sneak out, even if I’d rather celebrate when they appear in the Nation than rail against their exclusion from CNN. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if 2002-3 was a great period for underreported news. There are a few truly scandalous stories here (‘US illegally removes pages from Iraq UN report’; ‘US implicated in Taliban massacre’; ‘Rums-feld’s plan to provoke terrorists’; the so-called P2OG) but many of the 25 are neither surprising nor particularly new (‘Treaty busting by the US’; ‘Unwanted refugees a global problem’ …).
Overall it’s a curate’s egg. There’s some excellent stuff in the back half: Robin Andersen’s account of media manipulation during the Iraq war is informative and alarming, and Kenichi Asano’s brief survey of the Japanese media industry is fascinating. But the front half is where the work of Project Censored really takes place — and much of that seems overwritten and under-focused.