Project Censored's Latest Top
25 Censored Stories
By Stephen Lendman
10-2-9


For 33 years, Sonoma State University's (SSU) Project Censored (PC) has engaged in pioneering research on, and advocacy for, First Amendment issues. Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, it's now headed by Professor Ben Frymer. On July 1, he took over from Professor Peter Phillips who stepped down after 13 years of distinguished service as Director.

PC works cooperatively "with numerous independent (US) media groups," primarily to train SSU students "in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States."

For over three decades, it's "trained over 1,500 students in investigative research" and continues doing it through "a partnership of faculty, students, and the community," cooperatively engaged in "research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media."

Each year, it ranks the top 25 and publishes them in its yearbook, "Censored: Media Democracy in Action." The latest "Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 - 09" just out is the subject of this review. The book may now be purchased locally, online, and most easily at projectcensored.org/store.

The current edition is larger than even, and includes the year's honorable mention choices as well as additional chapters covered below.

In the preface, Peter Phillips and former Associate Director Mickey Huff highlight Censored 2010's theme in explaining the corporate media's emphasis on commercialism, the "inane", the "irrelevant," and their willful suppression of real news and information on vital issues.

Their betrayal of the public trust reveals them to be "a gossip rag or screed sheet, a veritable three-ring circus sideshow of spectacle and distraction," and a "dying system" relying on disinformation, faux reporting over real journalism, and the main threat to democracy in America that can't flourish without a free and open media able to supply everyone with real news and information.

In its annual editions and daily on its web site (projectcensored.org), PC offers the best of what the corporate media censor or suppress. Censored 2010 offers more of it than ever, and credit for it goes to Peter Phillips, Mickey Huff, and the entire Project Censored team. As Dahr Jamail ends his introduction, "we are (indeed) fortunate to have (a valued) ally like Project Censored."

Tricia Boreta and Peter Phillips explain why:

-- because "the absence of real news from corporate media has never been so complete;

-- Lies, deception, propaganda, superficial coverage, and overt censorship are on the rise;" and as a result

-- democracy is being willfully destroyed.

But PC isn't standing pat, and allied with 28 professors nationally have incorporated PC "curricula and investigative procedures into their classrooms." They, and a free and open Internet, are the future. But not without a long tough struggle against powerful dark forces determined to hold on and control all news and information sources. It's for public outrage and committed organizations like PC to stop them. It's our country and our choice.

Zombie Newspapers - Dead A Generation Ago, Their Corpses Are Showing Up

Buffalo State College Journalism Professor Michael Niman highlighted the decline of US dailies at a time of economic crisis. Some have shut down. Most have downsized, while others are going virtual over print. However, "the collapse of journalism is old news. Newspapers have been dead for quite a while." We're just now seeing their corpses, but the concentration of media monopolies, the proliferation of one-newspaper towns (in 98% of US cities), and the destruction of media diversity made it predictable.

Content is heavily censored by conglomerates controlling media empires for profit, "not to inform, educate, and agitate...." With no competition, they cut staff, use wire services over their own reporting, and lost "significance as sources of (real) news." Avoiding controversy and pleasing advertisers counts most, and on political issues they "suck up to power and don't ask (hard) questions...."

The relevant one for consumers is "why the hell should we pay for their misinformation?" In increasing numbers, they've stopped, preferring instead to get reliable information from independent print and online sources.

It shows that "while there might not be a future for soulless, zombie monopoly newspapers, there is a future for journalism." Niman sheds no tears for the corporate kind and hopes that many credible alternatives will replace them.

PC's Top 25 2008 - 2009 Stories

Project Censored's Latest Top 25 Censored Stories

Final Comments

The Project Censored team has made PC a national treasure, dedicated to media democracy in a free and open society. As guardians of power, today's dominant media system is in crisis because it's bottom-line driven, unresponsive to public needs, and concerned only about the interests of wealth and power.

As a result, fiction substitutes for fact. News is carefully filtered, dissent marginalized and denigrated, and supporting the powerful substitutes for full and accurate reporting. The fallout has imperial wars called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Washington has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and patriotism means supporting militarism, violence as a way of life, global dominance, lawlessness, torture, and an Orwellian society in which "war is peace, freedom is slavery, (and) ignorance is strength."

Democracy requires a free, open, vibrant, and diverse media, elements totally absent under our corporate-driven system. PC holds it accountable by revealing what it suppresses.

Support Project Censored and the Media Freedom Foundation (MFF) that works closely with PC. Read Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008 - 09, and follow PC daily at projectcensored.org and MFF at mediafreedominternational.org. They're our best hope to restore freedom in a healthy and functioning democracy, something very much absent in today's corporate-dominated America.

BBC Attack Piece Promotes Cottage Industry Of Debunkers

Self professed “skeptics” claim they promote critical thinking while doing the exact opposite

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Oct 6, 2009

The BBC cannot resist attacking anyone who questions the establishment line and counters mainstream accounts of events, especially if they make up part of the new and exciting alternative media that is contributing to the corporation’s ongoing fossilization.

That is why in a feature article today, the corporation is promoting a group of “scientists and skeptics” whose declared mission is to vigorously debunk those who are questioning the “accepted versions” of events.

“While many people find them harmless fun, others believe there is a darker truth – that conspiracy theories are rewriting history, warping the present and altering the future. Enough is enough they say – it’s time to fight back.” the report reads.

The article centres around the “non profit” James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which charges £175 a ticket to its conferences, events that equate to little more than rabid debunking fests on everything from 9/11 truth to research claiming mercury containing vaccinations are harmful.

In a deliberate Orwellian warping of language, JREF attendees are described as “skeptics” who are promoting critical thinking”:

“…scientists, writers and comedians target conspiracy theories – and their close cousins pseudoscience and medical quackery – in front of an audience loosely allied by their desire for more rational, critical thinking.” the report states.

“…some delegates prefer to call themselves rationalists, free thinkers or Brights. Out there in the audience is the next generation of bloggers and media professionals,” [JREF president Dr Phil] Plait says.

In which plane of reality is it considered “free thinking” to debunk and shut down alternative theories and questions in favour of a received reality?

Luminaries and speakers at the recent conference in London, titled The Amazing Meeting (TAM), included Glenn Hill, the son of someone who claimed to have taken pictures of fairies at the bottom of their garden, but later admitted it was a hoax.

The BBC report on JREF brazenly lumps in questions over the 9/11 attacks with moon landing conspiracies and individuals who claim to have paranormal spoon-bending powers.

It highlights the fact that those who have questioned and challenged the findings of the 9/11 commission have had a “massive impact”, however, the tone of the piece suggests this is thoroughly negative and even dangerous.

Presumably the 9/11 commissioners themselves should be a target for the JREF debunkers, given that six of the ten have openly questioned the Commission’s findings and described the whole thing as a whitewash.

Perhaps the same goes for the majority of the 9/11 victims’ family members, who also have unanswered questions regarding the attacks, according to the head of the biggest 9/11 families group.

JREF was officially established in 1996 to “help debunk paranormal and pseudoscientific claims”. How ironic it is then that the foundation seemingly supports the pseudoscientific claim that jet fuel, and office fires in the case of of World Trade Center 7, can burn at temperatures hot enough to cause multi-story steel framed structures to collapse and disintegrate at free fall rate.

JREF has comedians and a man who pretended to have a picture of fairies at its conferences, the 9/11 truth movement has heard from hundreds of architects, engineers and physics professors. How telling it is that the BBC paints up JREF as the credible organisation, while the 9/11 truth movement is reduced to the level of racist internet-dwelling freaks.

The ever present anti-semite smear against the 9/11 truth movement is present, tick that prerequisite off the list. Apparently British investigative journalist Jon Ronson (he who lied in his own book in claiming he entered the elite Bohemian Grove gathering with Alex Jones) posted a comment on a 9/11 truth forum and was, according to the BBC, “abused and ridiculed because he is Jewish”.

Demonization of the internet is there too, with the following lazy smear:

“Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events… Conspiracy theories predate the internet but the web has provided a fast, accessible platform for groups to unite, gather research and disseminate information without even meeting or leaving their houses.”

Check off another cliched attack.

The piece also intimates that a belief in a conspiracy regarding the assassination of JFK is something to be classed as kooky or revisionist. A reader comment nails the ridiculousness of such a claim:

So I guess you’re also including the “House Select Committee on Assassinations” who in 1970 concluded that “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy.” This was a three-year investigation carried out carried out by the US Government. Those loony conspiracy nuts.

If the BBC and JREF are trying to convince the general public to believe something different, they have a great deal of work to do, given that some forty years later 7 in 10 stark raving mad kooks believe the assassination was the result of a nefarious plot, not the act of a lone killer.

Another reader comment on the BBC piece injects some common sense into an otherwise blithering mess of an article:

Some conspiracy theorists are plain nuts, but the ability and right to question what is commonly taught is extremely important. To assert that all conspiracy theories are bunk is the same as saying “believe what you are told”. Surely this is dangerous thinking?


The BBC has routinely attacked the 9/11 truth movement and over the past few years has produced no less than four television hit pieces laden with bias and emotional manipulation in an attempt to debunk legitimate questions that remain unanswered.

The corporation has also hacked its way through research into the 7/7 London bombings that has raised concerning questions in the vacuum that exists due to the lack of any real investigation into the attacks.

In addition the BBC has taken to debunking any deviations from the official version of events surrounding Lockerbie, The Oklahoma City Bombing, and the deaths of Dr David Kelly and Princess Diana.

All of these shows have been backdropped with so called “experts”, including the director of The X-Files, forcing ludicrous, cringe-worthy and cliched psychobabble down the throats of viewers to the effect of “the conspiracy theorists just want to believe that there is a big evil force, that they have no power to resist, manipulating and controlling everything.”

We have attempted to engage the makers of these programs directly. Alex Jones himself has appeared in many of them and has had their producers and creators on his show as guests. Each time they have had very little to contribute and have actively shown themselves to be completely uninformed on the subjects they have supposedly spent months researching.

Trust in the BBC went down the toilet bowl a long time ago. The corporation was effectively castrated by the government following its role in the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

After the Blair government appointee Lord Hutton astonishingly exonerated the government of any wrong doing over the affair, the Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, was forced to quit. The corporation was also made to issue a groveling apology for daring to act like an independent journalistic source when it ran a story claiming that the government had “sexed up” its Iraq weapons dossier with unreliable intelligence.

Greg Dyke has since spoken of a “Westminster conspiracy”, on the part of the elite political class and the BBC, that is actively breaking down democracy in Britain. But then again I guess he is just one of the loony internet-dwelling spoon-bending conspiracy theorists that the BBC is proud to announce should be countered by the “critical thinkers” of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

I guess we should simply trust a giant media corporation that is directly subsidized by the government and feeds off enforced tax payer license fees to deliver our “critical thinking” for us.

Alex Jones’ Prison Planet.com » BBC Attack Piece Promotes Cottage Industry Of Debunkers

Always remember that George Orwell conceived of his great novel nineteen eighty four after working at the BBC. It is just as Orwellian today!

May I please have the two (2) sentence summary Ax?

The rise of social media presents vast opportunities for consumer empowerment, a more democratic media and resistance to the information control that the world’s worst regimes routinely practice.
But with the decline of the mainstream media, little lamented by any except unemployed journalists, we’re also losing something social media cannot provide. As media users fragment into an ever-proliferating range of platforms in which they entirely control who they see and hear and what they read, the risk of us locking ourselves into digital ghettos increases.
Mass media, for all its many faults, provided a common space in which differing, frequently hostile ideas could compete. But increasingly, our media platforms allow us to filter out what we don’t want to hear. The rigour of considering a viewpoint with which ones disagrees -- even if only to reject it -- and even the patience of simply hearing someone out, are not skills that Twitter or other social media encourage.
Whether that’s healthy for our increasingly digital democracy isn’t at all clear.

The rise of social media presents vast opportunities for consumer empowerment, a more democratic media and resistance to the information control that the world’s worst regimes routinely practice.
But with the decline of the mainstream media, little lamented by any except unemployed journalists, we’re also losing something social media cannot provide. As media users fragment into an ever-proliferating range of platforms in which they entirely control who they see and hear and what they read, the risk of us locking ourselves into digital ghettos increases.
Mass media, for all its many faults, provided a common space in which differing, frequently hostile ideas could compete. But increasingly, our media platforms allow us to filter out what we don’t want to hear. The rigour of considering a viewpoint with which ones disagrees -- even if only to reject it -- and even the patience of simply hearing someone out, are not skills that Twitter or other social media encourage.
Whether that’s healthy for our increasingly digital democracy isn’t at all clear.

At the moment ... the info warrior's main concern is ... to ... break down the programmed grip the elite have had on the masses.

I think your concern is overblown and that, generally speaking, most individuals do not gobble down everything the media presents to them.

"YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS !!" J.McEnroe