"[Labor issues] are off-limits to the media," says Conn Hallinan, journalism professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. [The suppression of union activity at Avondale] isn't just a single isolated instance but is emblematic of what happens to workers generally in the United States when they try to organize a union -- an activity supposedly protected by federal law. "There's never recognition of any conflict between workers and employers. The mainstream media don't talk about this because that might lead to a discussion of class -- which is still considered akin to communism." Project Censored 2000: RUNNERS-UP San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 5, 2000 Project Censored's other selections for 1999 11. America's largest nuclear test exposed thousands. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch, Terrain; Jeffrey St. Clair, In These Times. 12. Evidence indicates no prewar genocide in Kosovo and possible U.S./KLA plot to create disinformation. Mark Cook, Covert Action Quarterly; staff, Progressive Review; Pablo Ordaz, El Pais. 13. U.S. agency seeks to export weapons-grade plutonium to Russian organization linked to organized crime. Jeffrey St. Clair, In These Times; Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch. 14. U.S. media ignores humanitarian aspects of famine in Korea. Ramsay Liem, Peace Review; Yuh Ji-Yeon, Peace Review. 15. Early puberty onset for girls may be linked to chemicals in the environment and increases in breast cancer. Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, Eric J. Slora, Richard Wasserman, Carlos Bourdony, Manju V. Bhapkar, Gary Koch, Cynthia Hasemeier, Environmental Health Monthly. 16. Media distorts debate on affirmative action. Robert Entman, News Watch; Linda Jue, News Watch. 17. World Bank's resettlement program displaces millions. Lori Pottinger, World Rivers Review. 18. California convicts and punishes teenagers as adults. A. Clay Thompson, San Francisco Bay Guardian. 19. Bacterium in cow's milk may cause Crohn's disease. Lisa Chamberlain, Cleveland Free Times. 20. IMF and World Bank contributed to economic tensions in the Balkans. Michael Chossudovsky, This. 21. Vatican's U.N. status challenged. Laura Flanders, Ms. 22. United States and Germany trained and developed the KLA. Wayne Madsen, The Progressive; Michel Chossudovsky, Covert Action Quarterly. 23. International conference sets world agenda for peace. Robin Lloyd, Toward Freedom. 24. U.S. nuclear weapons controlled by unstable personnel. Ken Silverstein, Mother Jones. 25. U.S. military trains soldiers to kill and eat tame animals. D'Arcy Kemnitz, The Animals' Agenda. ______________________________________________ LABOR: THE REAL CENSORED STORY by David Bacon San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 5, 2000 In 1992 immigrant drywall hangers went on strike from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border, halting southern California home construction for almost a year. They defied police and border patrol agents, even shutting down freeways at rush hour to stop the Immigration and Naturalization Service and highway patrol from harassing caravans of picketers. And at the end of it all, they won. Over the following years, immigrants mounted strike after strike, involving hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of workers, on construction projects, in huge foundries and tortilla factories, among truckers in the Long Beach harbor, and in sweatshops from downtown Los Angeles's garment district to the Pomona barrio. The impact of this upsurge has been profound. It has changed the demographics of California's labor movement, giving immigrants a new voice and propelling activists into leadership of some of the state's largest and most important unions. But despite its profound impact on the economic and political life of California and the rest of the country, this working-class upsurge has gone largely unrecognized and unreported by the mainstream press. "It's really not even on their radar screen," says Susan Alva, staff attorney for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. The attitudes behind this lack of coverage are widespread in the press. They affect not only media outlets themselves but also progressive media critics and watchdogs, such as Project Censored, based at the California State University campus in Sonoma County. While some alternative publications did cover the immigrant worker upsurge, from the LA Weekly and the now defunct LA Village View to The Nation and Labornotes, none of those stories was considered censored by Project Censored judges and included in its nationally touted list, issued every year. "Unions are off-limits to the media," says Conn Hallinan, journalism professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Project Censored has as its premise that the media does an inadequate job of exposing the abuse of power by government and corporations. In its press release announcing 1999's chosen stories, it declares that "domestic and international events sure to boggle the minds of even the most indifferent went virtually unnoticed by the press last year." "On one level I applaud what they do," Hallinan says. "At least they feature the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. But I find there's a consistent pattern of ignoring certain stories." This year's list does include a story on environmental racism, affecting African American communities in the industrial cancer belt in Louisiana. It was the first story involving struggle in a community of color to make it into Project Censored's top 10 list in the 11 years since the project began. Yet just a few miles away, primarily African American workers have also been fighting a pitched battle to unionize the huge Avondale shipyard. Six years ago workers voted for the union, and the company has used all its legal and political might to deny them their labor rights ever since. Not only that, but according to Nadra Floyd, deputy organizing director of the AFL-CIO, U.S. taxpayers financed the effort: "The Department of the Navy kept signing contracts with the yard, even including money for consultants which we suspect was used to pay union busters." Avondale isn't just a single isolated struggle but is emblematic of what happens to workers generally in the United States when they try to organize a union -- an activity supposedly protected by federal law. "The media doesn't care what happens to them," Floyd says. "What it boils down to is that there's never recognition of the struggle between workers and employers. They don't talk about this because it could lead to a discussion of class, which is still considered akin to communism or socialism." The struggle of workers against union busters was just one story left off Project Censored lists, which reflect the same set of class biases. Those lists inherently assume that the news that's worth reporting involves the actions of the rich and powerful -- their unreported misdeeds. Stories involving movements among working-class people and in communities of color go unnoticed by both the mainstream media and its liberal critics. Of the 110 stories chosen by Project Censored over 11 years, 64 featured the U.S. government's abuse of power, 54 covered corporate misdeeds, 40 exposed environmental and health crimes, and 35 discussed deception in U.S. foreign policy or misdeeds by other governments. The number of stories featuring a union or a struggle by workers: 0. Project Censored's Peter Phillips says this is a blind spot in the alternative press as a whole. "Even the alternative press doesn't cover labor and social-activist stories as much as it could," he says. Project founder Carl Jensen also points out that grassroots stories are usually local in nature and thus excluded by Project Censored's national emphasis. Certainly the growth of giant media corporations has something to do with it. After all, probably the most censored story of the last few years is the Detroit newspaper strike, a direct challenge to two media monopolies by their own employees. It's hardly a surprise that Gannett and Knight-Ridder didn't report it -- after all, why should they encourage other workers to go on strike to save their unions and rights at work? Nor is it much of a surprise that other media monopolies saw their common class interest in keeping the story quiet. But Project Censored and other media critics didn't see a story there either. While corporate class interest certainly leads to censorship, reporters and people who work in the media share responsibility. After all, looking at Detroit, one can't help asking the obvious. Thousands of newspaper workers belong to unions and care a lot about their own salaries and working conditions. Why didn't or couldn't they challenge the effort to suppress the news from Detroit? While there were real efforts by dedicated newspaper union activists, most reporters didn't see this as their responsibility. Media monopolies and journalism schools have taught journalists that they must not participate in movements for social justice, especially unions and community organizations that challenge the established order. "Project Censored is a reflection of the industry," Hallinan says. "The Project Censored attitude is that what we should do is objective journalism. That attitude not only makes reporters unwilling to be participants, but you can't be a good journalist with it. Was I.F. Stone neutral on Vietnam and Korea, or Mike Quinn on the San Francisco General Strike?" Another measure that would lead to coverage of unions and communities of color would be increasing diversity among media workers themselves. Bill Fletcher, former AFL-CIO education director and now assistant to President John Sweeney, and an organizer of the Black Radical Congress, points out that "communities of color are overwhelmingly working-class communities. The percentage of union membership among African Americans, eighteen to twenty percent, is the highest among any racial or national group." Yet minorities make up 11.1 percent of media workers. That percentage, which was rising for some years, is in decline. "Look at the class origin of reporters and editors also," Hallinan urges. "Seventy-five years ago, they were overwhelmingly working-class people. Today they're largely middle class." Changing that calls for a new kind of participatory activist journalism, with roots in the struggles of workers, unions, and communities of color, loyal to the ideal of fundamental social change and those who fight for it.
