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What you don’t
know, will hurt you. First three posted below. The others are: 4. Surveillance society moves in 5. US uses tsunami to military advantage in SE Asia 6. The real Oil for Food scam 7. Journalists face unprecedented danger to live and livelihood 8. Iraqi farmers threatened by Bremer’s mandates 9. Iran’s new oil trade system challenges US currency 10. Mountaintop removal threatens ecosystem and economy. Contact me if you want a copy of this. 56 KB MS Word or 29 KB Adobe PDF, 8 pages. kwc Censored! Project Censored presents the 10 biggest stories the
mainstream media ignored over the past year. By Camille T. Taiara ,
The San Francisco Bay Guardian 13
September 2005 Issue Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious
British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les
Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to 100,000
people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were noncombatant
civilians. Many were children. But that news didn't make the front pages of the major
newspapers. It wasn't on the network news. So most voters knew little or
nothing about the brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush's war when
they went to the polls. That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media
ignored, blacked out, or underreported over the past year, according to Project
Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State University.
Every year project researchers scour the media looking for
news that never really made the news, publishing the results in a book, this
year titled Censored 2006. Of course, as Project Censored staffers
painstakingly explain every year, their "censored" stories aren't
literally censored, per se. Most can be found on the Internet, if you know
where to look. And some have even received some ink in the mainstream press.
"Censorship," explains project director Peter Phillips, "is any
interference with the free flow of information in society." The stories
highlighted by Project Censored simply haven't received the kind of attention
they warrant, and therefore haven't made it into the greater public
consciousness. "If there were a real democratic press, these are the
kind of stories they would do," says Sut Jhally, professor of
communications at the University of Massachusetts and executive director of the
Media Education Foundation. The stories the researchers identify involve corporate
misdeeds and governmental abuses that have been underreported if not altogether
ignored, says Jhally, who helped judge Project Censored's top picks. For the
most part, he adds, "stories that affect the powerful don't get reported
by the corporate media." Can a story really be "censored" in the Internet
age, when information from millions of sources whips around the world in a
matter of seconds? When a single obscure journal article can be distributed and
discussed on hundreds of blogs and Web sites? When partisans from all sides
dissect the mainstream media on the Web every day? Absolutely, Jhally says. "The Internet is a great place to go if you already
know that the mainstream media is heavily biased" and you actively search
out sites on the outer limits of the Web, he notes. "Otherwise, it's just
another place where they try to sell you stuff. The challenge for a democratic society is how to
get vital information not only at the margins but at the center of our
culture." Not every article or source Project Censored has cited over
the years is completely credible; at least one this year is pretty shaky. But
most of the stories that made the project's top 10 were published by more
reliable sources and included only verifiable information. And Project
Censored's overall findings provide valuable insights into the kinds of issues
the mainstream media should be paying closer attention to. 1. Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate
Open Government
While the Bush administration has expanded its ability to
keep tabs on civilians, it's been working to make sure the public - and even
Congress - can't find out what the government is doing. One year ago, Rep. Henry A. Waxman
(D-Calif.) released an 81-page analysis of how the administration has
administered the country's major open government laws. His report found that
the feds consistently "narrowed the scope and application" of the
Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and other key public
information legislation, while expanding laws blocking access to certain
records - even creating new categories of "protected" information and
exempting entire departments from public scrutiny. When those methods haven't been enough, the Bush
administration has simply refused to release records - even when the requester was
a Congressional subcommittee or the Government Accountability Office, the study
found. A few of the potentially incriminating documents Bush and Co. have
refused to hand over to their colleagues on Capitol Hill include records of
contacts between large energy companies and Vice President Dick Cheney's energy
task force; White House memos pertaining to Saddam Hussein's, shall we say,
"elusive" weapons of mass destruction; and reports describing torture
at Abu Ghraib. The report's findings were so dramatic as to indicate
"an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and
accountable," Waxman said at a Sept. 14, 2004, press conference announcing
the report's release. Given the news media's intrinsic interest in safeguarding
open government laws, one would think it would be plenty motivated to publicize
such findings far and wide. However, most Americans remain oblivious to just
how much more secretive - and autocratic - our leaders in the White House have
become. Source: "New Report Details Bush Administration
Secrecy" press release, Karen Lightfoot, Government Reform Minority
Office, posted on www.commondreams.org, Sept. 14, 2004. 2. Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah
and the Civilian Death Toll Decades from now, the civilized world may well look back on
the assaults on Fallujah in April and November 2004 and point to them as
examples of the United States' and Britain's utter disregard for the most basic
wartime rules of engagement. Not long after the "coalition" had embarked on its
second offensive, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour called
for an investigation into whether the Americans and their allies had engaged in
"the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and
disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons, and the use of human
shields," among other possible "grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions ... considered war crimes" under federal law. More than 83
percent
of Fallujah's 300,000 residents fled the city, Mary Trotochaud and Rick
McDowell, staffers with the American Friends Service Committee, reported in
AFSC's Peacework magazine. Men between the ages of 15 and 45 were refused safe
passage, and all who remained - about 50,000 - were treated as enemy
combatants, according to the article. Numerous
sources reported that coalition forces cut off water and electricity, seized
the main hospital, shot at anyone who ventured out into the open, executed
families waving white flags while trying to swim across the Euphrates or
otherwise flee the city, shot at ambulances, raided homes and killed people who
didn't understand English, rolled over injured people with tanks, and allowed
corpses to rot in the streets and be eaten by dogs. Medical
staff and others reported seeing people, dead and alive, with melted faces and
limbs, injuries consistent with the use of phosphorous bombs.
But you wouldn't know any of this unless you'd come across a rare report
by one of an even rarer number of independent journalists - or known which
obscure Web site to log onto for real information. Of course, the
media blackout extends far beyond Fallujah.
The US military's refusal to keep an Iraqi death count has been mirrored
by the mainstream media, which systematically dodges the question of how many
Iraqi civilians have been killed. Les Roberts, an investigator with the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted a rigorous inquiry into pre- and
post-invasion mortality in Iraq, sneaking into Iraq by lying flat on the bed of
an SUV and training observers on the scene. The results were published in the
Lancet, a prestigious peer-reviewed British medical journal, on Oct. 29, 2004 -
just four days prior to the US presidential elections. Roberts and his team
(including researchers from Columbia University and from al-Mustansiriya
University, in Baghdad) concluded that "the death toll associated with the
invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably about 100,000 people, and may be
much higher." The vast majority of those deaths resulted from violence -
particularly aerial bombardments - and more than half of the fatalities were
women or children, they found. The
State Department had relied heavily on studies by Roberts in the past. And when
Roberts, using similar techniques, calculated in 2000 that about 1.7 million
had died in the Congo as the result of almost two years of armed conflict, the
news media picked up the story, the United Nations more than doubled its request for aid
to the Congo, and the United States pledged an additional $10 million. This time, silence - interrupted only by the occasional
critique dismissing Roberts's report. The major television news shows, Project Censored found,
never mentioned it. Sources: "The Invasion of Fallujah: A Study in the
Subversion of Truth," Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, Peacework, Dec.
2004-Jan. 2005; "US Media Applauds Destruction of Fallujah," David
Walsh, www.wsws.org (World Socialist Web site), Nov. 17, 2004; "Fallujah
Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone," Dahr Jamail, New
Standard, Dec. 3, 2004; "Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of
Iraq," Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and
Gilbert Burnham, Lancet, Oct. 29, 2004; "The War in Iraq: Civilian
Casualties, Political Responsibilities," Richard Horton, Lancet, Oct. 29,
2004; "Lost Count," Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education,
Feb. 4, 2005; "CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?"
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, April 15, 2004, and Asheville Global
Report, April 22-28, 2004. 3. Another Year of Distorted Election
Coverage
Last year Project Censored foretold the potential for
electoral wrongdoing in the 2004 presidential campaign: The "sale of electoral
politics" made number six in the list of 2003-04's most underreported
stories. The mainstream media had largely ignored the evidence that electronic
voting machines were susceptible to tampering, as well as political alliances
between the machines' manufacturers and the Republican Party. Then came Nov. 2, 2004. Bush prevailed by 3 million votes -
despite exit polls that clearly projected Kerry winning by a margin of 5
million. "Exit polls are highly accurate," Steve Freeman,
professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational
Dynamics, and Temple University statistician Josh Mitteldorf wrote in In These
Times. "They remove most of the sources
of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them
immediately afterward who they had voted for." The
eight-million-vote discrepancy was well beyond the poll's recognized,
less-than-1-percent margin of error. And when Freeman and Mitteldorf analyzed the data
collected by the two companies that conducted the polls, they found concrete
evidence of potential fraud in the official count. "Only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted
paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal
sampling margin of error,"
they wrote. And "the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official
count was considerably greater in the critical swing states." Inconsistencies were so much more marked in African American
communities as to renew calls for racial equity in our voting system. "It is
now time to make counting that vote a right, not just casting it, before Jim
Crow rides again in the next election," wrote Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg
Palast in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Sources: "A
Corrupt Election," Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf, In These Times, Feb.
15, 2005; "Jim Crow Returns to the Voting Booth," Greg Palast and
Rev. Jesse Jackson, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 26, 2005; "How a
Republican Election Supervisor Manipulated the 2004 Central Ohio Vote,"
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, www.freepress.org, Nov. 23, 2004. For the
rest please see San Francisco Bay Guardian here http://www.sfbg.com/39/49/cover_censored.html
Or
Truth Out http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805S.shtml |
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