Why Corporate TV Can’t Give us All the Important News we Need [View All]

[Time for change]

“Project Censored” is a project whose purpose it is to bring the American people important news stories that have apparently been censored by our corporate news media. Cynthia McKinney explains why we need organizations like that in the preface to Project Censored’s latest book, “Censored 2009 – The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08”:

I welcome a real discussion of all the issues that face our country today and the real public policy options that exist to resolve them. For many Americans, this important discussion has been too vague or completely non-existent. Now is the time to talk about the concrete measures that will move our country forward…

You would not have read about these issues if you had relied solely on television news for your information… The media in this country obviously do not want the people to be informed about the truths presented by Project Censored…

In the first chapter of their book, Project Censored explains perhaps the main reason why our corporate media censor so many important stories:

The uncovered news stories in Censored 2009 reveal an increasingly desperate demand on the part of US corporations for conquest of international resources, as well as the increased reliance on military means to silence and eliminate dissent and achieve compliance. Our list this year shows more clearly than ever that the People’s Will is the main enemy to be violently reckoned with by corporate America. The term “terrorism” is quickly expanding to include even thoughts that run contrary to US agenda of conquest.

But wait! Our corporate news media claims that they have been unfairly criticized for “censoring” news stories. We need to understand that news professionals have hard and legitimate choices to make about what news to cover. It isn’t that they censor news. It’s just that there is not enough time and space to cover all the important news stories.

To assess that claim, Project Censored did an analysis of corporate TV news coverage. They identified ten “junk” news stories and then looked to see whether important news went uncovered on the days of the junk news stories, or whether our corporate news media just had to present junk news on those days because nothing much else was happening.

I’ll briefly note just 5 of those junk TV news stories in this post, and then list what else was happening on those days that TV news couldn’t cover because they didn’t have enough time.


Some examples of junk TV news stories

All of these stories received a great amount of TV coverage:

Britney Spears’ custody troubles, massively covered during the first week of October, 2007.

On December 18, 2007, Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s younger sister, announced her pregnancy. Following that announcement, Lynn Spears, Britney’s and Jamie Lynn’s mother, announced an indefinite delay in her book on parenting.

Paris Hilton turned herself in for drunk driving on June 3, 2007, to begin serving a short jail sentence.

On May 26, 2007, Lindsay Lohan crashed her car and was found by the police to be in possession of cocaine. In the following months, detailed coverage was provided of her rehab and relapses, and psychological experts discussed the causes of celebrity substance abuse.

On March 5, 2007, a judge ruled that Anna Nicole Smith’s child, Dannielynn, was the sole heir to her estate. This was following by much speculation on TV “news” as to who was the father of Dannielynn.


TV NEWS THAT WASN’T COVERED DUE TO THE ABOVE NOTED STORIES

Here are some events that could have appeared on TV, but never did, which occurred on the same dates as the above noted stories. These then are the stories that our corporate news media didn’t have time to cover because of the urgency of covering the above noted stories:


The Iraq War and Occupation

Our corporate news media led us into war in Iraq by failing to counter and even actively supporting obviously phony Bush administration excuses for war. Now that we’re there, they are none too eager to give us the bad news. These are the stories that were not covered by TV news in 2007, during the same days that the above noted “junk” news stories were aired:

GOP Rivals Embrace Unproven Iraq/9-11 Tie
Failing to report this story served two purposes simultaneously. It avoided reminding the American people of the lies that got us into the war, and simultaneously it avoided making the Republican presidential candidates sound like the idiots that they are:

In defending the Iraq war, leading Republican presidential contenders are increasingly echoing words and phrases used by President Bush in the run-up to the war that reinforce the misleading impression that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Intel Agencies Warned of Post-War Risks
The American people don’t need to be reminded that the war is making us less safe, rather than more safe:

Two major studies prepared by the U.S. intelligence community and distributed to senior officials in every relevant agency two months before Washington's invasion of Iraq warned of many of the problems that have turned the U.S. occupation there into the worst foreign policy crisis since at least the Vietnam War.

Survey Shows Iraq War Strain Leads Troops to Abuse Civilians
What would happen if more Americans knew about what we’re doing to the Iraqis – and to our troops? :

One in 10 of the US soldiers in Iraq mistreats civilians or damages their property, according to a survey published by the Pentagon last night. The report said the mental health of soldiers and marines deteriorated significantly as a result of extended or multiple deployments.

Iraq: “Bad” Women Raped and Killed
Or how would Americans feel about this? :

Several women victims were accused of being "bad" before they were abducted, residents say. Most abducted women are later found dead. The bodies of several were found in garbage dumps, showing signs of rape and torture. Several bodies had a note attached saying the woman was "bad"…

Iraqi liberals are deeply frustrated by the lack of personal freedom. "We are so disappointed with the loss of what there was of Iraqi women's achievements… "The Americans promised they would make Iraq a symbol of liberty and prosperity. Now it has neither."

Abu Ghraib Prisoners Accuse US Companies of Torture
Or This? :

Two US Army subcontractors accused of torturing prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib jail go to court Wednesday in a case that highlights the murky legal status of private US companies in Iraq.

Iraq, Afghanistan War Costs Tops Vietnam
Reminding Americans that it is our military, not our social programs that are bankrupting our country, would not help to advance the Neocon agenda:

Congress' approval Wednesday of $70 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean the twin conflicts are now more costly to American taxpayers than the war in Vietnam.

According to a study by the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Congress has now approved nearly $700 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

US Can Forget about Winning in Iraq: Top Retired General
Nor would it serve their purpose to let the American people know that staying in Iraq is accomplishing no useful purpose.

The man who commanded US-led coalition forces during the first year of the Iraq war says the United States can forget about winning the war…. "I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time," Sanchez told AFP after a recent speech…

Malfeasance of the Bush administration

Former CIA Analyst Says Evidence Abounds for Impeachment
This was the issue that was so important to keep off the table that they tried to make us feel that it was “unpatriotic” to talk about it:

The evidence for impeachment of the president and vice president is overwhelming, former CIA analyst and daily presidential briefer Ray McGovern told a room full of people.

Gorbachev Criticizes U.S. “Empire”
How would Americans feel about learning that the man who helped the Soviet Empire break apart, to end the Cold War, now points to the obvious fact that the United States is an empire? Americans want to believe that their country is a freedom loving democracy, not an empire. Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted as saying:

We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire…

"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire, we know about empires, we know that all empires break up in the end, so why start again to create a new mess.'"

Venezuela Defends Iran, Blasts Hypocritical US Policy on Terror
Let’s not help expose the blatant hypocrisy of our so-called “War on Terror”. That would remove one of our major excuses for war:

(Venezuelan Foreign Minister) Maduro also denounced Washington's "hypocritical" policy of combating terrorism while at the same time protecting "one of the most dangerous terrorists," Cuban anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles… a former US Central Intelligence Agency operative wanted by Havana and Caracas in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.

Rove Prepped Justice Dept. Official for Testimony
Using the U.S. Justice Department to punish one’s enemies, protect one’s friends, and sabotage U.S. elections is undoubtedly one of the worst crimes against democracy ever perpetrated against the American people. This is clearly something that our corporate news media doesn’t want to remind us of:

Questions about whether Rove had a hand in the firings have figured in a separate probe, being conducted by the Office of Special Counsel, into whether he and other administration personnel violated civil statutes by focusing on electoral politics at Cabinet agency meetings.

Destruction of our environment

Project Censored notes that in the same week as all the brouhaha over Paris Hilton going to jail:

A consensus of studies revealed that global warming is progressing at a rate three times faster than earlier predicted… Arctic ice caps are melting three times as fast and ocean waters are rising twice as fast…This exceeds the worst case scenario outlined in the 2007 reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

News stories of destruction of our environment are anathema to our corporate news media because citizen concern over the environment leads to demands to control the corporate activity responsible for the environmental destruction. Stories like these, which all took place simultaneously with the celebrity news stories noted above, but which never were important enough to appear as TV news:

Melting Ice, Snow to Hit Livelihoods Worldwide

Global warming that is melting ice and snow will affect hundreds of millions of people around the globe by disrupting rivers in Asia, thawing Arctic ice and raising ocean levels, a U.N. report said on Monday.

World Food Stocks Dwindling Rapidly, UN Warns

In an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday…. The changes created "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food," particularly in the developing world…. blamed a confluence of recent supply and demand factors for the crisis…. These include the early effects of global warming, which has decreased crop yields in some crucial places…

Greenpeace Posts Leaked US Objection to G8 Climate Statement
No point in calling attention to the fact that the Bush administration posed the primary obstacle in the world to combating global warming:

The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to," according to the undated US document released by Greenpeace.

THE PURPOSE OF OUR CORPORATE NEWS MEDIA

Here are two more stories that were buried in 2007 during a massive bombardment of celebrity junk news:

American Dream Sours as Housing Market Collapses

FCC Votes for Monopoly, Congress Must Vote for Democracy

The first of these stories could have helped the American people to prepare a little better and a little earlier for one of the biggest economic crises ever to hit them, had it received widespread attention at the time. But in May 2007 there was hardly any news coverage of this story.

The second story represents one of the gravest threats to our democracy that we continue to face. The last paragraph of that article sums up the problem:

Now, New York's Hillary Clinton, Illinois' Barack Obama, Connecticut's Chris Dodd and Delaware's Joe Biden need to put the issue of media monopoly front and center in Iowa and New Hampshire… If they are not talking about the fundamental threat to diversity of media ownership in American communities and the country as a whole, they will be failing to use the most powerful bully pulpit in the fight against the monopoly on communication that represents the single greatest threat to the battered democratic discourse of a country where the public's right to know cannot take this hit and survive.

Democracy cannot exist without a free and independent press. The press that we currently have puts celebrity junk news above war, the heinous crimes of our government, and the destruction of our planet. Those are not the actions of a free and independent press. Bill Moyers has put the problem in perspective:

What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.

Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.