Every year since 1976, Project Censored has performed an invaluable service — shedding light on the most significant news that's somehow not fit to print. While journalists everyday work hard to expose injustices, they work within a system where some injustices are so deeply baked in that stories that exposing them are rarely told and even more rarely expanded upon to give them their proper due.
That's where Project Censored comes in.
"The primary purpose of Project Censored is to explore and publicize the extent of news censorship in our society by locating stories about significant issues of which the public should be aware, but is not, for a variety of reasons," wrote founder Carl Jensen on its 20th anniversary.
Thus, the list of censored stories that's the centerpiece of its annual book, State of the Free Press | 2021, doesn't just help us to see individual stories we might have otherwise missed. It helps us see patterns — patterns of censorship, of stories suppressed and patterns in how those stories fit together.
The stories listed below are only part of what Project Censored does, however. State of the Free Press | 2021 has chapters devoted to other forms of obfuscation that help keep censored stories obscured.
Last issue we presented the first part of this series; so in this installment we present the Top 5 under-reported stories of 2020. And if this leaves you hungry for more, Project Censored has all that and more waiting for you in State of the Free Press | 2021.
"In public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills," DePaul University sociologist Fernando De Maio wrote for Truthout in December 2019.
Even before COVID-19, his research added fine-grained evidence of broad trends highlighted in three prominent governmental reports: The gap between rich and poor Americans had grown larger than ever in half a century, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2019 annual survey, with dramatic evidence of its lethal impact: people in the poorest quintile die at twice the rate as those in the richest quintile, according to a report by the Congressional General Accounting Office.
This is partly because job-related deaths are increasingly rooted in the physical and psychological toll of low-wage work, as opposed to on-the-job accidents, as documented by the United Nations' International Labor Organization. All these conditions were made worse by COVID-19, but they could've been seen before the pandemic struck — if only the information hadn't been censored by the corporate media, as Project Censored noted:
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality, or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
The August 2019 GAO report was based on health and retirement surveys conducted by the Social Security Administration in 1992 and 2014, looking at those between 51 and 61 years old in 1992, and dividing them into five wealth quintiles.
"The GAO found that nearly half of those (48 percent) in the poorest quintile died before 2014, when they would have been between 73 and 83 years old. Of the wealthiest quintile, only a quarter (26 percent) died," explained Patrick Martin, writing for the World Socialist Web Site. Death rates increased for each quintile as the level of wealth declined.
It's at the level of cities and communities "that the most striking links between inequality and health can be detected," De Maio wrote. "At the city level, life expectancy varies from a low of 71.4 years in Gary, Indiana, to a high of 84.7 in Newton, Massachusetts — a gap of more than 13 years."
And at the community level, "In Chicago, there is a nine-year gap between the life expectancy for Black and white people. This gap amounts to more than 3,000 'excess deaths'" among Black Chicagoans, due to "heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease. All of these are conditions that an equitable health care system would address," he concluded.
"The poorest Americans are also more likely than their rich counterparts to face illness or premature death due to the inherent dangers of low-wage work," Project Censored noted. "In 2019, you no longer have to hang from scaffolding to risk your life on the job," María José Carmona wrote for Inequality.org. "Precariousness, stress, and overwork can also make you sick, and even kill you, at a much higher rate than accidents."
She reported on an ILO story that found that less than 14 percent of the 7,500 people who die "due to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every day" die from workplace accidents. The greatest risk comes from "increasing pressure, precarious contracts, and working hours incompatible with life, which, bit by bit, continue to feed the invisible accident rate that does not appear in the news," Carmona wrote.
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality, or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
Exposition, political corruption, and conflicts of interest are age-old staples of journalism. So it's notable that two of the most glaring, far-reaching examples of congressional conflicts of interest in the Trump era have been virtually ignored by corporate media: Republicans' support for the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, and bipartisan failure to act on catastrophic climate change.
"The cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings," Peter Cary of the Center for Public Integrity reported for Vox in January 2020.
It was sold as a middle-class tax cut that would benefit everyone. "Promises that the tax act would boost investment have not panned out," he noted. "Corporate investment is now at lower levels than before the act passed, according to the Commerce Department." Once again, "trickle down tax cuts" didn't trickle down.
"The tax law's centerpiece is its record cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35 percent to 21 percent," Cary wrote. "At the time of its passage, most of the bill's Republican supporters said the cut would result in higher wages, factory expansions, and more jobs. Instead, it was mainly exploited by corporations, which bought back stock and raised dividends." Buybacks exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever, the year after the cuts were passed, and dividends topped a record $1.3 trillion high.
Two special features deserve notice. First is a newly created 20% deduction for income from 'pass-through' businesses, or smaller, single-owner corporations. "At least 22 of the 47 members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees have investments in pass-through businesses," Project Censored noted.
Second was a provision allowing real estate companies with relatively few employees to take a 20 percent deduction usually reserved for larger businesses with sizable payrolls. "Out of the 47 Republicans responsible for drafting the bill, at least 29 held real estate interests at the time of its passage," Project Censored pointed out.
As to the second major conflict, "Members of the U.S. Senate are heavily invested in the fossil fuel companies that drive the current climate crisis, creating a conflict between those senators' financial interests as investors and their responsibilities as elected representatives," Project Censored wrote.
"Twenty-nine U.S. senators and their spouses own between $3.5 million and $13.9 million worth of stock in companies that extract, transport, or burn fossil fuels, or provide services to fossil fuel companies," Donald Shaw reported for Sludge in September 2019.
While unsurprising on the Republican side, this also includes two key Democrats. Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, is the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has "up to $310,000 invested in more than a dozen oil, gas, and utility companies, as well as mutual funds with holdings in the fossil fuel industry," Shaw reported. But his record is not nearly as questionable as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who "owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of non-public stock in a family coal business, Enersystems, and reported earning "between $100,001 and $1 million" in reported dividends and interest in 2018, plus $470,000 in 'ordinary business income," Shaw reported.
His support for the industry was significant: Manchin was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling in 2017, and he was one of just three Democrats to vote against an amendment to phase out taxpayer subsidies for coal, oil, and gas producers in 2016.
It's said that an army travels on its stomach, but the Army itself has said, "Fuel is the 'blood of the military,'" as quoted in a study, "Hidden Carbon Costs of the 'Everywhere War,'" by Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, and Cara Kennelly, who subsequently summarized their findings for The Conversation in June 2019.
The U.S. military is "one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries," they wrote. If it were a country, it would rank as "the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world." Studies of greenhouse gas emissions usually focus on civilian use, but the U.S. military has a larger carbon footprint than any civilian corporation in the world.
"The U.S. military's climate policy remains fundamentally contradictory," their study notes. On the one hand, "The U.S. military sees climate change as a 'threat multiplier,' or a condition that will exacerbate other threats, and is fast becoming one of the leading federal agencies in the United States to invest in research and adoption of renewable energy [but] it remains the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, [and] this dependence on fossil fuels is unlikely to change as the USA continues to pursue open-ended operations around the globe."
While the military has invested in developing biofuels, "the entire point of these fuels is that they are 'drop-in' – they can be used in existing military kit – which means that, whenever convenient or cheaper, the infrastructure is already in place to undo whatever marginal gains have been made in decarbonization."
Things will only get worse. "There is no shortage of evidence that the climate is on the brink of irreversible tipping points," the study notes. "Once past those tipping points, the impacts of climate change will continue to be more intense, prolonged, and widespread, giving cover to even more extensive U.S. military interventions."
Understanding the military's climate impact requires a systems approach. "We argue that to account for the U.S. military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon-based fuels possible," the study states. "We show several 'path dependencies' – warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste – that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on carbon-based fuels by the U.S. military for years to come."
Data for their study was difficult to get. "A loophole in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol exempted the United States from reporting military emissions," Project Censored explains. "Although the Paris Accord closed this loophole, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger noted that, 'with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap ... will return.'" They only obtained fuel purchase data through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.
Finally, by way of conclusions, Project Censored stated: Noting that "action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine," Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger recommended that "money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire" be reinvested as "a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take." Not surprisingly, the report had received "little to no corporate news coverage" as of May 2020, beyond scattered republication of their Conversation piece.
In its fight to avoid liability for causing cancer, the agricultural giant Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) created an "intelligence fusion center" to "monitor and discredit" journalists and activists, Sam Levin reported for The Guardian in August 2019. "More than 18,000 people have filed suit against Monsanto, alleging that exposure to Roundup [weed killer] caused non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and that Monsanto covered up the risks by manipulating scientific data and silencing critics," The Hill summarized. "The company has lost three high-profile cases in the past year, and Bayer is reportedly offering $8 billion to settle all outstanding claims."
"Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company's weed killer," The Guardian reported.
This took place while also targeting Neil Young (who released a 2015 record, The Monsanto Years), and creating a massive, multimillion dollar spying and disinformation campaign targeting journalists writing about it, as well as scientists and advocates exposing the risks its product posed. Creating a covert army of seemingly neutral allies to attack its critics was central to Monsanto's strategy.
The Guardian's report was based on internal documents (primarily from 2015 to 2017) released during trial. They showed that "Monsanto planned a series of 'actions' to attack a book authored by Gillam prior to its release, including writing 'talking points' for 'third parties' to criticize the book and directing 'industry and farmer customers' on how to post negative reviews."
In addition, Monsanto paid Google to skew search results promoting criticism of Gillam's work on Monsanto, and they discussed strategies for pressuring Reuters with the goal of getting her reassigned. The company "had a 'Carey Gillam Book' spreadsheet, with more than 20 actions dedicated to opposing her book before its publication." They also "wrote a lengthy report about singer Neil Young's anti-Monsanto advocacy, monitoring his impact on social media, and at one point considering 'legal action.'"
The entire pool of journalists covering the third trial was also targeted in a covert influence operation, Paul Thacker reported for The Huffington Post. A purported "freelancer for the BBC" schmoozed other reporters, trying to steer them toward writing stories critical of the plaintiffs suing Monsanto. Their curiosity aroused, they discovered that "her LinkedIn account said she worked for FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm that Monsanto and Bayer, Monsanto's parent company, had engaged for consulting," and she subsequently went into a digital disappearing act.
"Monsanto has also previously employed shadowy networks of consultants, PR firms, and front groups to spy on and influence reporters," Thacker wrote. "And all of it appears to be part of a pattern at the company of using a variety of tactics to intimidate, mislead and discredit journalists and critics."
"Monsanto officials were repeatedly worried about the release of documents on their financial relationships with scientists that could support the allegations they were 'covering up unflattering research," The Guardian noted. At the same time, they tried to attack critics as "anti-science."
"In June 2019 the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report, which received widespread news coverage in the United States," Project Censored notes. "U.S. corporate news outlets have provided nearly nothing in the way of reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States."
That's despite a problem of similar dimensions, and complexity, along with the election of the first two Native American congresswomen, Deb Holland and Sharice Davids, who, Ms. Magazine reported, "are supporting two bills that would address the federal government's failure to track and respond to violence against indigenous women [and] are supported by a mass movement in the U.S. and Canada raising an alarm about missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (MMIWG)."
Four in five Native women experience violence at some time in their lives, according to a 2016 survey by the National Institute of Justice, cited in an August 2019 ThinkProgress report. "About nine in 10 Native American rape or sexual-assault victims had assailants who were white or Black," according to a 1999 Justice Department report.
"Although the number of Native Americans murdered or missing in 2016 exceeded 3,000 — roughly the number of people who died during the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack — the Justice Department's missing persons database logged only 116 cases that year," ThinkProgress noted. "The sheer scale of the violence against Native women and the abysmal failure by the government to adequately address it, explains why the issue was given such prominence during this week's presidential candidates' forum in Sioux City — the first to focus entirely on Native American issues."
But even that didn't grab the media's attention. There are multiple complicating factors in reporting, tracking, investigating, and prosecuting, which were explored in coverage by The Guardian and YES! Magazine, as well as Ms. and ThinkProgress.
"Campaigners, including the Sovereign Bodies Institute, the Brave Heart Society, and the Urban Indian Health Institute, identify aspects of systemic racism — including the indelible legacies of settler colonialism, issues with law enforcement, a lack of reliable and comprehensive data, and flawed policymaking — as deep-rooted sources of the crisis," Project Censored summed up.
"As YES! Magazine reported, tribal communities in the United States often lack jurisdiction to respond to crimes." This was partially remedied in the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, known as VAWA, but "it left sex trafficking and other forms of sexual violence outside tribal jurisdiction, YES! Magazine reported."
The House voted to expand tribal jurisdiction in such cases in its 2019 VAWA reauthorization, but, Ms. reported, "The bill is now languishing in the Senate, where Republicans have so far blocked a vote."
Another facet of the problem explored by YES! is the connection between the extractive fossil fuel industry and violence against Native women. The Canadian report "showed a strong link between extraction zones on the missing and murdered women crisis in Canada," YES! noted. "It specifically cited rotational shift work, sexual harassment in the workplace, substance abuse, economic insecurity, and a largely transient workforce as contributing to increased violence against Native women in communities near fossil fuel infrastructure."
"It creates this culture of using and abuse," said Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute. "If you can use and abuse the water and land, you can use and abuse the people around you too."
Project Censored concluded, "As a result of limited news coverage, the United States is far from a national reckoning on its crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls."
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Mar 11, 2021
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