Censored 2004: the Top 25 Censored Stories
By Peter Phillips and Project Censored
Seven Stories Press, 2003
367 pages, $36 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
On February 5, 2003, the day US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his case for war against Iraq at the United Nations, UN officials covered up the painting that hangs at the entrance to the Security Council building, a reproduction of Guernica, Pablo Picasso's famous painting that protests the terror of war. The US government's ability to cover up the horror of war on canvas was a symbolic tribute to the lies, public relations spin and censorship that accompanied the US-led war against Iraq.
In the weeks before and after Powell's war sales pitch at the UN, when a majority of Americans opposed the war, the prime-time evening news slots of the four major US television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS) conducted 393 interviews on the pending war — only three (less than 1%) of those people interviewed were opposed to the war. The majority of anti-war Americans, report the authors of Censored 2004, were not the "silent majority" but the "silenced majority". Their views were treated with the same censoring arrogance that was shown to Picasso's Guernica.
Project Censored's annual report on the top 25 stories most ignored by the corporate media in the US from April 2002 to March 2003 focuses heavily on the lies told and the truths untold about the war against Iraq and reassertive US global ambitions.
Project Censored operates from the Department of Sociology at Sonoma State University, California. Its purpose is critical media analysis. Project Censored reviewed hundreds of the important stories written by independent journalists, published in the alternative media and loftily ignored by the corporate media.
The most censored stories included the neo-conservative plan for global US dominance, nurtured for more than 30 years by neo-cons like current US vice-president Dick Cheney and US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The war against Iraq, so crucial to the neo-cons' designs, had its quota of censored stories, from the slaughter of Iraqis to the US attempt to remove 8000 pages from Iraq's 11,800-page report on its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, which was presented to the UN in Winter 2002. These pages implicated 24 US corporations in the US government-approved illegal supply of WMD "dual-use" materials to Iraq when Saddam Hussein was a US ally during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior.
Also covered up were the health effects of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, classified by the UN as WMDs. US soldiers were among the victims of DU, while the Iraqi people have now been "liberated" to live in a radioactive battlefield, counting down the DU half-life of 4 billion years.
"Too controversial" was the response of corporate media editors unwilling to criticise the Pentagon during the war.
Other war stories deemed unfit for public eyes included war profiteering by major US corporations in post-Hussein Iraq, the US role in war atrocities in Afghanistan and the US military as holder of the title of world's largest toxic polluter (ably assisted by exemptions from environmental law by George W. Bush).
War abroad has its twin in war at home. The attack on civil liberties since 9/11, through the Department of Homeland Security and the USAPATRIOT Act, has also been red-inked. The war against trade unions continued on its profit-hungry but unpublicised way under Bush, who in two years blocked more strikes than any other president before him.
Stories which departed from the script of the US as upholder of international law against "rogue states" were also consigned to the memory hole. While demanding that other countries comply with the international legal framework (for example, North Korea and Iran on nuclear weapons), the Bush administration has spurned, violated or subverted nine international treaties, including on nuclear weapons, landmines, the International Criminal Court, global warming and biological weapons.
US silence on, and complicity with, the Israeli state in its illegal and brutal occupation of Palestine was prime censorship material, as were the clandestine affairs of the CIA, which was up to its old dirty tricks in the short-lived military coup against the Hugo Chavez's radical government in Venezuela in April 2002.
Rounding out the forbidden stories were the neoliberal, market-driven campaigns of privatisation and deregulation, anti-welfare "welfare reform", the vendetta against refugees from war-torn and poverty-stricken countries (in which Prime Minister John Howard's government gets a particular mention for making Australia the "poster-child for barbarism") and the US government's awarding of lucrative contracts to dozens of companies repeatedly cited (and lightly "punished") for workplace and environmental law violations (including General Electric's pocketing US$9.8 billion in government contracts, while fined an almost invisible $370,000 for serious pollution offences).
There was no shortage of "acceptable" news, however, and the corporate media coverage of the war against Iraq showed how entertainment, excitement and patriotism could pass for news while masking the reality that the essence of war is death. Sanitised television images blacked out the shredded flesh from cluster bombs as the new "PC" ("Pentagon Correctness") defined the boundaries of appropriate empathy and moral concern — faraway people dying in their thousands in an illegal war were of no concern; the relatively few deaths of US military personnel were worthy of grief.
"Militainment" provided the requisite mix of heroism, patriotism and indignation necessary to buoy public support for the US-led invasion.
The "saving" of Private Jessica Lynch was one of the more stunning examples of news management, in which the Pentagon-staged action drama reached heights of Hollywood flair. A corporate media hungry for propaganda swallowed whole the "rescue" of a telegenic soldier, not, as it turned out, from fierce Baathist forces (who had fled the city of Nasiriyah earlier) but from Iraqi doctors who had carefully tended Lynch's wounds (sustained not from the guns and knives of Iraqi forces but when her vehicle overturned) and who had earlier attempted to return her to a US outpost but were fired on and forced to return to the hospital. There they waited for the script that the Pentagon spin-doctors had ordered to be played out.
As well as Hollywood heroics and scary stories of WMDs, there was plenty to divert our attention from government and corporate crimes and greed, and Censored 2004 includes a top-10 list of "junk news" stories from the realms of voyeuristic celebrity gossip and reality TV hype — American Idol, the Osbournes, J. Lo (Jennifer Lopez), Survivor and The Bachelor doing well in the frivolous filler stakes.
Reflecting on the "fine art of evasion" by the corporate media on ruling-class economic and political power, the Censored 2004's authors analyse the motives and processes for protecting power from critical scrutiny. Corporate influence is so widespread and internalised by media owners and their servile staff, says Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, that direct exertion of corporate power over the media is rare. Corporate media are corporate, after all, and they share the bonds of class with their big advertisers and business partners, ideologically trumpeting the "virtues" of their shared capitalist system.
Any journalist who steps out of the corporate-government line is soon "re-assigned" or fired, ensuring that the remaining pool of "independent truth-seekers" happily rely on Pentagon briefings, government press releases and corporate PR flunkies. Should anything survive the self-censorship, there are "rows of news-story reviewers at headquarters to rewrite, soften or spike stories from the field" that may contain any truth germs.
Censored 2004 is probably one of the few places that 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly (Rohan Pearce on the human toll of the Iraqi civilian dead) and Hustler magazine (on depleted uranium) are cited approvingly for truth-telling within the covers of the one book.
That it is left, apart from the socialist press, to a porn magazine to carry the baton of serious critical reporting shows up the near absolute timidity and orthodox groupthink of the corporate media for which self-censorship is as natural as making money.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 28, 2004.
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