Top 25 Censored News Stories in the US Media

Project Censored is a Sonoma University-based initiative currently in its thirty-first year. Each year, it selects twenty-five stories from hundreds of possible candidates which did not make it into the mainstream media. The selection criteria is based on their relevance to American public and their implications at home and abroad. By publishing these stories, the project aims to give them 'the light of day they might otherwise never have seen.'

Project Censored 2007: Top 25 Censored News Stories Covering the Years 2005-06

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

For censored news covering the years 2006-2007, see here.

As to what may explain this censorship, the book "Manufacturing Consent" (1988) by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky may be a good place to start (here and here). To these authors, the mechanism of media (self) censorship, that is, the question of 'how' it happens, automatically or otherwise, could be explained through the logic of free market capitalism. Media groups work like corporations. The survival of the fittest is the rule in a free, competitive capitalist market where your profits determine your success. And if that means compromising on quality and integrity, so be it. The logic of the free market also dictates that the media corporations grow larger and eat up their rivals by either buying them out or outperforming them before their counterparts could do the same to them. This environment makes it very difficult for small, independent media outlets to survive. Over time, in the US, this market logic has resulted in a relatively concentrated network of major conglomerates and corporations (here). They standardized news, they set the agenda, their profit interests filter what gets on air and what does not. And, it is through this mechanism, media censorship happens. But more than that, the media actively constructs or 'manufactures' public apathy and/or 'consent'.

According to the two authors, there are five filters that determine what gets on the air. The filters explain the mechanism, of how media censorship happens in a systematic and automatic fashion in an otherwise varied groups of news outlets. They are a) Ownership of media, b) Funding sources, such as advertisments, c) Sourcing of news, d) Flak or negative responses to media content, from various groups and think tanks, e) Anti-ideologies, such as anti-communism, anti-terrorism.

I can't do justice to their argument in this limited space. But I hope you found this (rough) introduction helpful. Read more about the media filters here. Also check out Agenda-Setting and Framing theories on mass media.

Watch Chomsky elaborating on agenda-setting, on media selling audience to other corporations, on media coverage of the US war on Vietnam, and more, here. An interesting point he makes toward the end of the first clip is that George Orwell, the author of the famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, thought that his ideas in these novels about the control of knowledge, propaganda, and totalitarianism could as well apply to democratic systems.

Soccer Hijabs

Yet another incidence of hijab discrimination, this time the story comes from the US. See the news coverage here, here, here.

See my thoughts on this issue here and here.

Those interested in doing academic study of this issue may like to note that the countries I mention in these previous posts have their own local and national dynamics and histories of politics. Yet they all seem to discriminate the hijab using the same liberal political principles. It is this commonality in the liberal-secular framework of politics existing in all these countries that makes their comparison methodologically possible. And by extension, making broader, critical statements about the "West" possible while avoiding false essentializations. The comparisons in some studies could be just about discerning the differences and similarities in the operations and forms of power and discrimination among these countries on the hijab issue.

While we are at it, I recommend watching this 8-min, short Spanish film, 'Hijab in Europe,' by Xavi Sala. The film exposes the hypocrisy and shallowness of the anti-hijab, anti-muslim politics.

The Poor and Hungry

The photograph showing a starving Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture won Kevin Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.

The photo depicts a famine stricken girl collapsing on the way to a United Nations food camp, located a kilometer away. The vulture is waiting for the child to die so it can eat it. This picture shocked the world. No one knows what happened to the child.

Three months later Kevin Carter committed suicide due to depression.

My friends, let this not come to you as a surprise. This is the reality we are living in where it is 'estimated that one billion people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition. That's roughly 100 times as many as those who actually die from these causes each year. About 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger related causes... Three-fourths of the deaths are children under the age of five.'

How you can help:

Don't waste natural resources. Be thankful to God for His gifts and blessings. Be mindful of your responsibility toward other human beings. Think about what the Prophet (saws) would do. Have mercy and compassion toward all humankind. Next time you spend money on those unnecessary luxuries of your life, think for a moment about the plight of the poor and oppressed children around the world. Be aware of the materialistic forces and the contradictions of the dominant economic systems that are at the roots of global inequality (here). Don't become a part of this system. Don't become a slave of consumerism and endless materialistic competition.

Among other things, join a local organization that is working against subtle forms of oppression, like hunger, poverty, illiteracy, domestic violence, anorexia and bulimia, perfect body images, and endless materialistic competition. If there isn't any, start one today! Check out matteela's following production for ideas about how to create social awareness: Ye Bacha (a poem by Ibn Insha, on the wretched conditions of the poor children and class disparities, illustrated in the context of Pakistan. Urdu with English subtitles).

You can also look into doing online activism. Check out moveon.org’s work for ideas. Some online organizations also invite web surfers to click on their sites regularly. They say every click earns them revenue to support their causes. The Hunger Site is an example. Some may also invite you to buy their T-shirts and other souvenirs. I guess, you can buy these items if you think they can help spread the word and encourage people to join a good cause. Otherwise, in general, more shopping and more consumption cannot be a solution to human suffering. And I don’t like the idea of selling consumers to products through clicks or ads. That feeds into the same loop of consumerism. My suggestion: Donate directly! And, encourage others to do the same!

Lastly, remember the advice Imam Ali gave in his Last Will:

"My advice to you is to be conscious of Allah and steadfast in your religion. Do not yearn for the world, and do not be seduced by it. Do not resent anything you have missed in it. Proclaim the truth; work for the next world. Oppose the oppressor and support the oppressed."

Become a friend and supporter of the oppressed people and an enemy of the oppressors and all forms of oppression.

"Iraq in Fragments": A Critical Review

Speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies and media images (see the previous post), have you seen this recent documentary called “Iraq in Fragments” directed by James Longley? (here)

Apparently, it has won tons of awards in the Sundance Film Festival and was also nominated for the Oscars. It was screened all across North America between November 2006 and April 2007. A few of us watched it last year. My immediate impression was: DISAPPOINTING - to put it politely. I jotted down below thoughts afterwards and shared them with a few friends.

Longley spent over two years in Iraq from 2003 for this documentary. He used the everyday, lived experiences of Iraqi people as a lens to tell a bigger story of the politics and experiences of factionalism in Iraq. The idea was great and the resources he had access to could have helped him knit an intricate and complex portrayal of the ground reality. Like it is in reality. But, that did not happen in this documentary.

The documentary focused on the obvious three communities in Iraq – the Sunnis, the Shias, and the Kurds – and how their 'differences' - political and to a lesser extent ideological - are disparately opposite and irreconcilable. No mention of commonalities among them - like shared culture and religion, and intermarriages, friendships, and tribal relations - that cut across these factional lines, which are widespread in that society according to many scholarly studies.
A logical question that may come to any critical mind is that if it's that bad, then how did these communities put up with each other over such a long history? Why did it become so bad recently? We get no answer to these questions. The documentary made no attempt at presenting the current escalation of violence in its political and historical context. Consequently, an uninitiated viewer only gets an essentialized image of the ‘differences’ that appear as irreconcilable among these three communities.

For the Kurdish and Sunni cases, the documentary focused on the lives of young boys and people surrounding them. You see innocence, suffering, feelings, emotions that are real and that any viewer can relate with. But in the Shia case, the focus was instead on a leader of a militia, his ideological views, rhetoric, leadership, etc. How are all these experiences comparable in the first place? Moreover, we see no representation of female experiences in the current turmoil. Such an imbalanced portrayal furthers the differences in the minds of the viewers and presents a division of Iraq as the only ‘natural’ solution.

A friend, who was with me at the screening, drew my attention toward an underlying and very subtle depiction of hypocrisy in all three stories in the documentary. The documentary seem to depict that what the adult say and what they actually want are two different things. It reminded me of the imagery of 'cunning' Arabs that cannot be 'trusted' which runs deep into the Orientalist discourse (remember the movie, "Lawrence of Arabia"). I thought that was an interesting observation.

I cannot help but think that this documentary was made with a specific kind of anti-war argument in mind: Iraq is a mess now; it may have been in a better state before we got in. The people are messed up, you cannot solve their ideological and political differences, they would keep fighting with each other. The best option for us is to get out as soon as possible. The reification of 'fragments' serves well for this argument.

Here is the screening schedule, fyi.

PS. I shared the above thoughts with a few friends. One friend wrote back with some insightful thoughts. Below, I copy a couple of points from my response to that feedback.

- My primary concern was about the simplistic portrayal of reality and the reification of identities in this documentary. I suspect that it is produced for the consumption of a specific kind of anti-war argument. This portrayal could also contribute to a policy consensus on the division-of-Iraq solution, although I don't think this was Longley's intention or his personal politics. But it works to that effect, in my opinion. My general argument is that no depiction of Iraqi reality in the US is without consequences on the future of Iraq. It would be too naive on the part of the director to simply think of portraying the reality with 'objectivity' and no concern for the political consequences. I don't think he is that naive. And I think that these kinds of documentaries, columns, blogs on Iraq all have profound effect on policy and politics.

- On my friend's point about the passive form of documentary structure, which avoids the issue of causal connection; that is, who is responsible. My comment: Reality is much more complex than the simplistic three categories Longley presents in his documentary. His documentary starts with a Sunni in Baghdad expressing that they were better off under Saddam. A particular kind of focus on a specific Shia Militia (them beating up people who sold alcohol; their militant might; how they want to control the country using the channel of elections) in the second section, following the Sunni case, would automatically make the viewer think that Shias have replaced the previous dictatorship. They are the new dictators now (something the an American-Muslim scholar recently claimed on his blog, calling the top religious authority in Iraq a new dictator after Saddam). True, Longley does not venture into tracing the cause-effect, i.e. who is responsible, what is the political and the historical context. But the structure of this documentary and its content inevitably leads an uninitiated viewer into make these causal connections, if un-intentionally. Documentary is a form of art, and art touches hearts and minds at a deeper level.

The simplistic causal connection that's coming off at the moment could be averted even in the passive documentary form, by presenting the complexity, the confusion, the contradictions, which is what the ground reality is. Why does the portrayal have to be in the neat, simplistic three categories? Does Saddam or ex-baathist represent all Sunnis and a particular Militia all Shias?

If Longley's aim was to present 'the other side of the story' or the 'actual experiences of people' or 'through the lens of their experiences a larger story', I don't think he did a good job at any of these. Hence, my disappointment.

Iraq in Fragments: A Self-fulfilling Prophecy?

The US Senate recently voted for a soft partition of Iraq. This was an unbinding resolution to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines into three federal governments. One wonders, who gave them to right to talk about dividing Iraq in the first place?! Who are they to decide the future of the Iraqi people? The US is part of the problem, not solution. As Juan Cole rightly says in his recent blog entry, "First they messed up Iraq by authorizing Terrible George to blow it up, now they want to further mess it up by dividing it. It makes no sense..." It seems to me that those in the US Senate are following a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, a false understanding or prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true.

Here is how a false understanding is fulfilling itself in the Iraqi case: You are a typical senator. You rely mostly on your staffers and mainstream media to learn about matters pertaining to foreign policy. Especially when you are not part of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Even when you are, you obviously don't have time to read the core scholarly research on all international conflicts and different regions by yourself. So you prefer to get a simplified, straightforward, summarized view of each issue and each region, including Iraq. But you start off wrongly, as in your quest for simplified understanding, you perceive the Iraqi society as fundamentally divided into three neat categories: the Shias, the Sunnis, and the Kurds. These people fall neatly into these 'distinct' categories in your imagination with clearly discernable 'differences' in beliefs, attitudes, dialects, cultures, life preferences, etc. There is not much fluidity or overlap among these identities. Further, you perceive these groups in existential opposition to each other: they hate each other, they do not want to live together, otherwise, how can you understand the current conflict. That they only needed a catalyst, such as a sudden break up of the political status quo and state structure, to start killing each other. In this simplified understanding, the policies of divide-and-rule of the current administration, such as the "The Redirection" (here) or "Shifting Targets" (here, both articles by Seymour Hersh), are supposed to have no effect in politicizing and transforming sectarian relations. As if politics had no role in generating hatred among these groups in Iraq. In this understanding, politics matters not as much as the supposedly primordial differences between Sunnis and Shias do. You see the people and their identities not in their complex social reality, rather, in simplistic categories that can help you make voting decisions, or at least, justify your voting track. This simplified image is very far from the ground reality, but you think that it is the truth.

The result: a) You neglect the role of politics, and consequently, the possibility of finding solution through politics. That is, through talks, through negotiations, through trust building, through just solutions. b) You miss the possibility of finding solutions in the common cultural resources, in the commonality of religion among the Iraqi groups, in their shared culture and history. Hence, you end up suggesting the old colonial solution of dividing up people through territorial boundaries. And how do you validate it? With a justification like this: ‘because they were divided in the first place, hence the divide-up solution.’ You justify and validate this logic by referring to none other than the logic itself. Talk about tautological reasoning! How a false perception is causing itself to become true!!

How should we perceive Iraq then? I refer the readers to an earlier post where I shared similar concerns. There I pointed out the dangers of focusing only on the ‘differences,’ and I stressed that we should not overlook the common cultural and religious factors that bind the Iraqi society together (See here).

It is so terrible to see that the public is also buying into this distorted imagery, this wrong portrayal of the Iraqi social reality. Even some Muslims, outside of Iraq, who are deeply saddened by the violence and bloodshed, have also started to see the division as the best solution. This is the power of media. It effectively distributes the public opinion messages, which reproduce themselves in the minds of the general public. Through these messages, these perceptions, these lens, the general audience interprets the news about Iraq and would judge political solutions like the division of Iraq. It is through this combined role of policy making (power) and media (knowledge) that the self-fulfilling prophecy about Iraq is materializing itself.

Another example of such this self-fulfilling prophecy can be found in the “clash of civilizations” theory by Samuel Huntington, which for many people has become the standard examining glass to interpret terrorism and the war on terror. (See its criticism here.)

In my next post, I want to look at James Longley's documentary, "Iraq in Fragments" (see image). This documentary is a good illustration of the concerns I share above.