Project Censored

Project Censored

Type	Non-Profit
Location	Rohnert Park, California, USA
Key people	Mickey Huff Director
Method	Journalism and Media
Motto	The News That Didn't Make the News.
Website	www.projectcensored.org

Project Censored is a non-profit, media criticism and investigative journalism project within the Sonoma State University Foundation. It is managed through the School of Social Sciences at the university.

According to the Project Censored official website, the organization describes itself as a media research group that "tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters. From these, Project Censored compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major national news media."

Project function

Project Censored identifies and researches news stories which it believes have been underreported, mis-reported, or censored in the mainstream media. With this research, the group aims to advocate the protection of the First Amendment rights granted by the United States Constitution and freedom of information within the United States of America. The project is built around the "Sociology 435: Media Censorship" course based at the university. This course requires long hours of researching library databases. Each student is invited to develop skills of finding and researching such news stories and make full use of them for the purpose of conducting coverage reports on more than 200 under-published stories yearly. One of the goals of the project is to encourage the development of a national interconnected community-based media news service that will offer a "diversity" of news and information to local mainstream audiences through various media. Support and encouragement is provided to journalists, faculty, and student investigation of the principle objectives as stated above.

According to the group, a story covered by Project Censored should:

1. contain information that the general population has a right and a need to know, but to which it has limited access.
2. be timely, ongoing, and have implications for a significant number of residents of the United States of America.
3. have clearly defined concepts and be backed with solid verifiable documentation.
4. have been published electronically or in print, in a circulated newspaper, journal, magazine, newsletter, or similar publication by a foreign or domestic source.
5. have direct connections and implications for people within the United States of America, possibly including activities US citizens are engaged in abroad.

To date, the participants number nearly 200 and include the program staff of the School of Social Sciences at Sonoma State University, its students, its faculty, research interns, community experts, funders, and volunteer judges. Major sources of funding are provided by hundreds of individual donors, Working Assets, Anita Roddick, and The Body Shop International, as well as the Office of the President, the Office of the Provost, and the School of Social Science at Sonoma State University.

Project Censored was founded in 1976 by journalism professor Carl Jensen. He retired in 1996, and from 1996 through summer 2009 the project was directed by sociology professor Peter Phillips. Phillips continues in a supportive role as president of the Media Freedom Foundation.

Published works

Since 1993 Project Censored has published an annual trade paperback review of the “Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year.” Features of the book include Junk Food News, comic strips by Tom Tomorrow, updates on previous top stories, essays, and interviews. The publisher is Seven Stories Press in New York. Other projects include For the Record, a weekly radio program featuring underpublished stories, hosted by Pat Thurston.

Perception

Political affiliation

Although the group never explicitly takes a political stance, a majority of the stories Project Censored highlights have a leftist political slant, criticizing big business, economic inequality, the Pentagon, damage to the environment, and misdeeds of conservative politicians, among other progressive issues; at least 20 of the "Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007" could be classified in one of these categories. Moreover, Project Censored has had several well-known progressive journalists and academics on its panel of national judges, including Robert Jensen, Martin A. Lee, Michael Parenti, and Norman Solomon without any corresponding number of conservatives. In response, Project Censored's Associate Director Mark Lowenthal stated that conservatives had been invited to serve as judges each year, but have largely refused; that such right-wing topics as criticism of "big government" have been well publicized by Republicans in Congress and covered by the corporate-owned media, and so do not qualify as under-reported; and that Project Censored has in fact featured stories from The Spotlight, a now-defunct fringe newspaper that the Project characterized as far-right-wing.

Praise

Walter Cronkite, a veteran broadcast journalist, has stated that "Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism."

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle written by an author with self-described liberal views defended Project Censored's bias, saying that from their perspective, "any bias in the upper echelons of journalism looks to be skewed toward established political, economic and social power bases."

Criticism

The founder of the progressive news analysis and commentary website AlterNet criticized Project Censored as "stuck in the past" with a "dubious selection process" that "reinforces self-marginalizing, defeatist behavior." It has also been criticized for reporting on stories which are arguably not "under-reported" or "censored" at all, as they have sometimes appeared in The New York Times and other high-profile publications.

Some of these claims come from other progressive publications, such as AlterNet, Mother Jones and New Politics that are concerned that the Project's alleged mis-reporting will give the progressive movement and its alternative media less credibility. For example, Project Censored has been criticized for consistently downplaying Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, for exaggerating the dangers of the Cassini-Huygens space probe to Saturn, and for giving support to 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Two progressives, professor Robert Jensen and journalist Norman Solomon, resigned from Project Censored's panel of national judges over the decision to highlight the 9/11 conspiracy theories of Steven E. Jones, a founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, in Censored 2007.

In a debate with Project Censored's Associate Director Mark Lowenthal, Jack Shafer wrote that Project Censored had "an overbearing left-wing bias -- a fact belied by its refusal to review stories from the right-wing or conservative press, the openly partisan nature of the stories that are selected and the leftist panel of judges who help select them."

Controversy Due to Censorship of Project Censored

The project has come under scrutiny since it was announced that it was briefly at risk of being censored to prevent all mention of 9/11 Truth research by the organization that had printed its annual report, called Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank. This was covered by KPFA Guns and Butter as well as^{[citation needed]} Project Censored itself.

List of winners of Project Censored awards

• Joel Bleifuss
• Lisa Gale Garrigues, 2004
• Dave Lindorff, 2004
• Rock Creek Free Press, 2008

External links

• Project Censored Official website
• A Project Censored archive - Censored US Foreign Policy News Stories 1976-2005
• Dog Bites: Project Censored - parody and criticism of the Project by the SF Weekly.
• Project Censored 1967-2007 Index and Archive
• Project Censored 1967-2007 TOC and Archive