Why are certain stories effectively out of sight and out of mind? Project Censored has made a list of the 25 most ignored continuing news stories of 2007.
Here’s top ten:
- #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
All those are stories that have been covered by blogs, specifically left-wing and liberal blogs : just check our archive on the right side of the page. If we haven’t written about it ourselves, we’ve linked to someone who has.
But is there some grand, deliberate conspiracy by the mainstream media to censor specificstories, a global D-notice on certain lines of enquiry? Is there a concerted political strategy behind it?
I doubt it. I think it’s more a case of venal ndividuals, global markets and whether a story is financially or politically inconvenient for whichever corporate behemoth owns the channel or paper at any given time. Got money in metals? Genocide in the Congo? Shh, it’ll affect the market.
An inconvenient story may a get a mention, so they can say it wasn’t actually physically censored, but it’ll be on the back pages, buried among the classifieds, or on an obscure backwater of the online version.
Individuals working in the media may not intend individually (Heaven forbid! 1st Amendment! Sacred! Waah!) to commit censorship, but with the editorial decisions they make that is exactly what they’re doing – it isn’t overt conspiracy, it’s evolving from the reiteration of thousands of little decisions made because somone wants to suck up to their asshole boss, who also wants to suck up to their asshole boss who also wants…. they all have an asshole boss. There’s a positive multiplicty of asshole bosses, it’s asshole bosses all the way down up. It’s that reiteration thing again. But is there one criminal mastermind orchestrating it all in secret? Naaah.
I think that if I had to pick one proximate cause, I’d say that mostly it’s because there’s a generation of ill-educated, greedy thickos inhabiting the US media who wouldn’t know a news story if it bit them on the ass and who have no reason whatsoever to even try. Like Presidentin’, reportin’ is just too damned hard.
Moreover in the case of the Washington media, most of them are still mentally in high school too – they’re all wetting their pants at proximity to power. No-one in the media wants to be the unpopular one who farted at the like, rilly cool party.
