Twenty Years of Unfit-to-Print News

With this convergence acting as something of a socio-political catalyst, the themes of this era seemed to shift from "trust" and "conformity" to skepticism and independence -- almost as if the anti-authoritarian buzz of the counter-culture 60's had finally reared its head in mainstream politics and culture.

The result of this convergence was a brief, but significant period of citizen-activism -- perhaps, a fitting bicentennial tribute to the essence of democracy.

It was this era that saw Ralph Nader's consumer movement driving the passage of unprecedented consumer-protection legislation, Senator Church's committee hearings, that for the first time in history, began to unveil the clandestine activities -- and utter lack of public accountability of the intelligence community, and the first tangible, legislative impacts of the emerging environmental and women's movement, among others.

This consciousness was even present in popular culture, with All the President's Men (which depicted the breaking of the Watergate scandal) becoming the highest-grossing movie of the year, and Network, Paddy Chayefsky's biting and prescient indictment of the television news industry, was also doing big box office and garnering four Academy Awards.

It was also during this year that a sociology professor at Sonoma State College in Rohnert Park, California, conceived a research project which would explore the extent to which major mainstream media limit the range of subject matter that is relayed to the general public.

Jensen was so intrigued by what he discovered, that he decided to publish his research and institutionalize it as an on-going, year-round research project, which he dubbed "Project Censored."

Without question, the Project faced an uphill battle from the start. Aside from the major media hostility that greeted the annual release of "The Top 10 Best Censored Stories of the Year," many of Jensen's colleagues argued that "self-censorship" was not a legitimate form of censorship -- and even friends and supporters fretted about the viability of a project that criticized the press, yet relied on that same press to cover its annual report.

Fast forward to 1996. Project Censored has just released its twentieth annual "Top 10 Best Censored Stories" list and Carl Jensen, set to retire this June after two decades of media watch-dogging, enjoys the proverbial last laugh.

Having myself enjoyed a seven-year affiliation with Project Censored (I am currently the associate director), it has been especially gratifying to share that laugh.

As grand as it may sound, in twenty years Project Censored has changed the way in which journalism is taught, the way the public perceives the news that it consumes, and the way that journalists view the nature of their profession.

Over its twenty-year life span Project Censored has amassed a huge following among private citizens. Given the limited range of mainstream coverage we receive, a large percentage of our following is the result of "word-of-mouth" endorsement -- which is perhaps the most gratifying aspect of our work.

Each year we receive literally thousands of letters and phone calls from interested private citizens who are looking for information on a specific topic, or simply want to find out what's been missing from the mainstream medias' coverage spectrum. This latter point is worth emphasizing, as one of the Project's ongoing goals is to lead media consumers to question why many of the cited stories haven't received wide mainstream coverage. It is our hope that such broader implied questions might cause the public to question some of their most basic assumptions about the nature of corporate-owned news media.

By virtue of its longevity, Project Censored has also become something of an annual "wake-up call" for working journalists. Not only are most mainstream journalists aware of the Project's work, many have become more vocally (albeit privately) appreciative. During the regular conversations that I've had with working journalists over the past several years, it has become clear that the problem of self-censorship -- and overt censorship -- has become very real for many of them. These are, largely speaking, good people caught in a bad system -- and there seems to be an increasing awareness that the walls of editorial freedom are closing in. In a sense, the work of Project Censored seems to validate working reporters' growing feelings of anxiety about their profession.

So with that bit of self-congratulatory historical perspective out of the way, I give you: