The Billionaire’s Press Dominates Censorship Beat
Project Censored’s Top 10 Stories Show Just One Pattern Dominating All Others This Year
Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories — like Watergate before the 1972 election — that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense, but in a broader, expanded sense reflective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship defined as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method — including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship — that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment: Without the free flow of vital information, government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.
Yet, from the very beginning, as A.J. Liebling put it, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
In their introduction to Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press, which contains its top censored stories and much more, Project Censored’s Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth take this condition head-on, under the heading, State of the Free Billionaire, in contrast to the volume’s title, State of the Free Press 2023. Following a swift recap of historic media criticism highlights — Upton Sinclair, the aforementioned Leibling, Ben Bagdikian, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky — they dryly observe, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite owners, seldom serves the public interest,” and briefly survey the contemporary landscape before narrowing their gaze to the broadest of influencers:
Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs — Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet).
Obviously, this was written before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, but it’s an apt reminder that his wildly out-of-touch worldview is not just an individual, personal aberration, but also a symptom of wider systemic dysfunction.
“In pursuit of their own interests and investments, media tycoons past and present, again and again, appear to be conveniently oblivious to the main frame through which they filter news — that of class, including class structure and class interests,” Huff and Roth write. “Consequently, they often overlook (or ignore) conflicts of interest that implicate media owners, funders, investors, and advertisers, not to mention their business clients on Wall Street and in Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the military–industrial complex.”
This observation perfectly frames the majority of stories in Project Censored’s top 10 list, starting with the first two stories: massive subsidies of the fossil fuel industry and rampant wage theft — concentrated on the most vulnerable workers — that eclipse street crime in the magnitude of losses, but is rarely punished, even when offenders are caught dead to rights. It echoes clearly through the stories on congress members’ investments in the fossil fuel industry, the role of corporate consolidation in driving up inflation in food prices, Bill Gates’ hidden influence on journalism, and major media outlets lobbying against regulation of surreptitious online advertising, and only at slight remove in two others having to do with dark money, and one about the suppression of Environmental Protection Agency reports on dangerous chemicals. Indeed, only one story out of 10 is somewhat removed from the sphere of corporate corruption concerns: the story of the CIA’s plans to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
Every year, I note that there are multiple patterns to be found in the list of Project Censored’s stories, and that these different patterns have much to tell us about the forces shaping what remains hidden. That’s still true, with three environmental stories (two involving fossil fuels), three involving money in politics (two dark money stories), and two involving illicit surveillance. But the dominance of this one pattern truly is remarkable. It shows how profoundly the concentration of corporate wealth and power in the hands of so few distorts everything we see — or don’t — in the world around us every day. Here then, is this year’s list of Project Censored’s top 10 censored stories:
1) Fossil Fuel Industry Subsidized at Rate of $11 Million per Minute
2) Wage Theft: U.S. Businesses Suffer Few Consequences for Stealing Millions from Workers Every Year
3) EPA Withheld Reports on Dangerous Chemicals
4) At Least 128 Members of Congress Invested in Fossil Fuel Industry
5) Dark Money Interference in U.S. Politics Undermines Democracy
6) Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Inflation in Food Prices
7) Concerns for Journalistic Independence as Gates Foundation Gives $319 Million to News Outlets
8) CIA Discussed Plans to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange
9) New Laws Preventing Dark Money Disclosures Sweep the Nation
10) Major Media Outlets Lobby Against Regulation of “Surveillance Advertising”
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