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The following is the Project Censored exchange between Don Hazen, the executive editor of AlterNet, and Greg Ruggiero, an editor at Seven Stories Press and founder of the Open Media Pamphlet Series, and Dan Simon, founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press.
Beyond Project Censored: It's Time for a New Award
By Don Hazen
The media world has changed dramatically over the past decade. The Internet is increasingly delivering more information in new, faster and more efficient ways. As a result, the alternative media has more opportunities to break through the corporate media's traditional stranglehold on information. At no time was this more apparent than at the WTO protests in Seattle, when the alternative media reached international audiences with fresh, dynamic information.
In fundamental ways, we in the progressive, independent media world are stuck in the past, with very little capacity to make effective use of new media. A case in point is Project Censored, which compiles a list of the Top Ten censored stories every year. Flawed in its process to begin with, Project Censored tends to reinforce fundamentally self-marginalizing, defeatist behavior while ignoring the role new media is playing in communicating information. Instead of honoring timely, investigative-oriented, break-out stories that move from the alternative press to mainstream media, Project Censored chooses to recognize only those stories that remain buried. Part of the problem with Project Censored is the procedure by which stories are selected. PC's excellent panel of judges do not select the stories; rather they are asked only to rate a list of 25 picked by students and faculty from Sonoma State University.
I've personally been a supporter of PC over the years. But I finally got shocked into reconsidering a couple of years ago when the then publisher of In These Times, Paul Obis, started calling the PC awards the Alternative Pulitzers.
Without overly burnishing the Pulitzers, let's think about this for a moment: Obis was celebrating, as the most important stories our community can produce, an ad hoc collection of articles that weren't rated for their writing quality, their strength of argument or their documentation. And, of course, many were stories that very few people ever read. Yet these stories, year in and year out, receive our highest plaudits. This process--for the most part the sole recognition for independent journalism--demeans our standards. We can do better.
Absolutely, there are some very important stories among the PC content every year, written by incredibly good journalists about terribly important subjects. And there are some lame ones as well. But the point is, we should not be celebrating the failure to get those stories out to larger audiences. We need new awards. Let's call them the Project Big Audience Awards -- recognition for stories dug out, documented, brilliantly rendered and expertly promoted so that they got through the corporate media haze and became part of the public knowledge. That's worth a celebration.
Let's not be naive here--we're dealing with a mainstream media system that exists to protect a wide range of corporate interests and to make a lot of money. There are more PR agents than journalists writing the news. Billions of dollars are spent to get some messages into the mainstream and keep othersout. In this media world the law of the jungle rules, and journalist and editors must fight tooth and nail, organizing, seducing, threatening, haranguing, to get their stories to center stage.
Within these serious constraints, some independent journalists make significant contributions, especially now with the Internet. High traffic on various Web sites has forced numerous stories to the surface. Just look at the success Village Voice investigative reporter Bill Bastone has had with TheSmokingGun.com, a site that posts a new "exclusive document"--mostly confidential law enforcement and government material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act--every day. Bastone and his Hollywood colleague Sam Bretzfeld are most famous for uncovering the restraining order taken out against Rick Rockwell, the groom of Fox's "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" debacle, a stunt that brought 400,000 people to his site in one day. But Bastone unearths all sorts of interesting political andhistorical documents, some trivial some with major political ramifications. Maybe he should get the first Project Big Audience Award.
But according to Project Censored culture, the way to get an award is if your story doesn't get advanced or echoed in the mainstream media. Sure, it could have been censorship that stopped or slowed the story. But it also could have been that the article was badly written, had facts wrong, had bad timing or wasn't placed or promoted. None of these causes is really factored in the subjective process of PC choosing its stories. What we need to do is invest time and resources in helping journalists get their important stories more attention, rather than sitting back and offering a Project Censored award as consolation.
Yet PC has its moments. It still can serve a useful purpose. As one of this year's awardees, Ron Nixon, explains, "Yes, they are awards in a way, but they are really a PR effort to expand the story. Once the Project Censored book comes out (a compilation of the Top 25 stories) and articles about the awards appear in a number of alternative papers, the stories get more attention. It gives the stories an extra push."
Fair enough; these stories need all the pushing they can get. But I also agree with Ron's partner, Makani Themba, a well-known author, trainer and organizer, who calls Project Censored "awards for people not reading your stuff." Journalists may be seeing the light as well. Jason Vest, when asked about the significance of the Censored 2000 List replied: "Hard to say. I think Project Censored has been invaluable over the years, but I have to wonder if some review of it's selection and vetting procedures is in order. Also, I have towonder if calling it 'Censored' limits its impact on the mainstream that needs to be the most aware of it. In progressive circles, most of us can quote Manufacturing Consent; outside of our circles, most think of censorship in much more conventional terms. Perhaps it should be renamed."
I agree. It's time for a change. 
Candle, Torch, Three-Alarm
Fire:
A Response to Don Hazen's "Big-Audience" Critique of the Censored Awards
By Greg Ruggiero and Dan Simon
While most cases of censorship in this country don't result in missing journalists, they do result in missing stories, cases of omission wherein investigations of grave social and political consequence go under-, mis-, or un- reported. For the past 24 years, the purpose of Project Censored has been to locate these underreported stories, and with the power of all the resources at its disposal, amp up their flame into torchfire. Not a small undertaking. Under the indefatigable leadership of Project Censored's director Peter Phillips, staffers work year round to monitor the press, edit an annual book, give radio interviews, publish a newsletter, maintain a web-page, pound out action alert email to a list of thousands, and produce CDs that get the word out to radio stations.
But according to Don Hazen, the project of working with stories that don't make it into the mainstream is "self-defeating and self-marginalizing," compared to the smart option of using "new media," Don's code for using the Web. Don's biggest miss is his notion that to make it into the mainstream is the goal, the big win, a sort of Booker T. Washington rather than Frederick Douglass approach to what it means to succeed.
Another of Hazen's misfires is that Project Censored has somehow missed the "new media" boat that sailed so brightly during the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Project Censored was not only involved in the first IMC, but is looking to the "new media" innovations of the IMC as a model to be further explored in it's upcoming Press Freedom Conference. On April 11 & 12, Project Censored is holding a conference (see www.sevenstories.com) at Fordham University to explore investigative journalism, media activism, and independent media. A core part of the program will be to hold discussions with the Seattle organizers who created the first IMC, along with organizers in DC, Philly, LA, and Boulder who are working to form an IMC alternative news network. Project Censored intends to be part of this network.
Getting a message or a story into the mainstream is a tactic, not a goal for independent media. We are not trying to move our message from left to center, but trying to build our own audience on the left. That's what makes us independent. When you concentrate on making it in the mainstream, you must conform to mainstream rules. When, instead, you invest resources and attention on the alternatives, you strengthen and consolidate them. That's the purpose of Project Censored: To demonstrate that the stories of most profound political, social, and ecological import are being reported on Democracy Now! and in the pages of In These Times, not on the evening news, and to build larger audiences for those venues.
By Don's logic, people who listen to Democracy Now! or read The Nation are "small-audience," "marginalized" folks, and to honor the journalists who often risk life and limb to get the story to them is "self-defeating" because the mainstream didn't publish it too. Don thinks that bringing attention to buried stories is lame, let them stay buried, and that we should instead give awards to "winners," mainstream stories that can be deemed progressive. Might this have been the sort of thinking that made the 2nd Media & Democracy Congress what it was, and prevented there from ever being a third?
What Project Censored does, through books, CDs, newsletters, and the web, is to demonstrate the inherent biases in the corporate media system and to move "audiences" away from information as entertainment and toward information as activism. Corporate media is always about markets, never about movements. Project Censored is about shaming the mainstream to change, while investing in the alternatives that can replace it. Giving awards to folks for publishing articles in "big audience" venues is precisely what we don't need to do. Like giving a scholarship to a rich kid. The purpose of Project Censored is to give a scholarship of attention to writers that the corporate press would rather blot out, like Gary Webb or Mumia Abu-Jamal. But Hazen doesn't think so.
In this age of media mergers and increasingly monolithic corporate power, Project Censored says not only that the independent press worth reading, but that it is precisely where we will find the stories that are too hot to handle in the dumbed-down corporate press. For Project Censored, the winning project is to enable progressive social change by supporting progressive media. Folks deserve awards when they've brought back news that affects us all, but which the mainstream ignores. It would be a tragic mistake if we followed Don's advice and only celebrated writers who managed to shoehorn a progressive message into a mainstream package. Don's approach would only contribute to the isolation and attrition of the independent press, a prize all should agree that the corporate media does not deserve.
We believe in constructive criticism. Even the best of institutions are only as good as they are open to change. However, that Hazen critiques the obscurity of the stories Project Censored chooses is bizarre. His critique misses the main point, which is that Project Censored has shown an extraordinary ability to transform a candle-flame into a torch, and a torch into a three-alarm fire. A good source for this is Carl Jensen's Twenty Years of Censored News, which documents countless cases of stories crossing the Project Censored bridge out of obscurity. Here, by way of example:
* Corporate control of DNA was a PC story all the way back in 1976, when it was the #2 Censored Story, a harbinger of today's situation when genetic engineering has become one of our age's great controversies (sources: articles in Mother Jones, Science and The Progressive).
* The #1 story in 1977 was the growing gap between black and white incomes, and related discrepancies in unemployment and poverty. Here again Project Censored foreshadowed what would become one of our most telling news issues (Sources: The Progressive).
* In 1978 the top Censored story was the dangers of nuclear power plants, based on a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Again, the choice proved prophetic and influential.
* In 1979 the top story was the export of substandard pesticides and other chemical products, defective medical devices, and even nuclear power plants to Third World countries based on a Mother Jones article by Mark Dowie, Barbara Ehrenreich and four other authors. Again, the Project had hit on an issue of huge importance around the globe and undercovered here, although it did later receive better coverage in the mainstream press and some, although inadequate, government response.
These are typical examples. The entire list is nearly endless and largely covered in Jensen's book. Each year the need for Project Censored-like organizations only increases--groups that serve both as ombudsmen, pointing out the failures of the mainstream press to cover the news, and as disseminators of the important grassroots and international news coverage that is done by organizations and individuals with relatively small readerships.
Want to know what will be on page one of your electronic metropolitan
daily twenty years from now? Come to the Project Censored Conference and
Awards on April 11 & 12. Read Censored 2000 today.
Don Hazen Responds to Dan Simon and Greg Ruggiero
With Simon and Ruggiero's letter, it is hard to imagine amore selective reading or deliberate misreading of the critique I wrote of Project Censored (PC). I'm disappointed in Simon and Ruggiero for not addressing my criticism of PC's lack of standards as well as personalizing the issues I raised.
But I'll try to keep to the high road. Here is a summary of my previous argument:
There is clearly censorship in the American media" some of it is self-censorship; some more overt. No surprise here. Corporate interests are not public interests. This is a persuasive reason to work for a strong, independent press.
It is also clear to me, as a person fighting for social change, that there is not a sufficient constituency willing to actively address societal problems. This constituency must be significantly expanded and some of that growth can be motivated via credible journalism.
Part of the reason we lack a significant constituency of advocates and activists is that there is a feeling that nothing can be done; that the system is locked up. I feel that Project Censored adds to this despair, reinforcing the negative expectations of the system, without providing solutions to overcome or creatively work around the problem.
As a journalist and publisher, it is also evident to me that concentrating on the quality of independent media will expand audiences and bring more credibility to issues of concern. Social change is not achieved by crying wolf year after year. It's too easy to be screwed by the mainstream media; we don't need to give awards for it.
Sometimes good journalism can be unruly. It can uncover issues and contradictions we don't want to face. Sometimes the truth hurts. That 's why activism and independent journalism are sometimes nervous allies. There is a thin line between good advocacy journalism and propaganda. But the system puts out enough propaganda. We need to make sure we are not perceived as doing the same thing by those we want to reach. The best way to avoid marginalizing our work is to have high standards woven into our passion and beliefs. For me these standards are not present in Project Censored. In its haphazard way, PC identifies some important stories that haven't been echoed sufficiently in the media and deserve more attentions. But PC picks other stories that clearly are not up to snuff. One example this year was Diane Johnstone's story on the influence of oil in the Kosovo war, which AlterNet reporter Tamara Straus was unable to find supporting evidence of.
Another example is PC's number eight pick this year--Karl Grossman's "U.S. Plans to Put weapons in Space, violating International Law." The progressive online magazine the Albion Monitor calls this story "the most dubious story" of 1999. Albion Editor Jeff Elliot writes: "This doesn't even qualify as news. It's based mostly on hyperbole found in 1996 and 1998 Air Force reports that fantasies of Darth Vader-style space weapons--to be operational within the next twenty years. Only a single R&D project has been approved, and that was for tests of a missile-intercept laser considered "very desirable" by Pentagon watchdogs at the Federation of American Scientists. The authors of this Project Censored--winning item were also behind the Project's top 1996 story that the Cassini spacecraft posed a risk to life on Earth--another concocted space 'thereat'"
Another example of PC's lack of credibility was the article it chose to rank in its number one spot last year, which covered the "secret negotiations" of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). PC basically missed the story. According to global economic expert David Morris, a worldwide coalition of activists organized around anti-NAFTA and GATT campaigns helped to force the collapse of the so-called secret MAI negotiations.
Wrote Morris: "The planetary corporations and their governmental aides hoped to push the MAI through fast and secretly. They failed, as activists began to spread the word about the aims and implications of that document, the tide began to turn. By the end of 1998 US policy-makers had abandoned their dream of making corporations sovereign over the people with one document."
PC offers no serious analysis as to why certain articles are "censored" or underreported and others aren't. Standards as to quality of writing, documentation of proof and clarity of argument are not often the criteria Project Censored uses. The standards are primarily based on the collective-subjective judgment of a group of students and teachers at Sonoma State College. With the corporate media system stacked, with censorship pervasive, with the power of the PR industry growing everyday--more energy and resources and creativity would be invested into promoting the best of independent journalism.
New media, particularly the Internet, offers more opportunities for effective promoting public interest journalism and investigative reporting. These new opportunities need to be taken advantage of. Sometimes the new technology has been used effectively to provide a deeper picture of what's going on, as was the case for coverage of the WTI meeting in Seattle. In the end, there is less reason to blame the system for not getting stories out when there are more tools available.
In terms of awards, I think there should be to kinds. Version One: Awards for the best independent journalism judged on quality by peers who know something about journalism.; Version Two: Awards for campaigns and effort that bring independent journalism findings and concepts to broad audiences and help change people's minds.
If we want to list stories, theories or analyses that aren't getting enough coverage, fine. But then let's figure out how to get them covered. And maybe people know a lot more about the problem then Project Censored things. They just don't know what to do about it.
Finally, I see a major contradiction in Simon and Ruggiero's presentation. They say progressive media is for building a progressive movement and they don't want to play by the mainstream media's rules. That's fine. Activists need smart media. But if you are writing opinion and advocacy for a small audience of progressive, can you then step back and cry censorship when the corporate media doesn't cover the topics to your satisfaction? I think not. You can't have it both ways.
For the record, I've worked in independent and alternative media more than 15 years, beginning as publisher of Mother Jones in 1985. My media diet is the Nation, Mother Jones, and In These Times, along with dozens of other magazines and online sites. I know, as one of the 120,000 or so subscribers of the Nation, that I am on the margins when it comes to being able to produce change in this country. But I also know that the ideas and values represented in the Nation resonate with millions of Americans, far beyond their regular readership. I'm certain of that.
It's also pretty clear to me that neither the Nation, Mother Jones or the best independent journalists want to talk solely to the 120,000 Nation subscribers. But I don't think The Nation or Mother Jones is satisfied with this situation. If they were, then why would they keep full-time publicists on Staff? Why would Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval agree to appear on national TV shows?
Simon and Ruggiero framed their letter with the metaphor of Project Censored's
perceived success: a "candle, torch, three-alarm fire.," If only that
were true. It appears to me there's a lot more smoke than fire coming
from Project Censored and its time to air out the situation and allow
for reevaluation.
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