The Johnsons of the LAWA respond to criticism of West Harbor development p. 2 Councilmember Pearce calls out Long Beach on transparency, energy priorities p. 5 Long Beach Opera commissions new classical music to fundraise for 2021 p. 11
3-Part Series:
Project Censored’s Top Stories Show Missing Patterns in Corporate News
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Real News, Real People, Really Effective
EDITOR’S NOTE: Every year since 1976, Project Censored has performed an invaluable service — shedding light on the most significant news that’s somehow not fit to print. Censorship in an authoritarian society is obvious, from a distance, at least: there is a central agent or agency responsible for it, and the lines are clearly drawn. That’s not the case in America, yet some stories rarely, if ever see the light of day — such as stories about violence against Native American women and girls, even though four out of five of them experience violence at some point in their lives, overwhelmingly at the hands of non-Native perpetrators.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re more vulnerable, I’d say that we’re targeted,” Annita Lucchesi, a Southern Cheyenne descendant and executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, told The Guardian. “It’s not about us being vulnerable victims, it’s about the system being designed to target and marginalize our women.” And the media erasure of their stories is part of that same system of targeting and marginalization. While journalists everyday work hard to expose injustices, they work within a system where some injustices are so deeply baked in that stories exposing them are rarely told — and even more rarely expanded upon to give them their proper due. That’s where Project Censored comes in. “The primary purpose of Project Censored is to explore and publicize the extent of news censorship in our society by locating stories about significant issues of which the public should be aware, but is not, for a variety of reasons,” founder, Carl Jensen, wrote on its 20th anniversary. Thus, the list of censored stories that is the centerpiece of its annual book, State of the Free Press | 2021 doesn’t just help us to see individual stories we might otherwise have missed. It helps us see patterns — patterns of censorship, of stories suppressed, and patterns of how those stories fit together. [See Censored, p. 6]
COVID-19 Cases in the U.S. as of Nov. 23, 2020: 12,724,507 • Deaths: 263,421 • LA County cases: 364,520 COVID-19 Health Alert, see p. 9
November 24 - December 2, 2020
Illustration by Anson Stevens-Bollen, Santa Fe Reporter
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