IllustratIons by anson stevens-bollen
to learn more about Project Censored, including reading the expanded list of 25 underreported stories or purchasing the book, visit projectcensored. org. Paul rosenberg is senior editor at random lengths news.
The real fight against
fake news Project censored reveals the 10 most under-rePorted stories of 2018 by Paul Rosenbe RosenbeRg
Fake news is not a new thing. With the return of its annual list of censored stories in Censored 2019: Fighting the Fake News Invasion, Project Censored’s vivid cover art recalls H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The situation today may feel as desolate as the cover art suggests. “But Censored 2019 is a book about fighting fake news,” editors Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff observed in the book’s introduction.
They wrote that “critical media education— rather than censorship, blacklists, privatized fact-checkers or legislative bans—is the best weapon for fighting the ongoing fake news invasion.” The list of censored stories is central to Project Censored’s mission, which, the editors point out, can be read in two different ways, “as a critique of the shortcomings of U.S. corporate
1. declining rule of law, human rights According to the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2017-2018, released in January 2018, a striking worldwide decline in basic human rights has driven an overall decline in the rule of law since October 2016, the month before Trump’s election. Fundamental rights—one of eight categories measured—declined in 71 out of 113 nations surveyed. Overall, 34 percent of countries’ scores declined, while just 29 percent improved. The United States ranked 19th, down one from 2016, with declines in checks on government powers and deepening discrimination. Fundamental rights include absence of discrimination, right to life and security, due process, freedom of expression and religion, right to privacy, freedom of association and labor rights. Constraints on government powers, which measures the extent to which those who govern are bound by law, saw the
second greatest declines (64 countries out of 113 dropped). This is where the United States saw the greatest deterioration, the World Justice Project said in a press release. “While all sub-factors in this dimension declined at least slightly from 2016, the score for lawful transition of power—based on responses to survey questions on confidence in national and local election processes and procedures—declined most markedly,” the press release said. The United States also scored notably poorly on several measurements of discrimination. “With scores of .50 for equal treatment and absence of discrimination (on a scale of 0 to 1), .48 for discrimination in the civil justice system, and .37 for discrimination in the criminal justice system, the U.S. finds itself ranked 78 out of 113 countries on all three subfactors,” the World Justice Project stated. The four Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden—remained in the top four positions.
news media for their failure to adequately cover these stories, or as a celebration of independent news media, without which we would remain either uninformed or misinformed about these crucial stories and issues.” With all that in mind, here is Project Censored’s annual Top 10 list of under-reported stories.
2. secrets sold to highest bidders In March 2017, WikiLeaks released Vault 7, a trove of 8,761 leaked confidential CIA files about its global hacking programs, which it described as the “larg “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” It drew media attention. But almost no one noticed what George Eliason of OpEdNews pointed out: “Sure, the CIA has all these tools available. Yes, they are used on the public. The important part is [that] it’s not the CIA that’s using them.” Eliason explained, the CIA’s mission prevents it from using the tools, especially on Americans. “All the tools are unclassified, opensource, and can be used by anyone,” Eliason explained. “It makes them not exactly usable for secret agent work.” Drawing heavily on more than a decade of reporting by Tim Shorrock for Mother Jones and the Nation, Eliason’s OpEdNews series reported on the explosive growth of private contractors in the intelligence community,
which allows the CIA and other agencies to gain access to intelligence gathered by methods they’re prohibited from using. In a 2016 report for the Nation, Shorrock estimated that 80 percent of around 58,000 private intelligence contractors worked for the five largest companies. He concluded that “not only has intelligence been privatized to an unimaginable degree, but an unprecedented consolidation of corporate power inside U.S. intelligence has left the country dangerously dependent on a handful of companies for its spying and surveillance needs.” Eliason reported how private contractors pioneered open-source intelligence by circulating or selling the information they gathered before the agency employing them had reviewed and classified it. Therefore, “no one broke any laws.” As a result, he wrote, “People with no security clearances and radical political agendas have state-sized cyber tools at their disposal.”
The real fighT againsT fake news conTinued on page 14 11.15.18
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