BY PAUL ROSENBERG WITH TERELLE JERRICKS | ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUSTYN IANNUCCI
STORIES THAT THE MEDIA MISSED IN 2015-16 Throughout its 40-year history, Project Censored has covered a lot of ground that the corporate mainstream media has missed. Begun by Carl Jensen, a sociology professor at California’s Sonoma State University shortly after Watergate in 1976, it’s become an institution involving dozens of faculty members and institutions working together to come up with an annual list of the Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year.
As with the Watergate story, these stories aren’t censored in the overt heavy-handed manner of an authoritarian dictatorship, but in the often more effective manner reflecting our society – an oligarchy with highly centralized economic power pretending to be a “free marketplace of ideas.” It may give people what they think they want in the moment, but it leaves them hungry for more, if not downright malnourished in the long
run. The missing stories concern vital subjects central to the healthy functioning of our democracy. The problem is that we may not even realize what we’re missing. Another way to think about it is as censorship of what the people as a whole can hear, rather than what any one individual can say. More than 220 students and 33 faculty members from 18 college and university campuses across the United States and Canada
1. US MILITARY FORCES DEPLOYED IN 70 PERCENT OF WORLD’S NATIONS The top censored story deals with the massive expansion in the number of countries where the officially unnamed war on terror is now being waged by US special operations forces — 147 of the world’s 195 recognized nations, which is an 80 percent increase since 2010. This includes a dramatic expansion in Africa. The majority of the activity is in “training missions,” meaning that this expansion is promoting a coordinated worldwide intensification of conflict, unseen at home, but felt all around the globe. Writing for TomDispatch, the Nation, and the Intercept, Nick Turse exposed different aspects of this story and its implications. Turse’s story focused on the development of a single base, Chabelley Airfield, in the East African nation of Djibouti. It’s an “outof-the-way outpost” transformed into “a key hub for its secret war…in Africa and the Middle East.” In the Nation, Turse tackled the question of mission success. Project Censored noted that, “Turse [had] reported skepticism from a number of experts in response to this question, pointing out that “impacts are not the same as successes.” In Vietnam, body counts were mistaken for signs of success. “Today, tallying up the number of countries in which special operations forces are present repeats this error,” Vietnam veteran and author Andrew Bacevich told Turse.
2. CRISIS IN EVIDENCEBASED MEDICINE The role of science in improving human health is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, but the profit-oriented influence of the pharmaceutical industry has created a crisis situation. Research simply cannot be trusted.
“Something has gone fundamentally wrong,” said Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, commenting on a UK symposium on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research: [M]uch of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest,
were involved in the latest Project Censored installment. A panel of 28 judges consisting of media studies professors, professional journalists, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission also participated. Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor for Random Lengths News at the Port of Los Angeles, California, and is a contributing columnist for Salon.com. Terelle Jerricks is the managing editor who contributed to this article.
together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards (sic) darkness…The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. Horton’s conclusion echoed Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who went public in 2009. A classic case was Study 329 in 2001, which reported that paroxetine (Paxil in the United States) is safe and effective for treating depressed children and adolescents, leading doctors to prescribe Paxil to more than two million US children and adolescents by the end of 2002, before being called into question. The company responsible (now GlaxoSmithKline) agreed to pay $3 billion in 2012, which is the “largest healthcare fraud settlement in US history,” according to the US Department of Justice. Nonetheless, the study has not been retracted or corrected, and “none of the authors have been disciplined,” Project Censored points out, despite a major reanalysis which starkly contradicts the original report’s claims. The reanalysis was seen as the first major success of a new opendata initiative known as Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials. While Project Censored noted one Washington Post story on the reanalysis, there was only passing mention of the open-data movement. “Otherwise, the corporate press ignored the reassessment of the paroxetine study,” and beyond that, “Richard Horton’s Lancet editorial received no coverage in the US corporate press.” continues on page 10
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