whitebeard

Friday, September 23, 2005

     Happy Media Accountability Day!
     By Molly Ivins
     WorkingForChange.com

Tuesday 20 September 2005

Project Censored offers a list of stories the mainstream missed.

Austin - What we need in this country - along with a disaster relief
agency - is a Media Accountability Day. One precious day out of the entire
year when everyone in the news media stops reporting on what's
wrong with everyone else and devotes a complete 24-hour news cycle to
looking at our own failures. How's that for a great idea?

My colleagues, of course, are persuaded that every day is Pick on the
Media Day. Every day, the right wing accuses us of liberal bias and the
liberals accuse us of right-wing or corporate bias - so who needs
more of this?

I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be
sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The
real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and
bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover,
what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to - because,
after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and
Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry
on.

Happily, the perfect news peg, as we say in the biz, for Media
Accountability Day already exists - it's Project Censored's annual release
of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media.
Project Censored is based at Sonoma State University, with both faculty
and students involved in its preparation.

Of course, the stories are not actually "censored" by any authority,
but they do not receive enough attention to enter the public's
consciousness, usually because corporate media tend to underreport stories
about corporate misdeeds and government abuses.

The No. 1 pick by Project Censored this year should more than make the
media the blink - it is a much-needed deep whiff of ammonia smelling salts
for the comatose: Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government.

Gene Robertson, a great news editor, says we tend to miss the stories
that seep and creep, the ones whose effects are cumulative, not abrupt.
This administration has drastically changed the rules on Freedom of
Information Act requests; has changed laws that restrict public access to
federal records, mostly by expanding the national security classification;
operates in secret under the Patriot Act; and consistently refuses
to provide information to Congress and the Government Accountability
Office. The cumulative total effect is horrifying.

No. 2: Iraq Coverage - faulted for failure to report the results of
the two battles for Fallujah and the civilian death toll. The civilian
death toll story is hard to get - accurate numbers nowhere - but the
humanitarian disaster in Fallujah comes with impeccable sources.

No. 3: Distorted Election Coverage. Faulting the study that caused
most of the corporate media to dismiss the discrepancy between exit polls
and the vote tally; and the still-contentious question of whether the
vote in Ohio needed closer examination.

No. 4: Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In. It's another seep 'n'
creep story, where the cumulative effect should send us all shrieking into
the streets - the Patriot Act, the quiet resurrection of the MATRIX
program, the REAL ID Act, which passed without debate as an amendment to
an emergency spending bill funding troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No. 5: United States Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast
Asia. Oops. Ugh.

No. 6: The Real Oil for Food Scam. The oil-for-food story was rotten
with political motives from the beginning - the right used it to belabor
the United Nations. The part that got little attention here was the
extent to which we, the United States, were part of the scam. Harper's
magazine deserves credit for its December 2004 story, "The UN is Us:
Exposing Saddam Hussein's Silent Partner."

No. 7: Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood.
That a lot of journalists are getting killed in Iraq is indisputable. I
work with the Committee to Protect Journalists and am by no means
persuaded we are targeted by anyone other than terrorists. However,
Project Censored honors stories about military policies that could improve
the situation of those journalists who risk their lives.

No. 8: Iraqi Farmers Threatened by Bremer's Mandates. It's part of the
untold story of the disastrous effort to make Iraq into a neo-con's
free-market dream. Order 81 issued by Paul Bremer "made it illegal
for Iraqi farmers to reuse seeds harvested from new varieties registered
under the law." Iraqi farmers were forced away from traditional methods to
a system of patented seeds, where they can't grow crops
without paying a licensing fee to an American corporation.

No. 9: Iran's New Oil Trade System Challenges US Currency. The effects
of Iran's switching from dollars to Euros in oil trading.

No. 10: Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy. A classic
case of a story not unreported but underreported - a practice so
environmentally irresponsible it makes your hair hurt to think
about it.

Most journalists manage to find a quibble or two with Project
Censored's list every year, but mostly we just stand there and nod, yep,
missed that one, and that one and...

But here's a wonderful fact about daily journalism - we don't ever
have to get it all right, because we get a new chance every day.

Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas
Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including Who Let
the Dogs In?
--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/