The new censorship.
            (media underreporting of environmentally critical issues)
                            (Editorial) Ed Ayres.

            Abstract: Sonoma State University's Project Censored has monitored important issues that receive little media
            attention since 1977. It publishes five choice underreported stories each year. Many people are unaware of the
            real state of their natural resources and of their future prospects because industries playing major roles in
            environmental degradation control the media by spending heavily on advertising. They want people to remain
            ignorant for fear that consumers would cut back their spending, resulting in lower sales.

            Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Worldwatch Institute When an event of international importance goes
            conspicuously unmentioned by the media in the country where it occurred, U.S. reporters are quick to notice.
            They are less inclined to notice their own patterns of de facto censorship, A prominent group of analysts,
            however, has been watching those patterns with great interest. For the past 20 years, the Sonoma State
            University (California)-based Project Censored has been keeping track of critical issues that are given the silent
            treatment by mainstream news media. These issues come to the attention of the project through the diligence of
            a relatively few researchers and reporters who are willing to dig beneath the daily flotsam of scandals, murders,
            and bombings, and to analyze deeper patterns. Each year, Project Censored selects the 25 "most
            under-reported" of these stories for publication in its well-publicized book.

            For Censored 1997, six of the stories draw from the past year's WORLD WATCH. They include Aaron
            Sachs's article "Dying for Oil," on the struggle for environmental justice in Nigeria (May/June 1996), Lester
            Brown's "Facing Food Scarcity," on the growing shortfall between global food production and human
            population (November/December 1995); our report on "America's Compromised Refrigerators"
            (September/October 1996); and three Environmental Intelligence pieces.

            One might wonder why the issues exposed by WORLD WATCH should so often be those that are being given
            the silent treatment by mainstream media. It's not as though the topics we write about are too specialized to be
            of interest to most people, though it sometimes seems people are more interested in the pseudo-realities of
            Disney or MTV than in the actual world they're going to live or die in. Nor do we make any particular effort to
            dig up dark secrets; we're not "investigative journalists." So, why do the things we discuss turn out to be so
            stonewalled by The New York Times or CBS TV?

            One hypothesis is that if more people really knew what's happening to their common assets - their water, food
            security, cultural and genetic heritage, and future prospects - they'd never permit many of today's industries to
            do what they routinely do. Some of these industries are engaged in practices that are rapidly spending down the
            planet's natural capital. And one reason most people don't seem to be particularly conscious of this, perhaps, is
            that these industries now exercise heavy control of the media through their expenditures of close to half a trillion
            dollars a year in advertising. That's more spent per person, worldwide, than the entire annual income per person
            of the world's poorest billion people (see page 39, top item).

            It's conventional belief that free speech now prevails around the world, in a way it never has before. And for
            any specific bit of information, that may be true. But that does not make it true for information in the aggregate.
            As long as information is scattered about in disconnected bits, one can't see whole pictures; yet we're generally
            given only bits. One minute we see a TV commercial for a hot new 4-wheel-drive vehicle; a minute later, news
            of a devastating flood; then some video of a brutal, "random" street crime; then a bulletin about a bulbous
            former football star dying of heart disease at age 49. But we get no sense of how such events may actually be
            connected.

            If more people were aware of how such events are connected, more might decide to cut back on their
            consumption - not out of magnanimity, but out of a dawning sense of collective self-interest. More would frown
            on big houses and petroleum-gulping "sport-utility" vehicles, the same way so many have come to frown on
            cigarette smoking, ivory jewelry, big slabs of meat, or fur coats. They might eat less, do more bicycling or
            walking, and need fewer anti-anxiety drugs.

            That people might do this strikes fear into the corporate hearts of industries that are dedicated to driving up
            consumption, and that live and die by the credo that their sales - and the economy - must forever grow. The
            major news media may do a good job of retaining their journalistic independence when reporting on truncated
            news fragments, but rarely will they let their researchers really put the pieces together. Why not? I suspect that
            relatively little of this is direct censorship; in the emerging global consumer culture, that's not necessary. It's
            enough, now, for producers and reporters to know that what counts is being part of a fast-moving,
            market-driven, profit-generating news team. Anyone who forgets that news is a business - increasingly an
            entertainment business - just won't "fit in" and won't advance.

            Meanwhile, the de facto censorship - via oversimplification of information to the point of titillating
            meaningless-ness - continues to worsen. And the ability of even the most educated people to see clearly what's
            happening depends increasingly on what Project Censored calls "alternative" media - those that are neither
            owned by large profit-driven businesses nor dependent on their advertising.
 
 
            Article A19998124