Author Archives: Charles L. Klotzer

The top censored stories of 2015-2016

The Journalism Review’s presentation of the top censored stories of 2015-2016 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976. That tradition now includes faculty and students from campuses across North America.

During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 235 validated independent news stories representing the collective efforts of 221 college students and 33 professors from 18 college and university campuses.

How do the organizers know that the top stories brought forward each year are not only relevant and significant, but also trustworthy? The answer is that each candidate news story undergoes rigorous review, which takes place in multiple stages.

Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public. Together, faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage.

Once Project Censored receives the nomination, a second round of judgment is conducted, using the same criteria and updating the review to include any subsequent, competing corporate coverage.

In early spring, the faculty and students at all affiliate campuses, and the panel of judges cast votes to winnow the candidate stories from several hundred to 25. Once the top 25 list has been determined, Project Censored student interns begin another intensive review of each story using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases.

The finalists are then sent to a panel of judges, who vote to rank them in numerical order. (This writer is one of the judges.) These experts include media studies professors, professional journalists, and a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.

(1) U.S. Military forces deployed in 70 percent of world’s nations

If you throw a dart at a world map and do not hit water, Nick Turse reported for TomDispatch, the odds are that US Special Operations Forces “have been there sometime in 2015.” According to a spokesperson for Special Operations Command (SOCOM), in 2015 Special Operations Forces (SOF) deployed in 147 of the world’s 195 recognized nations, an increase of eighty percent since 2010. “The global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking,” Turse wrote.

As SOCOM commander General Joseph Votel told the audience of the Aspen Security Forum in July 2015, more SOF troops are deployed to more locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars. In Turse’s words.

(2) Crisis in evidence-based medicine

In April 2015, the Lancet’s editor, Richard Horton, wrote, “Something has gone fundamentally wrong with one of our greatest human creations.” Describing the upshot of a UK symposium held that month on the reproducibility and reliability of biomedical research, Horton summarized the “case against science”: “Much 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, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness…. The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming.”

In 2009, Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, made comparable claims in an article for the New York Review of Books: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

(3) Rising carbon dioxide levels threaten to permanently disrupt vital ocean bascteria

Imagine a car heading toward a cliff’s edge with its gas pedal stuck to the floor. That, Robert Perkins wrote, is a metaphor for “what climate change will do to the key group of ocean bacteria known as Trichodesmium,” according to a study published in the September 2015 issue of Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Southern California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Trichodesmium is found in nutrient-poor parts of the ocean, where it converts nitrogen gas into material that can be used by other forms of life. From algae to whales, all life needs nitrogen to grow. Reporting for the Guardian, Emma Howard quoted Eric Webb, one of the study’s researchers, who explained how the process of “nitrogen fixation” makes Trichodesmium “the fertilising agent of the open ocean.”

(4) Search engine algorithms and electronic votiong machines could swing 2016 election

From search engine algorithms to electronic voting machines, technology provides opportunities for manipulation of voters and their votes in ways that could profoundly affect the results of the 2016 election. In the US, the 2012 presidential election was won by a margin of just 3.9 percent; and, historically, half of US presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent. These narrow but consequential victory margins underscore the importance of understanding how secret, proprietary technologies—whether they are newly developing or increasingly outdated—potentially swing election results.

Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). Their research focuses on the powerful role played by the secret algorithms (including Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank) that determine the contents of our Internet search results and social media news feeds.

(5) Corporate exploitation of global refugee crisis masked at humanitarianism

According to a June 2015 United Nations report, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. The UN report indicated that during 2014 one out of every 122 people was a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker; and over half of these refugees were children.

Although the extent of the global refugee crisis has been covered in the corporate media (including, for example, the New York Times and the Washington Post), the exploitation of refugees has been less well covered. In February 2016, Sarah Lazare published an article on AlterNet that warned of the World Bank’s private enterprise solution to the Syrian displacement crisis. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid,” Lazare wrote, “the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch ‘new investments’ in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of stranded Syrian refugees. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive ‘solution’ to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyper-exploitation.”

(6) Over 1.5 million American families live on two dollars per person per day

According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, sociologists and authors of the book $2.00 per Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, in 2011 more than 1.5 million US families—including three million children—lived on as little as two dollars per person per day in any given month. Edin and Shaefer determined this figure on the basis of data from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), income data from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), additional data on family homelessness, and their own fieldwork in four study sites.

Corporate coverage of Edin and Shaefer’s sociological study of extreme poverty has been limited. In early 2012, USA Today published a straightforward report on a previous version of their findings, which indicated 1.46 million families lived on less than two dollars per person per day.

(7) No end in sight for Fukushima disaster

Five years after the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Dahr Jamail reported that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials in charge of the plant continue to release large quantities of radioactive waste water into the Pacific Ocean. Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, called Fukushima “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of humankind.” As Jamail reported, experts such as Gundersen continue warning officials and the public that this problem is not going away. As Gundersen told Jamail, “With Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now with Fukushima, you can pinpoint the exact day and time they started…but they never end.” Another expert quoted in Jamail’s Truthout article, M.V. Ramana, a physicist and lecturer at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and the Nuclear Futures Laboratory, explained, “March 2011 was just the beginning of the disaster, which is still unfolding.”

(8) Syria’s war spurred by contest for gas delivery in Europe, not Muslim sectarianism

At least four years into the crisis in Syria, “most people have no idea how this war even got started,” Mnar Muhawesh reported for MintPress News in September 2015.

In 2011–12, after Syrian president Bashar al-Assad refused to cooperate with Turkey’s proposal to create a natural gas pipeline between Qatar and Turkey through Syria, Turkey and its allies became “the major architects of Syria’s ‘civil war.’” The proposed pipeline would have bypassed Russia to reach European markets currently dominated by Russian gas giant Gazprom. As a result, Muhawesh wrote, “The Middle East is being torn to shreds by manipulative plans to gain oil and gas access by pitting people against one another based on religion. The ensuing chaos provides ample cover to install a new regime that’s more amenable to opening up oil pipelines and ensuring favorable routes for the highest bidders.”

Although there is plenty of coverage in US corporate media about the violence in Syria and the refugee crisis that is sweeping Europe and reaching North America, this coverage has failed to address the economic interests, including control of potentially lucrative gas pipelines,

(9) Big pharma political lobbying not limited to presidential campaigns

Pharmaceutical companies have been among the biggest political spenders for years, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. As Mike Ludwig of Truthout reported, based on CRP data, large pharmaceutical companies made over $51 million in campaign donations during the 2012 presidential election, nearly $32 million in the 2014 elections, and, as of September 2015, they had already put $10 million into the 2016 election. During the 2014 elections, Pfizer led drug companies with $1.5 million in federal campaign donations, followed by Amgen ($1.3 million) and McKesson ($1.1 million).

Although these are large sums of money, campaign donations by large pharmaceutical companies pale in comparison to how much they spent on lobbying politicians and influencing policies outside of elections. As Ludwig reported, according to data gathered on the 2014 election, the industry spent seven dollars on lobbying for every dollar spent on the election. The $229 million spent by drug companies and their lobbying groups that year was down from a peak of $273 million in 2009, the year that Congress debated the Affordable Care Act.

(10) CISA: The internet surveillance act no one is discussing

On December 18, 2015, President Obama signed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) into law as part of a 2,000 page omnibus spending bill. As drafted, CISA was intended to “improve cybersecurity in the United States through enhanced sharing of information about cybersecurity threats, and for other purposes.” The act authorized the creation of a system for corporate informants to provide customers’ data to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which, in turn, would share this information with other federal agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Defense (which includes the NSA), Energy, Justice (which includes the FBI), the Treasury (which oversees the IRS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

As Sam Thielman of the Guardian reported, civil liberties experts had been “dismayed” when Congress used the omnibus spending bill to advance some of the legislation’s “most invasive” components. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized Congress for using the spending bill “to pursue their extremist agendas.” “Sneaking damaging and discriminatory riders into a must-pass bill usurps the democratic process,” he told the Guardian. Lauren Weinstein, who cofounded People For Internet Responsibility, also spoke critically of the legislation: “There is not a culture of security and privacy established in the government yet. You have to have that before you even consider sharing the amounts of data [CISA] would cover.” Evan Greer of Fight for the Future called CISA “a disingenuous attempt to quietly expand the US government’s surveillance programs.”

Leo Drey: Progressive Pioneer

Benjamin Israel remembered

Founder's note

div>A founder's note from Charles Klotzer: “In the print version of my article in the Winter 2013 edition of Gateway Journalism Review, I failed to note that in the late 1980s Roland Klose was the assistant editor of SJR for several years. My apologies for this oversight. Congratulations also to Klose for being named the business editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

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Illinois, Missouri universities fall short of protecting free expression

The First Amendment protects free expression. That, however, covers only governmental acts, “Congress shall make no law . . . ,” it says. That threat by officialdom is ever-present. But we are also facing a similar threat by private centers of power that may actually interfere more directly with our lives.

Greg Lakianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), warns in a New York Times op-ed piece that colleges have enacted speech codes intended to enforce civility, “but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.”

Foundation officials found in a study of 392 campus speech codes 65 percent of the colleges had policies that, in their view, violated the constitutional guarantee of the right to free speech. (Private colleges, unlike public institutions, do not fall under the First Amendment protection.) Lakianoff reported that a 2010 study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities of 24,000 college students and 9,000 faculty and staff members found that 35.6 percent of the students and 18.5 percent of the faculty and staff strongly agreed that it was “safe to hold unpopular positions on campus.”

The debacle at St Louis University is a perfect example of intimidation and threats to free expression.

Readers of this review by now know about the travails that faculty members faced if Father Lawrence Biondi, president of the university, found them annoying.

Avis Meyer is a distinguished professor of journalism and has instructed students for more than 35 years. He has been the faculty adviser for the university’s school newspaper. The newspaper, in the best tradition of investigative journalism, has exposed many Biondi misdeeds. The president appears to blame Meyer for not censoring some of these exposés and banned Meyer from meeting with journalism students in the newspaper office. The students decided to meet with Meyer off campus.

When this publication covered Biondi’s antics over many years, not one of the faculty members we knew was willing to offer even a “no comment.” Suppression of free expression was the norm at the school.

FIRE (http://thefire.org/) evaluates free expression at public and private universities throughout the country. It reviewed school policies in detail and concluded whether they are or are not offensive to the First Amendment in the case of public universities, or the spirit of the First Amendment in the case of private universities.

Speech and behavior codes are an attempt to balance community stability and bans on hate speech and disturbances with free speech. These efforts frequently misfire.

In Missouri, FIRE found five of the six public universities may restrict the free exercise of speech under its established policies. Among the two private schools, it did not rate St. Louis University but Washington University’s policies of its “Residential Life Policies & Procedures: Harassment 11-12” endangered free expression.

“Harassment is defined as any behavior or conduct that is injurious, or potentially injurious to a person's physical, emotional, or psychological well-being, as determined at the sole discretion of the University. Such behavior is subject to disciplinary action.”

Who defines harassment? Who will determine the emotional injury? All will be up to the sole discretion of the university.

In Illinois, FIRE found that some regulations in 10 public and four private colleges and universities may restrict the free exercise of speech—thus the group found all Illinois schools they studied as potentially limiting a free exchange of ideas.

In the case of Southern Illinois University, it gives a green light to most of its codes, except for a “Policy on Non-Discrimination and Non-Harassment” passed by its board of trustees:

“Discriminatory harassment includes, but is not limited to, conduct (oral, written, graphics or physical) directed against any person or group of persons because of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran's status that has the purpose of or reasonably foreseeable effect of creating an offensive, demeaning, intimidating or hostile environment for that person or group of persons. Such conduct includes but is not limited to objectionable epithets demeaning depictions or treatment and threatened or actual abuse or harm.”

No matter how well-intentioned, the blanket term “discriminatory harassment” and its condemnation of objectionable epithets invite the possibility of censorship by school officials of legitimate expressions.

Celebration

The St. Louis Journalism Review, Gateway Journalism Review celebrate 40 years of service with a Celebration of 40 for the St. Louis Journalism Review and its transfer to Southern Illinois Univer

sity Carbondale and the Gateway Journalism Review. Join Bob Woodward via satellite and Russ Mitchell will be at the event which runs from 6-9 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Edward Jones Headquarters Lobby.

Anderson Cooper Upholds Ethics in Journalism

CNN’s coverage of the popular uprisings in Egypt and other countries has brought to the forefront once again the question: If reporters know that official statements or press releases do not reflect what is happening on the ground, should they report it without comment? Should they ignore it, or should they report it with a commentary highlighting the lack of veracity, in brief, that the official statement is wrong, if not an outright lie?

Traditionally, newsroom ethics draw a sharp line between editorial opinions and news reporting.

Most practitioners in the media now acknowledge that the basis of all reporting implies a point of view, and that objectivity — as such — is beyond human capability. Media simply cannot ever know everything about any situation; but, this limitation does not condone the introduction of the personal views of reporters or editors, whether in agreement or not, with an official position.

This is not considering points of view. It is focusing on physical happenings, on specific deeds, on activities the reporter has observed, which contradict the official version.

It is my view that it is the ethical responsibility of the reporter to point this out so readers, listeners or viewers will not be misled. Indeed, ignoring that obligation aligns reporters with the misleading statements of the officialdom they are supposed to cover.

CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper was criticized for using the word “lie” when reporting st

atements by former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s head Muammar Gaddafi. The Huffington Post quoted Fox news commentator Liz Trotta, who called Cooper’s coverage “really shocking” and accused him of having “no modesty.”

She is further quoted, “Any correspondent worth his salt knows that you shouldn’t be making editorial comments,” adding, “. . . though they may be lies and probably were, it’s not in his (Cooper’s) purview to say so.”

Most reporters are intelligent and learned in their area of coverage. The policy Trotta recommends was responsible for leading this country into war with Iraq and causing thousands of casualties.James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times was also critical, but largely because Cooper used the words “lies” and “lying” too often. Rainey’s comment: “How refreshing it would be to see that same piercing candor directed at American politicians when they overtly lie.

The burden falls on reporters and editors to determine, first, whether a statement or release represents a point of view or a political position. If so, it should be reported without comment. However, if that official pronouncement describes a verifiable situation that distorts or contradicts observable evidence, then reporters must inform their audience of what they know is accurate. Anderson Cooper deserves our collective thanks.

Charles L. Klotzer is the founder and editor/publisher emeritus of St. Louis Journalism Review.

Media Knew in the 1930s: Tobacco is a Poison

Column

Opening statements were made on Jan. 31 in a 13-year-old suit filed in 1998 by the City of St. Louis against American Tobacco, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In all, 37 plaintiffs, primarily hospitals, are targeting 11 tobacco manufacturers.

“Ken Brostron, a lawyer representing the hospitals, argued that tobacco companies knew as far back as the 1950s that cigarettes were addictive and harmful, yet continued to manufacture and market them,” the Post states.

Mr. Brostron is wrong. It was known much before 1950 that cigarettes were poison, but the media suppressed this information in collusion with the tobacco industry. My apologies to long-time readers of this journal, who might remember that we reported on this some years ago. But the core of this information deserves repetition. Mr. Brostron probably never heard of George Seldes, the father of media criticism and journalism reviews, who died in 1995 at the age of 104. From time to time, we have reported on Seldes accomplishments and life.

First a word about Seldes. As a reporter for major newspapers, he offended every tyrant, was banished from the Soviet Union during the early years, barely made it out of Fascist Italy and in 1928 left the Chicago Tribune after the paper published full articles from the U.S. oil companies, but censored his dispatches from Mexico. He attacked the National Association of Manufacturers for assisting Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

After his reports from the civil war in Spain were suppressed by some newspaper chains on the East Coast, he returned to the States and published the In Fact journal from 1940 to 1950. It carried the subtitle, “For The Millions Who Want A Free Press,” which he changed in 1943 to “An Antidote for Falsehood in the Daily Press,” and later that year to “Exposes Native Fascism, Corrupt Press, Lanor-Baiters.”

Seldes revealed a clause in the contract between the tobacco companies and newspapers that “no news and no adverse comments on the tobacco habit must ever be published.”

Seldes reported on many other findings on the effects of smoking. Hal Bieler, for example, analyzed at length the embalming effect of smoke on lungs (In Fact, Vol. VI, No. 25, March 29,1943). “The action of smoke on the delicate air-cells of the lung is quite similar to the action of smoke on a fresh ham hung in the smoke house to be ‘cured.’ The irritants which the smoke contains shrivel and dry and preserve and harden the exterior of the ham . . . When smoke is inhaled into the lung the same irritating process takes p

lace . . . When the stethoscope is applied ‘smokers rales’ are heard over the entire respiratory tree . . . He is unaware that his lung lymphatics are getting black with tar-like irritants; that the actual breathing capacity of his air-cells has been diminished more than one-half of the normal, and that his resistance to lung-cancer, respiratory diseases or to severe infections has been decreased to more than one-half of the normal.”

As early as the 1920s, scientists knew about the harmful effects of smoking. In 1927, Johann Plesch, head of the medical school of the University of Berlin, treated Seldes for malaria. Plesch told him to cut down on tobacco, because it contained deadly poisons.

In 1938, a study by Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University showed that heavy cigarette smoking severely limited a person’s life span. By 1941, this study was published only by the Washington Post and a number of country papers that received no tobacco advertising. It was suppressed by “the NYSun, Post, News, Mirror, Journal-American and Herald Tribune,” Seldes wrote.

In response to Seldes naming the New York Times as suppressing news of Pearl’s finding presented to the New York Academy of Medicine in 1938, the NYT managing editor James (last names only cited) sent him copies of a mention of less than two inches. However, after non-commercial weeklies played up the story, it ran a 10-inch story under the heading, “Tobacco called a life shortener.”

In 1942, physician Edward J. Grace writes in In Fact, among others, “Cancer of the mouth, lips, tongue, larynx and pharynx is more prevalent in smokers than non-smokers.”

Reviewing volumes 6, 7, 8 and 10 of In Fact (the only ones in our possession), which published 102 issues during the war years 1942 through 1944, we found 36 articles lambasting the cigarette industry, revealing the dangers of smoking and the influence of advertising.

Later, others studied smoking. Only after Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill in 1947 documented in a statistical analysis and in 1950 Evarts A. Graham and medical student Ernst L. Wynder published a landmark article, did the public become more aware that smoking was related to lung cancer.

Reacting to his unrelenting attacks on business and government actions, President Roosevelt ordered the FBI to investigate In Fact, causing the publication, which once had a circulation of 176,000, to fold. Seldes reports, however, have endured the test of time.

Charles L. Klotzer is the founder and editor/publisher emeritus of the St. Louis Journalism Review.