Jackson Free Press

This year's annual Project Censored list of the most under-reported news stories includes the widening wealth gap, the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, and President Obama's war on whistleblowers—all stories that actually received considerable news coverage.

Project Censored isn't only about stories that were deliberately buried or ignored. It's about stories the media have covered poorly through a sort of false objectivity that skews the truth. Journalists do cry out against injustice, on occasion, but they don't always do it well.

Academics and students from 18 universities and community colleges across the country pore through hundreds of submissions of overlooked and under-reported stories annually to pick the top 25 stories and curates them into themed clusters. This year's book, "Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fearful Times," just hit bookstores.

Brooke Gladstone, host of the radio program "On the Media" and writer of the graphic novel cum news media critique, "The Influencing Machine," said the story of Manning (who now goes by the first name Chelsea) was the perfect example of the media trying to cover a story right, but getting it mostly wrong. Manning's career was sacrificed for sending 700,000 classified documents about the Iraq war to WikiLeaks. But the media focused largely on Manning's trial and subsequent change in gender identity.

The media mangling of Manning is No. 1 on the Project Censored list, but its shallow coverage is not unique. The news mainstream media are in a crisis, particularly in the U.S., and it's getting worse.

WATCHING THE WATCHDOGS

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts an annual analysis of trends in news, found that newsrooms have shed 30 percent of their staff in the last decade. In 2012, the number of reporters in the U.S. dipped to its lowest level since 1978, with fewer than 40,000 reporters nationally. This creates a sense of desperation in the newsroom, and in the end, it's the public that loses.

"What won out is something much more palpable to the advertisers," says Robert McChesney, an author, longtime media-reform advocate, professor at University of Illinois and host of Media Matters from 2000 to 2012. Blandness beat out fearless truth-telling.

Even worse than kowtowing to advertisers is the false objectivity the media try to achieve, McChesney said, neutering news to stay "neutral" on a topic. This handcuffs journalists into not drawing conclusions, even when those conclusions are well-supported by the facts.

To report a story, they rely on words of others to make claims, limiting what they report. "You allow people in power to set the range of legitimate debate, and you report on it," McChesney said.

For example, reporting on the increasing gulf between the rich and the poor is easy, but talking about why the rich are getting richer is where journalists worry about objectivity, Gladstone said.

"I think that there is a desire to stay away from stories that will inspire rhetoric of class warfare," she said.

Unable to tell the story of a trend and unable to talk about rising inequality for fear of appearing partisan, reporters often fail to connect the dots for their readers.

The story, "Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent," is a good example of the need for a media watchdog. Researchers point to interest payments as the primary way wealth is transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. It's how the banks are picking the pockets of the 99 percent. But if no politician calls out banks on this practice, if no advocacy group gains enough traction, shouldn't it be the media's role to protect the public and sound the battle cry?

"So much of media criticism is really political commentary squeezed through a media squeezer," Gladstone said.

For American journalism to revive itself, it has to move beyond its corporate ties. It has to become a truly free press. It's time to end the myth that corporate journalism is the only way for media to be objective, monolithic, and correct.

The failures of that prescription are clear in Project Censored's top 10 under-reported stories of the year:

1.

Manning and the Failure of Corporate Media

Untold stories of Iraqi civilian deaths by American soldiers, U.S. diplomats pushing aircraft sales on foreign royalty, uninvestigated abuse by Iraqi allies, the perils of the rise in private war contractors—this is what Manning exposed. They challenged the U.S. political elite, and they were enabled by a sacrifice.

Manning got a 35-year prison sentence for the revelation of state secrets to WikiLeaks, a story told countless times in corporate media. Though The New York Times partnered with WikiLeaks to release stories based on the documents, many published 2010 through 2011, news from the leaks have since slowed to a trickle—a waste of more than 700,000 pieces of classified intelligence giving unparalleled views of America's costly wars.

The media took a scathing indictment of U.S. military policy and spun it into a story about Manning's politics and patriotism. As Rolling Stone pointed out ("Did the Media Fail Bradley Manning?"), Manning initially took the trove of leaks to The Washington Post and The New York Times, only to be turned away.

Alexa O'Brien, a former Occupy activist, scooped most of the media by actually attending Manning's trial. She produced tens of thousands of words in transcriptions of the court hearings, one of the only reporters on the beat.

2.

Richest Global 1 Percent Hide Billions in Tax Havens

Global corporate fat cats hold $21 trillion to $32 trillion in offshore havens, money hidden from government taxation that would benefit people around the world, according James S. Henry, the former chief economist of the global management firm McKinsey & Company.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained a leak in April 2013, revealing how widespread the buy-in was to these tax havens. The findings were damning: government officials in Canada, Russia, and other countries have embraced offshore accounts, the world's top banks (including Deutsche Bank) have worked to maintain them, and the tax havens are used in Ponzi schemes.

Moving money offshore has implications that ripped through the world economy. Part of Greece's economic collapse was due to these tax havens, ICIJ reporter Gerard Ryle told Gladstone. "It's because people don't want to pay taxes," he said. "You avoid taxes by going offshore and playing by different rules."

U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, introduced legislation to combat the practice, SB1533, The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, but so far the bill has had little play in the media. Researcher James Henry said the hidden wealth was a "huge black hole" in the world economy that has never been measured, which could generate income tax revenues between $190 billion to $280 billion a year.

3.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Take 600 corporate advisers, mix in officials from 11 international governments, let it bake for about two years, and out pops international partnerships that threaten to cripple progressive movements worldwide.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a trade agreement, but leaked texts show it may allow foreign investors to use "investor-state" tribunals to extract extravagant extra damages for "expected future profits," according to the Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

The trade watch group investigated the TPP and is the main advocate in opposition of its policies. The AFL-CIO, Sierra Club and other organizations have also had growing concerns about the level of access granted to corporations in these agreements. With extra powers granted to foreign firms, the possibility that companies would continue moving offshore could grow. But even with the risks of outsized corporate influence, the U.S. has a strong interest in the TPP in order to maintain trade agreements with Asia.

The balancing act between corporate and public interests is at stake, but until the U.S. releases more documents from negotiations, Americans will remain in the dark.

4.

President Obama's War on Whistleblowers

President Obama has invoked the Espionage Act of 1917 more than every other president combined. Seven times, Obama has pursued leakers with the act, against Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Bradley Manning, Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and most recently, Edward Snowden. All had ties to the State Department, FBI, CIA or NSA, and all of them leaked to journalists.

"Neither party is raising hell over this. This is the sort of story that sort of slips through the cracks," McChesney said.

Pro Publica covered the issue, constructing timelines and mapping out the various arrests and indictments. But where Project Censored points out the lack of coverage is in Obama's hypocrisy—only a year before, he signed The Whistleblower Protection Act.

Later on, he said he wouldn't follow every letter of the law in the bill he had just signed. "Certain provisions in the Act threaten to interfere with my constitutional duty to supervise the executive branch," Obama said. "As my administration previously informed the Congress, I will interpret those sections consistent with my authority."

5.

Antigovernment and Hate Groups on Rise across U.S.

Hate groups in the U.S. are on the rise, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are 1,007 known hate groups operating across the country, it wrote, including neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes, and others.

Since 2000, those groups have grown by over half, and there was a "powerful resurgence" of Patriot groups, such as those involved in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Worst of all, the huge growth in armed militias seems to have conspicuous timing with Obama's election. "The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, has grown 813 percent since Obama was elected — from 149 in 2008 to 1,360 in 2012," the SPLC reported.

6.

Billionaires' Rising Wealth Intensifies Poverty and Inequality

The world's billionaires added $241 billion to their collective net worth in 2012. That's an economic recovery, right?

That gain, coupled with the world's richest peoples' new total worth of $1.9 trillion (more than the GDP of Canada), wasn't reported by some kooky socialist group, but by Bloomberg News. But few journalists are asking the important question: Why?

Project Censored points to journalist George Monbiot, who highlights a reduction of taxes and tax enforcement, the privatization of public assets, and the weakening of labor unions. His conclusions are backed up by the United Nations' Trade and Development Report from 2012, which noted how the trend hurts everyone: "Recent empirical and analytical work reviewed here mostly shows a negative correlation between inequality and growth."

7.

Merchant of Death and Nuclear Weapons

The report highlighted by Project Censored on the threat of nuclear war is an example not of censorship, strictly, but a desire for media reform.

A study from the The Physicians for Social Responsibility said 1 billion people could starve in the decade after a nuclear detonation. Corn production in the U.S. would decline by an average of 10 percent for an entire decade and food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world's poorest.

This is not journalism in the classic sense, Gladstone said. In traditional journalism, as it's played out since the early 20th century, news requires an element of something new in order to garner reporting — not a looming threat or danger.

So in this case, what the project identified was the need for a new kind of reporting it called "solutions journalism."

"Solutions journalism," Sarah van Gelder wrote in the foreword to Censored 2014, "must investigate not only the individual innovations, but also the larger pattern of change — the emerging ethics, institutions, and ways of life that are coming into existence."

8.

Bank Interests Inflate Global Prices by 35 to 40 Percent

Does 35 percent of everything bought in the United States go to interest? Professor Margrit Kennedy of the University of Hanover thinks so, and she says it's a major funnel of money from the 99 percent to the rich.

In her 2012 book, "Occupy Money," Kennedy wrote that tradespeople, suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers along the chain of production rely on credit. Her figures were initially drawn from the German economy, but Ellen Brown of the Web of Debt and Global Research said she found similar patterns in the U.S.

This "hidden interest" has sapped the growth of other industries, she said, lining the pockets of the financial sector.

So if interest is stagnating so many industries, why would journalists avoid the topic? Few economists have echoed her views, and few experts emerged to back up her assertions. Notably, she's a professor in an architectural school, with no formal credentials in economics.

From her own website, she said she became an "expert" in economics "through her continuous research and scrutiny."

Without people in power pushing the topic, McChesney said that a mainstream journalist would be seen as going out on a limb.

"The reporters raise an issue the elites are not raising themselves, then you're ideological, have an axe to grind, sort of a hack," he said. "It makes journalism worthless on pretty important issues."

9.

Icelanders Vote to Include Commons in Their Constitution

In 2012, Icelandic citizens voted in referendum to change the country's 1944 constitution. When asked, "In the new constitution, do you want natural resources that are not privately owned to be declared national property?" its citizens voted 81 percent in favor.

Project Censored says this is important for us to know, but in the end, U.S. journalism is notably American-centric. Even the Nieman Watchdog, a foundation for journalism at Harvard University, issued a report in 2011 citing the lack of reporting on a war the U.S. funneled over $4 trillion into over the past decade, not to mention the cost in human lives.

If we don't pay attention to our own wars, why exactly does Project Censored think we'd pay attention to Iceland?

"The constitutional reforms are a direct response to the nation's 2008 financial crash," Project Censored wrote, "when Iceland's unregulated banks borrowed more than the country's gross domestic product from international wholesale money markets."

10.

A "Culture of Cruelty" along Mexico - U.S. Border

The plight of Mexican border crossings usually involves three types of stories in U.S. press: deaths in the stretch of desert beyond the border, the horrors of drug cartels and heroic journeys of border crossings by sympathetic workers. But a report released a year ago by the organization. "No More Death's snags the 10th spot for overlooked stories.

The report asserts that people arrested by Border Patrol while crossing were denied water and told to let their sick die. "No More Deaths" conducted more than 12,000 interviews to form the basis of its study in three Mexican cities: Nacos, Nogales and Agua Prieta. The report cites grossly ineffective oversight from the Department of Homeland Security. This has received some coverage, from Salon showcasing video of Border Patrol agents destroying jugs of water meant for crossers to a recent New York Times piece citing a lack of oversight for Border Patrol's excessive force.

The ACLU lobbied the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to call international attention to the plight of these border crossers at the hands of U.S. law enforcement. If ever an issue flew under the radar, this is it.

The Most Under-reported Stories in Jackson

With few exceptions, slow news days are rare in the capital city.

Jackson's Falling Crime Rate

Everybody loves to talk about how crime is out of control in the capital city, but aside from ignoring the systemic causes of crime, it's just flat-out wrong to say that crime is on the rise. The most recent information from the Jackson Police Department show that total major crimes are down more than 10 percent from last year, dropping from 8,472 at this time last year to 7,585 this year. And despite occasional spikes in various crimes, the crime rate has fallen steadily and dramatically in Jackson since the 1990s.

The Beer Renaissance

Soon, Lucky Town Brewing Co. will become the first microbrewery operating in the capital city in recent memory. Meanwhile, Kiln's Lazy Magnolia is earning a national reputation for the quality of its suds, and Jackson now has a store dedicated to the legal-at-last hobby of home brewing called Brewhaha. Those stories are widely reported. The story that has been under-reported is what a healthy craft-brewing culture means for social and economic progress in Mississippi. Microbreweries are a respectable portion of the U.S. beverage market, with about $10.2 billion in annual sale. Also, more than 2,300 craft breweries—which include brewpubs, regional craft breweries and microbreweries—operated during 2012 and 409 new breweries opened in 2012.

Continued Assault on Reproductive Rights

The Jackson Women's Health Organization has garnered national and international attention as the state's last abortion provider, but JWHO is not the final frontier of reproductive rights in Mississippi. Starting July 1, a new state law requires health-care professionals to collect and test DNA from the umbilical cord of mothers under age 16. Supporters of the measure, which included Gov. Phil Bryant, believe it will help curb Mississippi's high teen birth rate. Reproductive-rights advocates call the cord-blood law an invasion of privacy.

Juvenile Justice Makes Strides

Mississippi has a very troubled history with respect to youth corrections at Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, Oakley Training School (now called the Oakley Youth Development Center) and Hinds County's Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center, just to name a few. However, there is positive news about the way Mississippi treats kids in its juvenile-justice systems.

An August 2013 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that Mississippi is one of three states where the number of children sent to youth correctional facilities fell by more than 75 percent between 1997 and 2011. The overall national rate fell as well, by 48 percent in that time period.

State Democrats Surge

The state Democratic Party may have overplayed its hand a bit by chest-beating about the party's successes in several major cities during this year's mayor's races in Jackson, Vicksburg, Ocean Springs, Hattiesburg and Starkville. The Dems' victories with Jason Shelton in Tupelo and Percy Bland, the first black mayor elected in Meridian, are notable accomplishments, but that's not really where the story is. Rather, it's the quiet success of the party's 1876 Plan, which involved ensuring that each of Mississippi's 1876 voting precincts has Democratic presence. In some of the state's conservative areas, having even one brave soul stepping up to carry the mantle of the party of Obama seems worthy of more coverage than it has received.

And it's newsworthy in its own right that the state's Democrats are increasingly running as progressives, rather than trying to out-conservative Republicans.

Gun Laws Confusing Law Enforcement

Are liberal gun laws having a chilling effect on the investigation of violent crime?

As predicted, a new state law designed to clarify the definition of open-carry of firearms appears to have created confusion among law-enforcement officials. Several people whose loved ones were killed by handguns have told the Jackson Free Press that police officials used the new open-carry law and the state's Castle Doctrine as an excuse to wash their hands of a prolonged investigation into the facts.

Over the summer, 20-year-old Quardious Thomas became the victim of a homeowner who claims Thomas was breaking into his automobile. In that case, Jackson detectives declined to pursue charges against the homeowner, citing homeowners' right under the Castle Doctrine to protect their home and vehicles. This, despite the fact that legal experts have pointed out that the Castle Doctrine requires that vehicles be occupied to justify deadly force.

In a separate case, William Brown was shot and killed as the result of an apparent feud. His family question whether police declined to press charges against his assailant because people have the right to self-defense and, under the new state law, they also have the right openly carry firearms.