A week before Thanksgiving, I spent 50 minutes interviewing the directors of Project Censored, Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff. I opened our conversation on Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers more than 50 years ago, and his death this past June and identifying those who are picking up the torch.
The Projected Censored directors noted that Ellsberg wrote a piece for Project Censored 2014, which had a subtitle that introduced the idea of “Fearless Speech and Faithful Times.” In that edition, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning’s leaking of classified documents to Wikileaks was featured… a case Project Censored has continued to feature one way or another.
Huff and Roth noted that Ellsberg predates the founding of the nonprofit media watchdog organization. Project Censored was founded in 1976 while the Pentagon Papers were released five years before that. The theme of Ellsberg’s essay was on the importance of civil courage and juxtaposing that with this country’s pageantry around courage on the battlefield and courage displayed by law enforcement and other forms of paramilitary courage.
“Ellsberg pointed out that the courage that whistleblowers have is a kind of civil courage in the civic arena that is among the highest forms of patriotism,” Huff explained.
Huff went on to say that oftentimes, people who are exhibiting this kind of civic courage are putting bigger broader principles ahead of their own well-being, their own personal gain or their own personal pursuits because there’s another bigger idea that they just have to speak to.
“Ellsberg was speaking about the corruption and the violence and the illegality in the lies around the Vietnam War. Julian Assange and Wikileaks were speaking out about lies and war crimes around yet another war.
The leaders of Project Censored noted that Ellsberg was a champion of free speech rights and championed civil courage to the very end. Huff and Roth noted that Ellsberg endorsed Kevin Gostztla’s Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange this past year, jointly published by The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
“It meant a lot to us that Ellsberg was such a champion for that book because going back 50 years, that principle of civil courage resonated with Ellsberg so much that he was a champion of it until his last days… that to us epitomizes not just civil courage but epitomizes media democracy in action, and it epitomizes the kind of behavior that we think we need to see more of in the journalistic class,” Huff said.
I got the Project Censored directors to speak at length about their joint introduction in Project Censored 2024–State of the Free Press, which they entitled, What if Journalism Disappeared? This was a provocative question that, to my mind, spoke to a near future possibility as journalists are killed with impunity the world over for doing their jobs.
In that chapter, Huff and Roth discussed the rise of news deserts, the American public’s divided attention and the emergence of “news snacking.”
Roth broke down the term “news snacking,” explaining that the news snack is what people encounter while they’re doing other things like scrolling through their social feed while waiting in line at the supermarket or whatever.
“News snacking” is a metaphor that captures this idea that instead of consciously sitting down to a well-balanced meal of trustworthy informative journalism, what we’re getting is the potato chip variety. When one opens up a can of processed chips, they have a stomach ache but they feel strangely hungry… not satisfied, Roth explained.
Huff said, “The American public seems to have pretty historically low levels of trust or low opinions of the media at large. I think it’s an important distinction to make that it’s not so much that we’re seeing the death of journalism per se, and if we are it’s important to point out that what we’re seeing also is the death of the notion of the American public’s understanding of what journalism is in the first place. So if Americans are increasingly attracted to news snacking, and they have a steady diet of what we call junk food news. The corporate media tend to focus on more news abuse stories with spin propaganda and hyper-partisan news reporting.”
Huff cosigned to my sentiment that the current news ecosystem is such that people don’t know where to go or what to trust as true.
“The current ecosystem encourages people to go to places that align with what they agree with because they feel like there’s less questioning involved and because it feels safer to them,” Huff said. “But that’s not what journalism is supposed to be about.
“What Andy and I are trying to get across to people is that we need media-literate journalists just as much as we need media-literate citizens. Critical media literacy helps tune the public to what journalism actually is, what it looks like and how it functions, which then, in turn, should allow Americans to be able to find those sources on their own, and not be spoon-fed corporate propaganda or state propaganda or any kind of propaganda for that matter,” Huff continued.
Huff doesn’t think we do a great job with journalism education and that we, as Americans, don’t do a very good job of conveying to young people the importance and significance of journalism as it’s connected to civic engagement and participation in our democratic society.
In fairness to journalism in the United States, Roth and Huff note issues we are seeing aren’t just Americans choosing to consume junk food news, but that the industry-wide conglomeration of journalism is restricting the choices that Americans have in the first place.
As news media of every stripe are consolidated or bought up by other news media giants, news deserts are forming at a record pace. At the end of it all, the remaining newsrooms are forced to do more with less, which, in the end, just means less news for all.
“We have a major crisis going on within our so-called mainstream system,” Huff said. “That is, unfortunately, mostly corporate for-profit dominated. That’s why we talked about the importance of independent journalists and supporting independent news outlets. But we also couple that with the importance of being critically media literate, and the journalists themselves need to be more aware of the ecosystem in which they exist and write and produce content.”
Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2024 is set to be released this week and can be purchased via projectcensored.org.
The current crop of whiny “journalists” forget the “Golden Age” of newspapers, when cities had 6 or more daily papers that shamelessly took sides, campaigned for candidates and causes, and prided themselves on lack of objectivity. Readers had to think for themselves. A period of print consolidation and limited broadcast competition led “journalists” to think they had a “special” role to filter and choose the news.
Now that anybody can publish a journal, the traditional “journalists” are running scared, attacking the new technology with the same fervor and irrationality that saddle makers and horseshoes attacked the automobile. Somehow, a much freer publishing environment leads to claims of “censorship”, a bad thing (unless it was Vijaya Gadde killing Twitter references to Hunter’s laptop—at least in the eyes of the biased “journalists”.)
This article is all just navel gazing by “journalists” who resent that new competition has eroded their cushy sinecures, enabled others to publish easily, and limited their ability to control the flow, tone, and bias in information dissemination. Quit whining and improve your own product, while you still have a chance!
Speaking of censorship, Peter Byrne, a long time contributor to the Pacific Sun and Sonoma County’s Bohemia, was the guest on Project Censored’s weekly radio program where he was interviewed by Micky Huff about how his report on a recent protest in Santa Rosa against Israel’s brutal and unprecedented bombing campaign on Gaza was censored by the Bohemia and the Pacific Sun because, he was told by their publisher, that it wasn’t “balanced.” You can find the article here in CounterPunch, for Nov. 10, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/10/call-it-genocide-a-call-for-ceasefire/