cover image 20 Years of Censored News

20 Years of Censored News

Carl Jensen, Project Censored. Seven Stories Press, $16.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-1-888363-52-4

As a professor of communications studies at Sonoma State University in California, Jensen (Censored--The News That Didn't Make the News and Why, 1900-1996) founded Project Censored, a media research project that has drawn as judges the likes of Noam Chomsky, Hugh Downs, Jessica Mitford and Bill Moyers. In this examination of print and electronic news coverage from 1976 through 1996, each chapter opens with the Associated Press's list of the 10 most important stories of the year, followed by Project Censored's list of the 10 most significant stories ignored by the mainstream media. The book contends, for example, that during 1994 ""the news media flooded America with O.J. Simpson sensationalism,"" while a host of domestic issues were overlooked (e.g., the EPA's retreat on the ozone crisis, the resurgence of TB). The text demonstrates a pattern of media outlets wary of offending large corporations, of government agencies withholding or distorting stories and of a military causing more environmental pollution than the corporate offenders. Parenti controversially charges in his introduction, ""Media bias... [favors] management over labor, corporations over corporate critics, affluent whites over inner-city poor, officialdom over protesters."" The text is supplemented by stinging and witty cartoons by Tom Tomorrow. (Dec.)