Too hot to handle

Project Censored names the top stories buried by the mainstream media in 2000

By Gabriel Roth

The stock market went down, then up, then down again. Survivor’s ratings went up, and up, and up. And the mainstream media never averted their gaze, afraid to miss a single bump or dip.

Meanwhile, out of the frame, two trends remained constant in 2000: big corporations and the government continued to put profits first and people second — and people continued to fight back. But you wouldn’t know that if you got your information exclusively from daily papers and TV news.

Some of the stories you missed: the bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia may not have been an accident. The United States could have stopped genocide in Rwanda. An independent study found that genetically modified foods cause serious health problems in rats. And multinational companies are fighting to privatize and commodify the world’s water supply.

Those stories are all on Project Censored’s Web site (www.project censored.org), which features the 25th annual list of the year’s most underreported news stories. Project Censored is a media-studies program, based at Sonoma State University, whose members comb alternative weeklies, trade newsletters, scientific journals, and activist magazines to ferret out the big stories that didn’t appear anywhere else.

Censorship in the United States is a slippery thing. No government agency blacks out offending phrases before they can appear in the New York Times — although for a brief period in 1999, Army propaganda specialists worked at CNN, according to one of the stories on the Project Censored list.

But two important factors prevent mainstream news outlets from covering tough stories. First, papers end up reflecting the politics of their owners, whose wishes trickle down from the publisher to the editor-in-chief to the national and metro editors to the reporters — who know very well what kind of stories will get on the front page and what kind will get hacked to pieces and buried on page A13. Second, shrinking budgets mean fewer reporters have to cover more stories in less time. Without the time or resources to pursue a lengthy investigation, they rely more and more on press releases and publicists, the official cover stories of the corporate and government establishment.

So even if the stories on this year’s list received some coverage in a few daily papers, none of them got the ongoing attention they deserved. They weren’t blacked out because they were poorly reported: many of the stories on past years’ lists have turned out to be major scoops. Most were thoroughly documented; most were written by credible journalists.

“It’s becoming increasingly easy to find stories,” project director Peter Phillips says. “As the media becomes more and more consolidated and corporatized, it all starts to look the same.”

Following are Project Censored’s top 10 stories for 2000, with URLs for the stories themselves (when available) and for more information.

 

1) World Bank and multinational corporations seek to privatize water

More than one billion people lack access to fresh drinking water, according to the United Nations — and that number is expected to double in the next 10 years. World water consumption is growing more than twice as fast as the population.

For human beings this is a crisis. For corporations, though, it’s an opportunity. The world’s biggest companies increasingly see water as the world’s largest untapped commodity. They’re moving to take over local water supplies in the name of profit. When municipal water services are privatized, rates double or triple, quality standards drop, and customers who can’t pay are cut off. And governments are lining up to help. Every year public officials from all over the world convene with big-business leaders and World Bank representatives at meetings of the World Water Council, a water think tank dominated by commercial interests.

The corporations involved aren’t shy about their plans. In Vandana Shiva’s story in Canadian Dimension magazine, Monsanto’s Robert Farley described his company’s strategy this way: “Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water.”

But the privatizers don’t always have an easy time of it. In 1999, Bechtel Group took over the public water system in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with the help of the World Bank. The company immediately doubled water rates. Bolivians didn’t take this lying down. Last year, general strikes repeatedly brought the city to a standstill. The government ultimately conceded and nullified Bechtel’s contract.

Cochabamba’s water war was one of the most significant victories yet for the opponents of corporate-driven globalization. Yet most US coverage came from the Associated Press’s Peter McFarren, whose stories uncritically accepted the government’s characterization of the protesters as drug traffickers. McFarren resigned from the wire service when it came out that he was actively lobbying the Bolivian Congress in support of a commercial proposal, from which he stood to benefit financially, to ship Bolivian water to Chile. Although it wasn’t mentioned by Project Censored, the McFarren conflict of interest was first reported by the Narco News Bulletin*(www.narconews.com/mcfarrenstory1.html).

Maude Barlow, Prime,@July 10, 2000 (www.ifg.org/bgsummary.html); Pratap Chatterjee, San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 31, 2000 5www.sfbg.com/News/34/35/bech1.html); Vandana Shiva, Canadian Dimension, February 2000 7www.purefood.org/Monsanto/waterfish.cfm); Jim Shultz, Canadian Dimension, February 2000 .www.democracyctr.org/onlinenews/water.html), In These Times, May 15, 2000, This, July/August 2000; Daniel Zoll, San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 31, 2000 %www.sfbg.com/News/34/35/bech2.html).

Mainstream coverage: Toronto Globe and Mail, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Examiner, Toronto Star.

More info: 7he Blue Planet Project (www.canadians.org/blueplanet).

 

2) OSHA fails to protect US workers

Terry Feeny lost three of his fingers molding wheel rims at a Titan Wheel International factory in Saltville, Virginia. He was a skilled mechanic, but he had never been trained to use the rim-molding machine, which had no safety guard and a missing stop button.

Compared to some other Titan workers, Feeny was lucky. Don Baysinger was a tire builder at the company’s plant in Des Moines, Iowa. He was pinned between two tire-tread machines for more than 20 minutes. His chest was crushed, and he died two days later.

Employees at Titan plants across the country are steadily racking up a shocking record of injuries and deaths. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is charged with protecting workers from such accidents and ensuring that workplaces are safe. Christopher D. Cook’s Progressive story surveys the problems at Titan plants around the country and asks: what’s OSHA doing about it? The answer: not much.

On-the-job accidents kill 6000 workers every year, and 10 times as many die from diseases acquired at work. But the federal and state agencies charged with protecting the country’s 102 million workers employ just 2300 inspectors.

OSHA fared worse than ever under the supposedly worker-friendly Clinton administration. Clinton’s OSHA made fewer workplace inspections and reduced or dismissed more fines than any other, according to a 1999 Public Citizen report.

The government certainly didn’t do much for Terry Feeny, Don Baysinger, or their co-workers. Virginia’s OSHA didn’t inspect the Titan plant until months after Feeny lost his fingers. Inspectors blamed the faulty machinery, and fined the company a paltry $2250. Feeny himself was laid off; the company ended his workers’ compensation less than five months later. Iowa’s OSHA found that machinery was also at fault in Baysinger’s death and levied a fine of $20,000. Two years after the incident, Titan finally agreed to pay half that.

Christopher D. Cook, the Progressive,RFebruary 2000 (www.progressive.org/cook0200.htm). Cook is now city editor at the Bay Guardian.

`ore info: Public Citizen report, “Reinventing OSHA” (www.citizen.org/hrg/PUBLICATIONS/1494.htm)

 

3) US Army psychological-operations personnel worked at CNN

In 1999, as NATO’s war in Kosovo was ending, five interns went to work at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters. These interns weren’t college students looking to pad their résumés — they were United States Army propaganda specialists.

The troops were members of the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, charged with spreading “selected information” to the public. And working at the world’s largest news network, they had a chance to do just that. “They worked as regular employees of CNN,” an army spokesperson told Abe de Vries, a reporter for the reputable Dutch newspaper Trouw.¦www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/devries/psyops2.htm) “Conceivably they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.”

It’s not clear what the agents actually did at the network. CNN executives, who knew about the soldiers’ visit, insist they didn’t make any journalistic decisions or write any news copy. But the Army, at least, considered the internships a great success. At a military symposium early last year, psychological-operations (“psyops”) specialist Christopher St. John described the CNN mission as a textbook example of military-media cooperation, according to Le monde du renseignement, a French newsletter covering intelligence agencies.

CNN’s coverage of the war in Kosovo was criticized for oversimplifying the issues, ignoring objections to the war, and uncritically parroting NATO officials. As de Vries wrote, the real question about the soldiers’ tenure as journalists is this: “Did the military learn from the TV people how to hold viewers’ attention? Or did the psyops people teach CNN how to help the U.S. government garner political support?” Probably both.

Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch, February 16, 2000, and March 1, 2000 &www.counterpunch.org/cnnpsyops.html).

Foreign coverage: Trouw8(www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/devries/psyops2.htm) (Netherlands), Japan Economic Newswire, Le monde du renseignement (France), the Guardian (UK).

Mainstream coverage: National Public Radio, Tampa Tribune, TV Guide.

More info: CNN responds to FAIR ,www.fair.org/activism/psyops-response.html)

 

4) Did the US deliberately bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade?

On May 7, 1999, US planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. President Clinton called the bombing “a tragic mistake,” the result of faulty maps provided by US intelligence services.

That was good enough for the American media, but it wasn’t good enough for their overseas counterparts. Working together, reporters from the London Observer and Copenhagen’s Politiken found US and NATO government and military sources who told a different story. One official at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, perhaps piqued at the assertion that his agency had botched its job, called the faulty-map story “a damned lie.”

In fact, according to these high-ranking sources, NATO deliberately targeted the Chinese embassy, which was serving as a rebroadcast station for the Yugoslav army.

After the Observer broke the story, the Associated Press wire service picked it up, but few major papers ran it. The Washington Post gave it 90 words in an international-news-briefs section, under the headline, nato denies story on embassy bombing. The New York Times didn’t mention it at all. When the press-watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting asked the Times why it ignored the story, the paper’s foreign editor described the Observer’s piece as “not terribly well-sourced, by our standards at least.”

“It sounds like the Times might be holding out for a named official source,” FAIR’s Seth Ackerman told In These Times, “which is a standard of evidence that the Times likes to apply in cases where they would rather not report the story at all.”

Seth Ackerman, In These Times, June 26, 2000 9www.inthesetimes.com/ackerman2415.html); Joel Bleifuss, In These Times,¼December 12, 1999; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting staff report, February 9, 2000 (www.fair.org/activism/china-response2.html); Yoichi Shimatsu, Pacific News Service, October 20, 1999.

Foreign coverage: the Observer (UK), Politiken (Denmark), the Glasgow Herald (Scotland), the Scotsman (Scotland), South China Morning Post, the Times (UK).

 

5) US taxpayers underwrite global nuclear-power-plant sales

The people of the United States don’t want nuclear power anymore. Not a single nuke plant has been built in this country since the 1979 meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island. What’s the industry to do?

Go abroad, of course. American power companies are bringing nuclear power to the Third World — with a lot of help from the US taxpayer.

The Export-Import Bank, a little-known government agency, provides loans, insurance, and other subsidies to foreign governments that want a nuclear plant. Between 1959 and 1993, the bank spent $7.7 billion to sell American-made reactors abroad, typically by financing their purchase by cash-strapped developing-world governments. With almost no oversight, the bank directs taxpayer dollars toward irresponsible and inefficient projects, few of which could ever pass domestic safety standards. While the US government has given in to public pressure and stopped pushing nuclear power at home, it’s happy to send it overseas to keep US contractors afloat.

In Turkey, Ex-Im approved a preliminary loan in support of Westinghouse’s $3.2 billion Akkuyu plant, on a site near an active fault line. Last summer, in response to a groundswell of opposition to the plant, the Turkish government finally declared it too expensive and too dangerous — despite lobbying on Westinghouse’s behalf by then-vice-president Al Gore.

In the Czech Republic, the bank backed a $300 million loan for the Temelin plant, which European nuclear authorities have deemed dangerous and unnecessary. Nearly a billion dollars over budget, the plant went live last year, sparking massive international protests.

There’s a simple reason you won’t see this story on the TV news. CBS is owned by Westinghouse and NBC by General Electric — both of which build nuclear plants with the Ex-Im Bank’s help.

In February of this year, President George W. Bush announced that he hoped to cut the bank’s budget by 25 percent.

Ken Silverstein and Ian Urbina, the Progressive, March 2000.

 

Page 1 | 2 | Next