Every year since 1976, Project Censored has performed an invaluable service — shedding light on the most significant news that’s somehow not fit to print. Censorship in an authoritarian society is obvious, from a distance, at least. There is a central agent or agency responsible for it, and the lines are clearly drawn. That’s not the case in America, yet some stories rarely, if ever, see the light of day, such as stories about violence against Native American women and girls, even though four out of five of them experience violence at some point in their lives, overwhelmingly at the hands of non-Native perpetrators.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re more vulnerable,” a Southern Cheyenne descendant and executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute told The Guardian. “I’d say that we’re targeted. It’s not about us being vulnerable victims. It’s about the system being designed to target and marginalize our women.”
And the media erasure of their stories is part of that same system of targeting and marginalization. While journalists work hard every day to expose injustices, they work within a system where some injustices are so deeply baked in that stories exposing them are rarely told and even more rarely expanded upon to give them their proper due.
That’s where Project Censored comes in.
“The primary purpose of Project Censored is to explore and publicize the extent of news censorship in our society by locating stories about significant issues of which the public should be aware but is not for a variety of reasons,” wrote Project Censored founder Carl Jensen on its 20th anniversary.
Thus, the list of censored stories that’s the centerpiece of its annual book, State of the Free Press | 2021, doesn’t just help us to see individual stories we might otherwise have missed. It helps us see patterns — patterns of censorship, of stories suppressed, and patterns of how those stories fit together.
This year, for example, among its Top 10 stories are two stories about violence and victimization of women of color, including the role of media neglect. There are similarities as well as differences between them, and being able to see them both together in Project Censored’s list helps us see them both more fully as distinct yet connected stories. If the Top 10 stories summarized here leave you hungry for more, Project Censored has all that and more waiting for you in State of the Free Press | 2021.
1. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
“In June 2019, the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its final report, which received widespread news coverage in the United States,” Project Censored notes. “U.S. corporate news outlets have provided nearly nothing in the way of reporting on missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States.”
This is despite a problem of similar dimensions, and complexity, along with the election of the first two Native American congresswomen, Deb Holland and Sharice Davids, who, Ms. Magazine reported, “are supporting two bills that would address the federal government’s failure to track and respond to violence against indigenous women [and] are supported by a mass movement in the U.S. and Canada raising an alarm about missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).”
Four in five Native women experience violence at some time in their lives, according to a 2016 survey by the National Institute of Justice, cited in an August 2019 Think Progress report.
“About nine in 10 Native American rape or sexual-assault victims had assailants who were white or Black,” according to a 1999 Justice Department report.
Think Progress noted, “Although the number of Native Americans murdered or missing in 2016 exceeded 3,000 — roughly the number of people who died during the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack — the Justice Department’s missing persons database logged only 116 cases that year. The sheer scale of the violence against Native women and the abysmal failure by the government to adequately address it explain why the issue was given such prominence during this week’s presidential candidates’ forum in Sioux City — the first to focus entirely on Native American issues.”
But even that didn’t grab media attention.
There are multiple complicating factors in reporting, tracking, investigating, and prosecuting, which were explored in coverage by The Guardian and YES! magazine, as well as Ms. and Think Progress.
“Campaigners, including the Sovereign Bodies Institute, the Brave Heart Society, and the Urban Indian Health Institute, identify aspects of systemic racism — including the indelible legacies of settler colonialism, issues with law enforcement, a lack of reliable and comprehensive data, and flawed policymaking — as deep-rooted sources of the crisis,” Project Censored summed up. “As YES! magazine reported, tribal communities in the United States often lack jurisdiction to respond to crimes.”
This was partially remedied in the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, known as VAWA, but Project Censored said “it left sex trafficking and other forms of sexual violence outside tribal jurisdiction, YES! magazine reported.”
The House voted to expand tribal jurisdiction in such cases in its 2019 VAWA reauthorization, but, as Ms. reported, “The bill is now languishing in the Senate, where Republicans have so far blocked a vote.”
Another facet of the problem explored by YES! is the connection between the extractive fossil fuel industry and violence against Native women. The Canadian report “showed a strong link between extraction zones on the missing and murdered women crisis in Canada,” YES! noted. “It specifically cited rotational shift work, sexual harassment in the workplace, substance abuse, economic insecurity, and a largely transient workforce as contributing to increased violence against Native women in communities near fossil fuel infrastructure.”
This environment, said Annita Lucchesi, executive director of the Sovereign Bodies Institute, “creates this culture of using and abuse. If you can use and abuse the water and land, you can use and abuse the people around you, too.”
Project Censored concluded, “As a result of limited news coverage, the United States is far from a national reckoning on its crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.”
2. Monsanto “Intelligence Center” Targeted Journalists and Activists
In its fight to avoid liability for causing cancer, the agricultural giant Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) created an “intelligence fusion center” to “monitor and discredit” journalists and activists, Sam Levin reported for The Guardian in August 2019.
“More than 18,000 people have filed suit against Monsanto, alleging that exposure to Roundup [weedkiller] caused non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that Monsanto covered up the risks by manipulating scientific data and silencing critics,” The Hill summarized. “The company has lost three high-profile cases in the past year, and Bayer is reportedly offering $8 billion to settle all outstanding claims.”
The Guardian said that Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller. This took place while also targeting Neil Young (who released the 2015 record The Monsanto Years) and creating a massive multimillion dollar spying and disinformation campaign targeting journalists writing about it, as well as scientists and advocates exposing the risks its product posed. Creating a covert army of seemingly neutral allies to attack its critics was central to Monsanto’s strategy.
The Guardian’s report was based on internal documents (primarily from 2015 to 2017) released during trial. They showed that “Monsanto planned a series of ‘actions’ to attack a book authored by Gillam prior to its release, including writing ‘talking points’ for ‘third parties’ to criticize the book and directing ‘industry and farmer customers’ on how to post negative reviews.”
In addition, Monsanto paid Google to skew search results promoting criticism of Gilliam’s work on Monsanto, and they discussed strategies for pressuring Reuters with the goal of getting her reassigned. The company “had a ‘Carey Gillam Book’ spreadsheet, with more than 20 actions dedicated to opposing her book before its publication.” They also “wrote a lengthy report about singer Neil Young’s anti-Monsanto advocacy, monitoring his impact on social media, and at one point considering ‘legal action.’ ”
The entire pool of journalists covering the third trial was also targeted in a covert influence operation, Paul Thacker reported for The Huffington Post. A purported “freelancer for the BBC” schmoozed other reporters, trying to steer them toward writing stories critical of the plaintiffs suing Monsanto. Their curiosity aroused, the other reporters discovered that “her LinkedIn account said she worked for FTI Consulting, a global business advisory firm that Monsanto and Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company, had engaged for consulting,” and she subsequently went into a digital disappearing act.
“FTI staff have previously attempted to obtain information under the guise of journalism,” Thacker added. “In January, two FTI consultants working for Western Wire — a ‘news and analysis’ website backed by the oil and gas trade group Western Energy Alliance — attempted to question an attorney who represents communities suing Exxon over climate change.”
Nor was FTI alone.
“Monsanto has also previously employed shadowy networks of consultants, PR firms, and front groups to spy on and influence reporters,” Thacker wrote. “And all of it appears to be part of a pattern at the company of using a variety of tactics to intimidate, mislead, and discredit journalists and critics.”
The Guardian noted that “Monsanto officials were repeatedly worried about the release of documents on their financial relationships with scientists that could support the allegations they were covering up unflattering research.”
At the same time, Monsanto officials tried to attack critics as anti-science.
“The internal communications add fuel to the ongoing claims in court that Monsanto has ‘bullied’ critics and scientists and worked to conceal the dangers of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide,” The Guardian summed up.
Project Censored noted that “Monsanto’s campaign to monitor and discredit journalists and other critics has received almost no corporate news coverage.”
A rare exception was a June 2019 ABC News report that nonetheless “consistently emphasized the perspective of Monsanto and Bayer.”
3. U.S. Military — A Massive, Hidden Contributor to Climate Crisis
It’s said that an army travels on its stomach, but the Army itself has said, “Fuel is the ‘blood of the military,’ ” as quoted in a study, Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war” by Oliver Belcher, Patrick Bigger, Ben Neimark, and Cara Kennelly, who subsequently summarized their findings for The Conversation in June 2019.
The U.S. military is “one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries,” the authors wrote.
If it were a country, it would rank as “the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.”
Studies of greenhouse gas emissions usually focus on civilian use, but the U.S. military has a larger carbon footprint than any civilian corporation in the world.
“The U.S. military’s climate policy remains fundamentally contradictory,” the study said. On the one hand, “The U.S. military sees climate change as a ‘threat multiplier,’ or a condition that will exacerbate other threats, and is fast becoming one of the leading federal agencies in the United States to invest in research and adoption of renewable energy, [but] it remains the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world, [and] this dependence on fossil fuels is unlikely to change as the USA continues to pursue open‐ended operations around the globe.”
While the military has invested in developing biofuels, “the entire point of these fuels is that they are ‘drop‐in’ — they can be used in existing military kit — which means that, whenever convenient or cheaper, the infrastructure is already in place to undo whatever marginal gains have been made in decarbonisation.”
Things will only get worse.
“There is no shortage of evidence that the climate is on the brink of irreversible tipping points,” the study noted. “Once past those tipping points, the impacts of climate change will continue to be more intense, prolonged, and widespread, giving cover to even more extensive U.S. military interventions.”
Understanding the military’s climate impact requires a systems approach.
“We argue that to account for the U.S. military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible,” the study stated. “We show several ‘path dependencies’ — warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste — that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on carbon‐based fuels by the U.S. military for years to come.”
Data for the study was difficult to obtain.
“A loophole in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol exempted the United States from reporting military emissions,” Project Censored explained. “Although the Paris Accord closed this loophole, Belcher et al. noted that ‘with the Trump administration due to withdraw from the accord in 2020, this gap … will return.’ ”
They obtained fuel purchase data only through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.
Noting that “action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine,” Project Censored said, the study’s authors recommended that “money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire” be reinvested as “a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take.”
Not surprisingly, the report had received “little to no corporate news coverage” as of May 2020, beyond scattered republication of the Conversation piece.
4. Congressional Investments and Conflicts of Interest
Exposition, political corruption, and conflicts of interest are age-old staples of journalism, so it’s notable that two of the most glaring, far-reaching examples of Congressional conflicts of interest in the Trump era have been virtually ignored by corporate media: Republicans’ support for the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and bipartisan failure to act on catastrophic climate change.
“The cuts likely saved members of Congress hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes collectively, while the corporate tax cut hiked the value of their holdings,” Vox wrote in January 2020.
It was sold as a middle-class tax cut that would benefit everyone.
“Promises that the tax act would boost investment have not panned out,” noted Vox author Peter Cary of the Center for Public Integrity. “Corporate investment is now at lower levels than before the act passed, according to the Commerce Department.”
Once again, “trickle-down tax cuts” didn’t trickle down.
“The tax law’s centerpiece is its record cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35% to 21%,” Cary wrote. “At the time of its passage, most of the bill’s Republican supporters said the cut would result in higher wages, factory expansions, and more jobs. Instead, it was mainly exploited by corporations, which bought back stock and raised dividends.”
Buybacks exceeded $1 trillion for the first time ever, the year after the cuts were passed, and dividends topped a record $1.3 trillion high.
The benefits to Congressional Republicans were enormous.
“The 10 richest Republicans in Congress in 2017 who voted for the tax bill held more than $731 million in assets, almost two-thirds of which were in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and other instruments” that benefitted handsomely as a result of Republican votes that “doled out nearly $150 billion in corporate tax savings in 2018 alone,” Cary noted. “All but one of the 47 Republicans who sat on the three key committees overseeing the drafting of the tax bill own stocks and stock mutual funds.”
Democrats also stood to gain from the tax bill, he wrote, “though not one voted for it. All but 12 Republicans voted for the tax bill.”
Two special features deserve notice. First is a newly created 20% deduction for income from “pass-through” businesses, or smaller, single-owner corporations.
“At least 22 of the 47 members of the House and Senate tax-writing committees have investments in pass-through businesses,” Project Censored noted.
Second was a provision allowing real estate companies with relatively few employees — like the Trump organization — to take a 20% deduction usually reserved for larger businesses with sizable payrolls.
“Out of the 47 Republicans responsible for drafting the bill, at least 29 held real estate interests at the time of its passage,” Project Censored pointed out.
As to the second major conflict, “Members of the U.S. Senate are heavily invested in the fossil fuel companies that drive the current climate crisis, creating a conflict between those senators’ financial interests as investors and their responsibilities as elected representatives,” Project Censored wrote.
Twenty-nine U.S. senators and their spouses own “between $3.5 million and $13.9 million worth of stock in companies that extract, transport, or burn fossil fuels or provide services to fossil fuel companies,” Donald Shaw reported for Sludge in September 2019.
While unsurprising on the Republican side, this also includes two key Democrats. Sen. Tom Carper, of Delaware, is the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. He has “up to $310,000 invested in more than a dozen oil, gas, and utility companies, as well as mutual funds with holdings in the fossil fuel industry,” Shaw reported.
But his record is not nearly as questionable as Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who “owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of non-public stock in a family coal business, Enersystems” and who reported earning “between $100,001 and $1 million” in reported dividends and interest in 2018, plus $470,000 in “ordinary business income,” Shaw reported.
His support for the industry was significant: Manchin was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling in 2017, and he was one of just three Democrats to vote against an amendment to phase out taxpayer subsidies for coal, oil, and gas producers in 2016. Manchin has also voted to approve construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, expedite the approval process for natural gas pipelines, and override an Obama administration rule requiring coal companies to protect groundwater from toxic coal-mining waste.
While there has been critical coverage of 2017 tax cuts, this has not included coverage of lawmakers personal profiting, Project Censored noted.
“In addition, despite the significant conflicts of interest exposed by Donald Shaw’s reporting for Sludge, the alarming facts about U.S. senators’ massive investments in the fossil fuel industry appear to have gone completely unreported in the corporate press.”
5. Inequality Kills: Gap between Richest and Poorest Americans Largest in 50 Years
“In public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills,” wrote DePaul University sociologist Fernando De Maio for Truthout in December 2019.
Even before COVID-19, his research added fine-grained evidence of broad trends highlighted in three prominent governmental reports: The gap between rich and poor Americans had grown larger than ever in half a century, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 annual survey, with dramatic evidence of its lethal impact. People in the poorest quintile die at twice the rate as those in the richest quintile, according to a report by the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO). And this is partly because job-related deaths are increasingly rooted in the physical and psychological toll of low-wage work, as opposed to on-the-job accidents, as documented by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO). All of these conditions were made worse by COVID-19, but they could have been seen before the pandemic struck — if only the information hadn’t been censored by the corporate media, as Project Censored noted.
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
The August 2019 GAO report was based on health and retirement surveys conducted by the Social Security Administration in 1992 and 2014, looking at those between 51 and 61 years old in 1992 and dividing them into five wealth quintiles.
The GAO, explained Patrick Martin in the World Socialist Web Site, “found that nearly half of those (48%) in the poorest quintile died before 2014, when they would have been between 73 and 83 years old. Of the wealthiest quintile, only a quarter (26 percent) died.”
Death rates increased for each quintile as the level of wealth declined.
It’s at the level of cities and communities “that the most striking links between inequality and health can be detected,” De Maio wrote. “At the city level, life expectancy varies from a low of 71.4 years in Gary, Indiana, to a high of 84.7 in Newton, Massachusetts — a gap of more than 13 years.”
And at the community level, it’s almost as bad. “In Chicago,” he continued, “there is a 9-year gap between the life expectancy for Black and white people. This gap amounts to more than 3,000 ‘excess deaths’ ” among Black Chicagoans due to “heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease. All of these are conditions that an equitable health care system would address.”
The poorest Americans, Project Censored noted, are “also more likely than their rich counterparts to face illness or premature death due to the inherent dangers of low-wage work.”
In 2019, María José Carmona wrote for Inequality.org, “you no longer have to hang from scaffolding to risk your life on the job. Precariousness, stress, and overwork can also make you sick, and even kill you, at a much higher rate than accidents.”
She reported on an ILO story that found that less than 14% of the 7,500 people who die “due to unsafe and unhealthy working conditions every day” die from workplace accidents.
The greatest risk comes from “increasing pressure, precarious contracts, and working hours incompatible with life, which, bit by bit, continue to feed the invisible accident rate that does not appear in the news,” Carmona wrote. “The most vulnerable workers are those employed on a temporary or casual basis, those subcontracted through agencies and the false self-employed. ILO data shows the rate of accidents for these employees to be much higher than for any others.”
As of May 2020, Project Censored has not been able to identify any corporate news coverage on the GAO or Census Bureau reports on inequality and premature mortality or on the ILO report about work-related illnesses, accidents, and deaths that take place when workers are off-duty.
6. Shadow Network of Conservative Outlets Emerges to Exploit Faith in Local News
In late October 2019, Carol Thompson reported in the Lansing State Journal that “dozens of websites branded as local news outlets launched throughout Michigan this fall … [promise] local news [while] also offering political messaging.”
The websites’ “About us” sections “say they are published by Metric Media LLC, a company that aims to fill the ‘growing void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media,’ ” Thompson wrote. However, it soon emerged that they weren’t filling that void with locally generated news, and the 40 or so sites Thompson found in Michigan were just the beginning.
A follow-up investigation by The Michigan Daily reported that “just this past week, additional statewide networks of these websites have sprung up in Montana and Iowa,” which was followed by a December 2019 report by the Columbia Journalism Review, revealing a network of 450 websites run by five corporate organizations in 12 states that “mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations” to “manipulate public opinion by exploiting faith in local media.”
All were associated with conservative businessman Brian Timpone.
“In 2012, Timpone’s company Journatic, an outlet known for its low-cost automated story generation, which became known as ‘pink slime journalism,’ attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes and for plagiarism,” CJR’s Priyanjana Bengani reported. Journatic was later rebranded as Locality Labs, whose content ran on the Metric Media websites.
“The different websites are nearly indistinguishable, sharing identical stories and using regional titles,” Michigan Daily reported. “The only articles with named authors contain politically skewed content. The rest of the articles on the sites are primarily composed of press releases from local organizations and articles written by the Local Labs News Service.”
Despite the different organization and network names, Bengani wrote, “it is evident these sites are connected. Other than simply sharing network metadata as described above, they also share bylines (including ‘Metric Media News Service’ and ‘Local Labs News Service’ for templated stories), servers, layouts, and templates.”
Using a suite of investigative tools, CJR was able to identify at least 189 sites in 10 states run by Metric Media — all created in 2019 — along with 179 run by Franklin Archer (with Timpone’s brother Michael as CEO).
“We tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites” over a period of two weeks, Bengani wrote, “and found over 15,000 unique stories had been published (over 50,000 when aggregated across the sites) but only about 100 titles had the bylines of human reporters.”
That’s well below 1% with a byline — much less being local. “The rest cited automated services or press releases.”
Their architecture and strategy are “useful to understand the way they co-opt the language, design, and structure of news organizations,” Bengani explained.
Automation can make them seem far more prolific than they really are and can help build credibility.
“Potentially adding to the credibility of these sites is their Google search ranking: In the case of some of the websites set up in 2015-2016, we observed that once sites had gained ample authority, they appeared on the first page of Google Search results just below the official government and social media pages.”
So the sites aim to fool people locally about the source of their “news,” and Google helps fool the world.
Although The New York Times did publish an article in October 2019 that credited the Lansing State Journal with breaking the story about pseudo-local news organizations, Project Censored noted that “corporate coverage has been lacking. … The Columbia Journalism Review’s piece expands on the breadth and scope of previous coverage, but its findings do not appear to have been reported by any of the major establishment news outlets.”
7. Underreporting of Missing and Victimized Black Women and Girls
Black women and girls go missing in the United States at a higher rate than that of their white counterparts. And that very fact goes missing, too.
“A 2010 study about the media coverage of missing children in the United States discovered that only 20% of reported stories focused on missing Black children despite it corresponding to 33% of the overall missing children cases,” Carma Henry reported for The Westside Gazette in February 2019.
But it’s only getting worse.
“A 2015 study discussed in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice found that the disparity listed in the 2010 study between the reportage and the reality of missing Black children had increased substantially,” Project Censored noted.
The numbers shake out to be 35% of missing children cases versus just 7% of media stories.
That discussion appeared in a paper that made two other pertinent points. First, that Black criminal perpetrators are over-represented in the media while Black victims are underrepresented, and second, that “because racial minorities are identified as criminals more often than not, non-minorities develop limited empathy toward racial minorities who are often perceived as offenders.”
Non-minorities in the media are obviously not exempt.
“Media coverage is often vital in missing person cases because it raises community awareness and can drive funding and search efforts that support finding those missing persons,” Project Censored noted.
It went on to cite an illustrative extreme case: In October 2019, “The Atlanta Black Star shed light on perhaps the most prolific offender against Black women and girls in recent history, Jason Roger Pope, who has been indicted on charges relating to human trafficking and child sex crimes. Pope, a white South Carolina promoter and popular disc jockey better known as DJ Kid, has made claims suggesting he may have participated in the trafficking, assault, and/or rapes of nearly 700 Black girls — primarily underaged — right up until his arrest in August 2019.”
The arrest didn’t come out of the blue.
“Pope has police records going as far back as 2011 relating to sexual misconduct with minors. Yet outside of a few local news outlets, the corporate media has been silent on Pope’s crimes.”
Blacks are also over-represented as victims of sex trafficking, according to statistics from Human Trafficking Search: They account for more than 40% of confirmed victims compared to 13.1% of the population.
While there is some coverage from small independent sources, “this gap in coverage of missing Black women and girls has gone widely underreported,” Project Censored noted.
It cited two exceptions, one from ABC News, another from CNN.
“But, broadly, U.S. corporate media are not willing to discuss their own shortcomings or to acknowledge the responsibilities they neglect by failing to provide coverage on the search for missing and victimized Black women and girls.”
8. The Public Banking Revolution
The year 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’ first publicly owned state bank, the Bank of North Dakota (BND), and, in October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Public Banking Act, authorizing up to 10 similar such banks to be created by California’s city and county governments. In response, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles both announced plans to do so. It was the culmination of a decade-long effort that began in the wake of the Great Recession which has also been taken up in nearly two dozen other states. Beyond the benefits North Dakota has reaped in the past, such banks could have greatly assisted in responding to COVID-19’s economic devastation and could yet help fund a just transition to a decarbonized future, along the lines of a Green New Deal.
Yet, despite California’s agenda-setting reputation, Project Censored noted that “no major corporate media outlets appear to have devoted recent coverage to this important and timely topic.”
The BND, wrote Ellen Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute, for Common Dreams, “was founded in 1919 in response to a farmers’ revolt against out-of-state banks that were foreclosing unfairly on their farms. Since then, it has evolved into a $7.4 billion bank that is reported to be even more profitable than JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, although its mandate is not actually to make a profit but simply to serve the interests of local North Dakota communities.”
Sushil Jacob, an attorney who works with the California Public Banking Alliance, told The Guardian that “the state of North Dakota has six times as many financial institutions per capita as the rest of the country, and it’s because they have the Bank of North Dakota. When the Great Recession hit, the Bank of North Dakota stepped in and provided loans and allowed local banks to thrive.”
As a result, “North Dakota was the only state that escaped the credit crisis,” Brown told Ananya Garg, reporting for YES! magazine. “It never went in the red, [had] the lowest unemployment rate in the country, the lowest foreclosure rate at that time.”
In an op-ed in The Hill, Eric Heath wrote, “There are two ways in which a state bank can fund state investment for a greener future. First, the bank can provide loans, bonds, and other forms of financing for investments to the state government and private organizations on better terms than those available in regular markets.”
Some such projects might not even be considered.
This is not because green investments are unprofitable “but because their profits slowly accumulate and are widely shared across a community,” Heath explained. “Second, a public bank will improve a state’s fiscal health. By holding state deposits as assets, the bank’s profits can be returned to state coffers to fund direct state investment. Additionally, the activity of the state bank — which will prioritize investing state assets and extending credit within the state for the benefit of the state — will improve the state economy,” just as has happened in North Dakota.
A new surge of interest in public banking came out of the Standing Rock movement’s protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. While individuals could easily withdraw from doing business with fossil fuel-financing banks — Wells Fargo, in this case — governments have no such similar options to meet all their banking needs.
In short, “From efforts to divest public employee pension funds from the fossil fuel industry and private prisons, to funding the proposed Green New Deal and counteracting the massive, rapid shutdown of the economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public banking has never seemed more relevant,” Project Censored wrote.
It’s a time-tested practical solution the corporate media refuses to discuss.
9. Rising Risks of Nuclear Power Due to Climate Change
As early as 2003, 30 nuclear units were either shut down or forced to reduce power output during a deadly European summer heatwave in Europe, but almost two decades later, the corporate media has yet to grasp that “nuclear power plants are unprepared for climate change,” as Project Censored noted. “Rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact power plants’ infrastructure, posing increased risks of nuclear disasters, according to reports from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Truthout from September 2019,” they explain. Yet “tracking back to 2013, corporate news media have only sporadically addressed the potential for climate change to impact nuclear power plants.”
Writing for the NRDC, Christina Chen said, “Nuclear power is uniquely vulnerable to increasing temperatures because of its reliance on cooling water to ensure operational safety within the core and spent fuel storage.”
In addition, Karen Charman, reporting for Truthout, noted that “nuclear reactors need an uninterrupted electricity supply to run the cooling systems that keep the reactors from melting down,” but this will be “increasingly difficult to guarantee in a world of climate-fueled megastorms and other disasters.”
Rising sea levels — combined with storm surges — represent the most serious threat. That was the focus of a 2018 report by John Vidal from Ensia, a solutions-focused media outlet, which found that “at least 100 U.S., European, and Asian nuclear power stations built just a few meters above sea level could be threatened by serious flooding caused by accelerating sea-level rise and more frequent storm surges.”
There have been more than 20 incidents of flooding at U.S. nuclear plants, according to David Lochbaum, a former nuclear engineer and director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The most likely [cause of flooding] is the increasing frequency of extreme events,” he told Vidal.
Yet in January 2019, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) decided to weaken staff recommendations to reassess the adequacy of hazard preparations. In dissent, Commissioner Jeff Baran wrote that NRC would allow power plants “to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago, when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced.”
Charman reported that “as of September 2019, 444 nuclear reactors are operating in the world, with 54 under construction, 111 planned, and 330 more proposed.
Vidal wrote, “Many of the world’s new nuclear plants are being built on the coasts of Asian countries, which face floods, sea-level rise, and typhoons. At least 15 of China’s 39 reactors in operation, and many of the plants it has under construction, are on the coast.”
Leading climate scientist Michael Mann told Vidal that “nuclear stations are on the front line of climate change impacts both figuratively and quite literally. We are likely profoundly underestimating climate change risk and damages in coastal areas.”
10. Revive Journalism with a Stimulus Package and Public Option
In late March, Congress passed and Donald Trump signed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus rescue package, including direct payments of $1,200 per adult and more than $500 billion for large corporations. Before passage, Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, argued in the Columbia Journalism Review that a stimulus package for journalism was also urgently needed. “In the face of this pandemic, the public needs good, economically secure journalists more than ever,” separating fact from fiction and holding politicians and powerful institutions accountable.
Aaron’s organization, Free Press, placed journalism’s needs at $5 billion in immediate emergency funds, “less than half of 1% of a trillion-dollar recovery package” and asked that “Congress put a foundation in place to help sustain journalism over the long term.”
Aaron presented a three-pronged plan. First: “doubling federal funds for public media,” not for Downton Abbey reruns but “earmarked specifically for emergency support, education, and especially local journalism.” For example, “The Los Angeles Unified School District teamed up with PBS SoCal/KCET to offer instruction over the airwaves while kids are out of school, with separate channels focused on different ages.”
Second: “direct support for daily and weekly newsrooms,” which have lost tens of thousands of jobs over the past three decades. “Direct, emergency subsidies of, say, $25,000 per newsgathering position could make sure reporters everywhere stay on the local COVID beat,” he wrote. “Just $625 million would help retain 25,000 newsroom jobs.”
Third: “new investments in the news we need … for a major investment in services that provide community information [and] to support new positions, outlets, and approaches to newsgathering, [which could] prioritize places and populations that the mainstream outlets have never served well.”
Arguing that a “resilient and community-centered media system” is necessary to get through the pandemic, Aaron concluded, “Now is the time to act. We need significant public investments in all corners of the economy, and journalism is no exception.”
In an article in Jacobin, media scholar Victor Pickard advanced a more robust proposal, for $30 billion annually (less than 1.4 % of the coronavirus stimulus package, Project Censored noted).
“On the question of cost, we must first remind ourselves that a viable press system isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity,” he wrote. “Similar to a classic ‘merit good,’ journalism isn’t a ‘want’ but a ‘need.’ … Democratic nations around the globe heavily subsidize the media while enjoying democratic benefits that put the U.S. to shame.”
Writing for The Guardian, just after the McClatchy newspaper chain bankruptcy was announced, Pickard noted that “for many areas across the U.S., there’s simply no commercial option. The market has failed us.”
And thus, “With market failure, journalism’s survival requires public options.”
The need was fundamental.
“All foundational democratic theories — including the First Amendment itself — assume a functional press system. The fourth estate’s current collapse is a profound social problem.”
And he suggested a broad range of funding possibilities: We could raise funds from taxing platforms like Facebook and Google, placing levees on communication devices, and repurposing international broadcasting subsidies. Other sources include spectrum sales and individual tax vouchers. We could leverage already-existing public infrastructures such as post offices, libraries, and public broadcasting stations to provide spaces for local news production.
“While corporate news outlets have reported the ongoing demise of newspapers and especially local news sources, they have rarely covered proposals such as Aaron’s and Pickard’s to revitalize journalism through public funding,” Project Censored wrote.
Paul Rosenberg is an activist turned journalist who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post, Al Jazeera English, Salon.com, and numerous other periodicals. He has also written more than 300 book reviews. He has worked as an editor at Random Lengths News since 2002.
