HIDDEN HEADLINES - What the Media Missed - The Top 10 Censored Stories of 1999
By Carrie Ching, Tate Hausman, Don Hazen & Tamara Straus

Did you know that sweatshops on American soil have been sewing uniforms for
the U.S. military? Or that the same companies that deliver energy to your
home may be supporting brutal dictators in Third World countries? Or that
the Pentagon has plans to put weapons in outer space, directly violating
international law?

If you did, you were among the few, because these stories - and seven
others like them - were just named the Top 10 Censored Stories of 1999.

The Top 10 Censored Stories is an annual list compiled by the faculty and
students at California's Sonoma State University's Project Censored
program. After 20 years, the Project Censored Award has established itself
as the "alternative Pulitzer Prize.'

The use of the word 'censored' has often generated confusion about the
Project Censored Awards. While censorship is usually thought to describe
some authority - an editor, government, or corporation - clamping down on a
journalist or news outlet, preventing them from publishing a story, that's
not how Project Censored defines the word.

"We consider censorship any interference with the free flow of information
in society," says Peter Phillips, Project Censored's director. "We don't
see it as a conspiracy, as something the media is deliberately doing to
keep the American public from being informed about certain stories. It's
much more complex than that."

Complex indeed. Almost every journalist who received a Project Censored
award this year told us that their story was not the victim of overt
censorship, but rather suffered from a tangled web of factors that kept
important stories out of the news. Those factors included waning resources
for investigative reporters, dwindling foreign coverage, newsroom laziness
(editor's assuming it's too hard to explain complex issues to audiences
with short attention spans) and self-censorship (journalists dropping
stories in order not to offend sources or to please editors or simply avoid
making waves).

With this wide definition of censorship, many hundreds of stories could be
considered censored every year. So Project Censored embarks on a lengthy
process to narrow the list down to the Top 10. Here's how they describe the
process.

"Project Censored students and staff screened several thousand stories for
1999 and selected some 500 for evaluation by faculty and community experts.

"The Top 200 stories were then researched for national mainstream coverage.
A final collective vote of all students, staff and faculty occurred in
early November, narrowing the pool down to 25. Then the Top 25 stories are
ranked by national judges.  We do not have a quota system of selecting
stories for certain categories, but rather use a holistic collective
process of monitoring, researching and deciding that involves more than 175
people. This process, we believe gives us an actual summary list of the
most important undiscovered news stories in the United States."

Regardless of this less-than-scientific process, it goes without saying
that the mainstream media should be doing a better job of covering these
stories. Hopefully the following list will prompt them to do so.

1. Energy Companies Support Brutal Dictatorships & Human Rights Violations
Arvind Ganesan, 'Corporation Crackdowns', Dollars & Sense Magazine,
May-June 1999.

Arvind Ganesan, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, gives an overview of
the egregious human rights violations that have occurred when oil and
electricity corporations support strong-arm governments in developing
nations. In some ways, it's the oldest story of the list: multinational
corporations bulldozing over poor Third World populations to extract
valuable natural resources.

But the details in this story are so striking - campaigns of rape, torture
and slavery that benefited Unocal in Burma, mass graves dug in Indonesia
with Mobil's bulldozers, scores of citizens slaughtered in Chad & Cameroon
by forces aligned with Exxon, unarmed villagers in Nigeria shot down by
soldiers in Chevron helicopters - that they should have merited significant
media coverage.

The coverage they got was solid - but only in Europe, Asia, Africa and
energy trade publications. The U.S. media picked up a report here and
there, but never connected the dots or explained the story's context.

According to Ganesan, "the failure of the U.S. mainstream media on this
issue is glaring."

Rather than overt censorship, Ganesan said, it was a combination of
cutbacks in international news, the deterioration of investigative
reporting, a very complex situation to report on and a lack of reader
interest that killed the story. "There's no nefarious motive behind the
lack of coverage," he said.

However, Ganesan expressed concern that poor coverage in the U.S. has had
negative ramifications. "Because the European press has investigated these
issues and raised public awareness, corporations like BP (based in England)
and Shell (based in Holland) have taken significant steps to correct these
human rights violations. But companies based in America are lagging behind
their European counterparts, because they face so little public scrutiny."

2.  Drug Companies Put Profits Before Health. Ken Silverstein, "Millions
for Viagra, Pennies for the Poor," The Nation, July 19, 1999

Instead of developing cures for life-threatening - though preventable -
Third World diseases, multinational pharmaceutical companies are focusing
their research on "lifestyle drugs" such as Viagra that bring in billions
of dollars in earnings. Ken Silverstein reported that in 1998 death from
malaria, tuberculosis and acute lower-respiratory infections claimed 6.1
million lives - nearly three times the number of people who died from AIDS.
These people died not because drugs could not be created to combat new
strains of these diseases, but because, asserts Silverstein, "it doesn't
pay to keep them alive."

Meanwhile, in its first year Viagra earned more than $1 billion. Propecia
and Rogaine - anti-balding drugs - earned $180 billion in 1998. To discover
other golden mines like these, enormous research funds are being poured
into creating ant-wrinkle creams and drugs aimed at curing dysfunctional
pets.

"It's obvious that some of the industry's surplus profits could be going
into research for tropical diseases," Silverstein quoted a retired drug
company executive as saying. "Instead it's going to stockholders."

3.  Bloated American Cancer Society Wastes Much, Prevents Few Cancers. Dr.
Samuel S. Epstein, 'American Cancer Society: The World's Wealthiest
Non-profit Institution', International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 29,
No. 3, 1999.

In what has become his raison d'etre, Dr. Samuel Epstein argued that the
American Cancer Society (ACS) should redirect its vast resources toward
preventing cancer rather than treating it. ACS doesn't do so because many
of its influential members benefit financially from treating the disease.

Epstein has been crusading against the ACS and the national Cancer
Institute (NCI), the two largest organizations devoted to fighting cancer,
for decades. As early as 1977, Epstein was writing books and articles
blasting these two institutions as reactionary forces that profit from the
"cancer epidemic" and have "incestuous conflicts of interest" with the
pharmaceutical and medical industries.

Although his point of view is often overlooked by the mainstream press, it
would be hard to argue that Epstein is unable to et his message out. Aside
from having drafted congressional legislation, frequently giving
congressional testimony, and serving as a key expert (notably in the
banning of the pesticides DDT and Aldrin), Epstein is as media savvy as
doctors come. He has appeared on many national TV programs including 60
Minutes, Face the Nation, Meet the Press,  and others.

4. American Sweatshops Sew U.S. Military Uniforms. Mark Boal, 'An American
Sweatshop', Mother Jones, May/June 1999.

Boal's article exposed the billion-dollar relationship between the Dept. of
Defense and the American garment industry, a relationship that has fostered
a wide range of workplace problems. Boal focused on a Lyon Apparel plant in
Battyville, Ky., where government uniforms are made. The plant has been
cited 32 times by OSHA for safety and health violations, pays substandard
wages to overworked employees and has exposed workers to formaldehyde, a
suspected carcinogen used to keep fabric stiff for processing.

About 10,000 American women are employed sewing government uniforms, often
in unsanitary, unsafe conditions,"Boal concluded.

"After the article came out Boal heard that some workers were harassed and
that one woman may have been fired by Lyon Apparel. Lyon also executed a
forceful counterattack, demanding that Mother Jones retract the story and
that Boal come visit the plant. Mother Jones refused to retract the story,
although it made a couple corrections, and Boal refused to visit the plant,
depending instead on his sources from inside.

After the article appeared, Boal was invited to numerous radio shows and
said that some local TV stations also picked up the story. Asked why the
topic had received scant coverage, Boal suggested that labor issues in
general were underreported in the American press and that sweatshop stories
in particular "flash across the media landscape intensely, but the coverage
tends to be short-lived."

5. Turkey Uses U.S. Weapons to Wipe out the Kurds.  Kevin McKiernan,
'Turkey's War on the Kurds', Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, march/April
1999.

The Turkish government is using U.S. weapons to kill and displace a
population of 15 million Kurds, the largest ethic group in the world
without a homeland. This civil war represents the single largest use of
U.S. weapons anywhere in the world by non-U.S. forces; it has claimed
40,000 lives and has created 2 million refugees. The U.S. continues to
coddle and arm the Turkish government (which many observers consider the
worst human rights violator on the globe) because of Turkey's strategic
position in the Middle East.

Since publication of Kevin McKiernan's story in March 1999, a major shift
in Western coverage of the war in Turkey has occurred. Ironically, that
shift came about almost by accident, said McKiernan.

"When Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested and put on trial in early
1999, hundreds of journalists flocked to Turkey," said McKiernan.
"They could only report on the captured rebel leader for so long, so
eventually they started digging into the story's contest, this massive war
against the Kurds."

CONCLUDED NEXT ISSUE.
Carrie Ching, Tate Hausman, Dan Hazen and Tamara Straus are on the staff of
Alternet, which distributes and creates articles for alternative newspapers.