Project Censored's blind spot

Even liberal media critics ignore workers and people of color.

by David Bacon
3/29/00

See also:
"Hidden headlines" presents Project Censored's top 10 censored stories of 1999.

Probably the most censored story of the last few years is the Detroit newspaper strike.

In 1992, immigrant drywall hangers went on strike, halting Southern California home construction for almost a year. They defied police and border patrol agents, even shutting down freeways at rush hour to stop the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and highway patrol from harassing caravans of picketers. At the end of it all, they won.

Over the following years, immigrants mounted strike after strike, involving hundreds and sometimes even thousands of workers, from downtown LA’s garment district to the Pomona barrio.

This upsurge has changed the demographics of California’s labor movement, giving immigrants a new voice and propelling activists into leadership of some of the state’s largest and most important unions. It’s provided a base of political power for the Latino community. Yet it has gone largely unrecognized and unreported by the mainstream press. "It’s really not even on their radar screen," says Susan Alva, staff attorney for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. "Sometimes the daily newspapers or TV latch onto individual events, but don’t see the context they fit into. The energy of immigrants has been the key to the revival of unions in LA, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the mainstream press.

"There’s no coverage when we mount successful campaigns to change conditions. ... I think that’s because it goes against the grain of the image and stereotype of immigrants prevalent in the media – that we’re victims, or sometimes even worse than that – demons and the cause of every ill."

Censored view

The attitudes behind this lack of coverage are widespread, affecting media and progressive media critics and watchdogs like Project Censored, based at the Sonoma State University campus in California.

While some alternative publications did cover the immigrant worker upsurge, none of those stories were included by Project Censored judges in the list they issue every year.

"Unions are off-limits to the media," says Conn Hallinan, journalism teacher at University of California at Santa Cruz. "The anti-union bias in the industry is very deep. This problem is also true with Project Censored."

Project Censored says the media do an inadequate job of exposing the abuse of power by government and corporations. It declares that "domestic and international events sure to boggle the minds of even the most indifferent went virtually unnoticed by the press last year. We have ‘secret’ negotiations taking place on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. There is heedless profiteering from breast cancer by chemical corporations. ‘Terminator seeds’ are being genetically engineered to control the world’s food crops. These were all critical issues left untouched by the mainstream press last year."

"On one level I applaud what they do," Hallinan says. "At least they feature the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. But I find there’s a consistent pattern of ignoring certain stories."

This year’s list includes a story on environmental racism, affecting African-American communities in the industrial cancer belt in Louisiana. It was the first story involving struggle in a community of color to make it onto Project Censored’s top-10 list in the 11 years of stories listed on its Web site.

Yet just a few miles away, primarily African-American workers have also been fighting a pitched battle to unionize the huge Avondale shipyard.

Six years ago, workers voted for the union, and the company has used all its legal and political might to deny them their labor rights ever since. According to Nadra Floyd, deputy organizing director of the AFL-CIO, United States taxpayers financed the effort. "The Department of the Navy kept signing contracts with the yard, even including money for consultants which we suspect was used to pay union busters."

Avondale is emblematic of what happens to workers in this country when they try to organize a union – an activity supposedly protected by federal law. "The media doesn’t care what happens to them," Floyd says. "What it boils down to is that there’s never recognition of the struggle between workers and employers. They don’t talk about this because it could lead to a discussion of class, which is still considered akin to communism or socialism. The media pretends that class doesn’t exist when strikes take place every day."

The struggle of workers against union busters was just one story left off Project Censored lists, which reflect the same set of class biases. Those lists inherently assume that the news that’s worth reporting involves the actions of the rich and powerful – their unreported misdeeds.

But stories involving movements among working-class people and in communities of color go unnoticed by both the mainstream media and their liberal critics.

Of the 110 stories chosen by Project Censored over 11 years, 64 featured the U.S. government’s abuse of power, 54 covered corporate misdeeds, 40 exposed environmental and health crimes, and 35 discussed deception in U.S. foreign policy or misdeeds by other governments. The number of stories featuring a union or a struggle by workers: 0.

In response to an earlier version of this critique, Project Censored blamed the liberal media. "The alternative press does not cover race, labor, and social-action issues anywhere near often enough or consistently enough," wrote Project Censored’s Peter Phillips. "However, Project Censored does find these stories, and recognizes them within the scope of our capabilities."

Objectivity myth

Liberal media critics tell us that the function of progressive journalists is to "speak truth to power." But these power sources already know what the truth is. They don’t worry much if all that happens is that this truth comes to light. What challenges them is when the people on the bottom begin to fight for power. Their stories are the ones that don’t make it into the mainstream media.

The growth of giant media corporations has something to do with it. Probably the most censored story of the last few years is the Detroit newspaper strike, a direct challenge to two media monopolies by their own employees. It’s hardly a surprise that Gannett and Knight Ridder didn’t report it – after all, why should they encourage other workers to go on strike to save their unions and rights at work? Other media monopolies saw their common class interest in keeping the story quiet. But Project Censored and other media critics didn’t see a story here either.

"Project Censored is a reflection of the industry," Hallinan says.

"The Project Censored attitude is that what we should do is objective journalism. The objective persona is like the tooth fairy – it doesn’t exist. That attitude not only makes reporters unwilling to be participants, but you can’t be a good journalist with it. Was I.F. Stone neutral on Vietnam and Korea, or Mike Quinn on the San Francisco general strike? The point isn’t to be objective and neutral, but to be fair and accurate. Neutrality destroys independent reporting – no one but reporters believes in it. Certainly not the public, who become even more cynical about the media every day."

David Bacon is a writer and photographer based in Berkeley, Calif., who concentrates on labor issues.