Eat The Press
The onslaught of junk news distracts people from understanding the truth
iStock photoProject Censored is the ongoing mission of journalists Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth to expose the most important news stories that have gone underreported or effectively censored. But with the 2017 edition of Project Censored (published in the Nov. 29 issue of the Syracuse New Times), Huff and Roth reached a milestone: the year in which an episode of The Simpsons was played out in real life.
Foreshadowed in a TV cartoon, the black comedy of events that obscured and propelled Donald Trump’s rise to president of the United States is chronicled in the annual Project Censored chapter devoted to Junk Food News: the so-called “fake news” that squeezed into the places that should have been filled with legitimate information.
In 2016, Project Censored’s legions of student interns, writers and editors spent a considerable amount of ink on the emerging youth movement. In addition to producing formidable activists in their own right, it undergirded the passion that spurred Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign during the presidential primaries and made the movement to abolish the use of super delegates in the days after the election about more than just sour grapes.
The occasion of the 40th anniversary and its emphasis on youth seemed to infuse Huff and Roth with hopefulness in Project Censored and the good hands doing its work. But the 2016 election cycle did something else.
The Junk Food News chapter is co-written by Huff and Nolan Higdon, a professor of English, communications and history in the San Francisco Bay Area. Examples of Junk Food News that have distracted Americans range from Trump’s refusal to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to the breathless reporting on Trump’s every tweet.
Huff and Higdon characterize this coverage as a backlash in response to Trump not allowing corporate media to hobnob with the power elites. Besides, Project Censored described the White House dinner as a means for the media to ingratiate themselves to power rather than speak truth to power.
This unhealthy diet of junk news displaced news about the widespread famine in Yemen, a region raked by a 2-year-old war led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States, which left more than 10,000 dead and 40,000 wounded in the region. A United Nations report estimated that more than 90 percent of Yemen’s citizens are experiencing famine and malnutrition.
Huff and Higdon described the Olympic Summer Games of 2016 as a media spectacle, particularly after the corporate media latched onto the story of the four U.S. Olympic swimmers who lied about being robbed at gunpoint after vandalizing a gas station bathroom and being stopped by an armed security guard. Project Censored contrasted the slap on the wrist these swimmers received with the treatment of gold medalist Gabby Douglas when it appeared that she didn’t put her hand over her heart during the medal ceremony.
This news displaced coverage of “flooding on a historic scale” in Louisiana. Project Censored noted that “while the damage caused was less than that of Hurricane Katrina, 20,000 residents had to be rescued, 10,000 were placed in shelters, and several people lost their lives.”
Huff and Higdon also highlighted the Academy Awards’ un-scandalous scandal in which La La Land was mistakenly announced as Best Picture. It took only two minutes until the film Moonlight was announced as the real winner, but Huff and Higdon noted that this non-scandal scandal obscured major news in that almost 550 community leaders, elected officials, business moguls, health officials and politicians called for doubling the strength of the Regional Greenhouse Gas initiative, a clean air and healthy climate program.
Huff and Higdon noted that “a gathering of this size to enact policies to prevent further climate change is certainly worthy of major attention. But instead, the American public was treated to endless punditry on who was responsible for the year’s Best Picture blunder.”
Alternative Reality and Reportage
Huff and Higdon recounts how Huff and former Project Censored director Peter Phillips argued in 2010 that the United States was facing a truth emergency. They assert that “in the United States today, the rift between reality and reporting has reached its end. There is no longer a mere credibility gap, but rather a literal truth emergency. This is a culmination of the failures of the Fourth Estate to act as a truly free press.”
Huff and Higdon conclude that little has changed. In the recent edition of Project Censored, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his own people is a primary example. This attack was used to justify Trump’s order to fire 59 Tomahawk missiles on a country torn by civil war.
Project Censored pushes back against the notion that critiquing the corporate press pushing the Bashar al-Assad chemical weapon attack as tantamount to being pro-al-Assad. Indeed, Project Censored adds nuance that should be applied to the Trump administration and the role of the Russians in the 2016 presidential elections.
Huff and Higdon wrote: “This is a complicated matter, to be sure, one that even sparks vivid disagreements among the anti-imperialist and the pacifist left in the United States. To question official narratives should not mean people are automatically pro-Assad — or pro-Putin, for that matter. More importantly, what does it mean to be pro-truth in a post-truth world, when the truth can be elusive, especially in an environment addled by propaganda coming from many sides?”
Huff and Higdon note that the corporate press’ engagement in news abuse regarding Syria is an attempt to build public support for U.S. invasion, much like the second war in Iraq a decade earlier. Project Censored wrote, “This makes accurate reporting and publishing of diverse perspectives all the more crucial.”
Huff and Higdon argue that the countermeasure to news abuse and propaganda is an informed citizenry with strong critical thinking skills. Project Censored actually goes a little further than that by saying that the level of critical thinking required now goes beyond simply evaluating information based on conformity with existing knowledge. Huff and Higdon argue that Americans’ thought process must embrace perspectives at odds with “prevailing wisdom or personal views” based on the evaluation of reality.
Huff and Higdon identified a few different and daunting cases where this form of education is applicable. One of those examples was the aim of right-wing personality Glenn Beck and pseudo-historian David Barton to offer training camps to teach graduating high school students their revisionist history. They used the words of regular Salon writer Amanda Marcotte to describe their historical narrative, saying that it is “one that valorizes straight white men as humanity’s natural leaders and grants Christian fundamentalism a centrality to American history that it does not, in reality, have.”
Marcotte also noted, “In Barton’s history, the founding father idea of government was rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, instead of enlightenment philosophy, and the contributions of people of color are minimized in service of centering Christian white men as the righteous shepherds guiding everyone else.”
Huff and Higdon also argue that schools should teach media literacy as core curriculum to help fight against news abuse and fake news. Project Censored noted that the U.S. education system has drifted to the same for-profit model of information dissemination as the mass media, yielding many of the same results.
Huff and Higdon cite critical theory scholar Henry Giroux, who notes that an effective “democracy cannot exist without informed citizens and public spheres and educational apparatuses that uphold standards of truth, honesty, evidence, facts and justice. Under Trump, disinformation masquerading as news has become a weapon for legitimating ignorance and civic illiteracy.
“Artists, educators, young people, journalists and others need to make the virtue of truth-telling visible again. We need to connect democracy with a notion of truth-telling and consciousness that is on the side of economic and political justice, and democracy itself. If we are going to fight for, and with, the most marginalized people, there must be a broader understanding of their needs. We need to create narratives and platforms in which those who have been deemed disposable can identify themselves and the conditions through which power and oppression bear down on their lives.”
More Inconvenient Truths
Huff and Higdon recounted the brief history of the term “fake news” since Trump was elected president. The authors noted that during one week in January 2017, the trend of people researching the term “fake news” on Google jumped 100-fold above pre-election levels. Trump and his supporters denounced any critiques of the new administration, such as CNN for questioning the validity of his statements as fake news.
But Project Censored noted that Trump and his underlings were not alone in labeling inconvenient truths as fake news. The Democratic National Committee was also guilty, as it sought to explain how Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. Project Censored noted that the partisan practice of labeling inconvenient truths as fake news undermined credible journalism while distracting the public from the barrage of actual fake news flooding our global society.
This was reminiscent of a Ron Suskind story in the New York Times Magazine more than a decade ago in which the phrase “reality-based community” was used by an aide in the George W. Bush administration. The term was a phrase used to denigrate critics of the administration’s policies who were basing their judgments on facts.
Suskind wrote: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as ‘people who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
The source was later revealed to be political operative and Bush administration adviser Karl Rove, but he has denied it.
Huff and Higdon noted that the internet’s promise of delivering endless information to circumvent a post-truth world has not succeeded in producing a well-informed populace. Instead, the inflation of spurious information coupled with an education system that does not teach critical media literacy to students and does not show them how to navigate and participate in the digital world has resulted in a dystopia of falsehoods that are now referred to as “alternative facts.”
This post-truth environment, they argue, gave rise to a term defined as an outright lie that is introduced and then used as evidence to support a desired conclusion. Among the examples Project Censored used include:
Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claiming three times that a terror attack occurred in Atlanta, Ga.
U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson claiming that African American slaves were immigrants who worked hard and found success in America, without socio-economic relevancy or historical context.
The Trump administration claiming that the resistance to their repeal and replace Obamacare were paid protesters.
Huff and Higdon argue that the ability to embrace dissonant facts is a skill set needed now more than ever, when inconvenient truths are labeled fake news. They argue that this state of affairs has resulted in a post-truth world.
After laying this groundwork, Project Censored shifts to the Democratic National Convention and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. From the start, Project Censored makes the argument that the Russian hacking narrative, propagated by the corporate media invested in Clinton’s bid for the White House, is an example of an alternative fact designed to deflect attention away from Clinton’s deficiencies as a candidate.
Huff and Higdon cite the Washington Post and the website PropOrNot that were purported to have uncovered the media outlets that served as dupes of Russian hackers with a series of algorithms designed to analyze the web content of media outlets. The Post reprinted a list created by PropOrNot. Project Censored noted that under threat of lawsuits, they published a partial retraction. Project Censored, using a quote by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibibi, argues that the Russian story was a distraction from the pre-existing problems within the Democratic Party. Taibibi, and by extension, Project Censored is correct.
For Huff and Higdon, the question was whether Russian interference had a direct, demonstrable impact on Clinton losing the election. The answer has been a resounding “no,” regardless of the steady drip of leaks regarding the alleged collusion of Trump’s campaign with the Russian government. The fact remains that Clinton, with help from the Democratic National Committee, lost to a candidate who should not have had any chance of winning.
Huff and Higdon note that fact-checking would not be enough to counter fake news. But fake news is not the only threat. Blacklists like the one used by sites like PropOrNot that include legitimate journalistic outlets as fake news, or the passage of legislation that literally bans the media from lying. Huff and Higdon note that the corporate press has assisted in creating some of these new threats such as the weaponizing of fake news. The pair acknowledges the daunting task of making these times and nation more hospitable to a more free and democratic place, they write:
“The failures of the corporate media and education system have already contributed to the current post-truth environment by creating nothing short of an epistemological crisis. This has proven to be detrimental to our democratic process and an affront to the First Amendment rights of the American people.
“Creating the better world we envision will not depend on rewriting recent history to suit our purposes or flatter our illusions, but rather will depend on creating an ever more democratic, diverse and critical free press. Without progress on building critical media literacy, if there’s a hell below, like Curtis Mayfield said, ‘We all going to go.’”
Terelle Jerricks is managing editor of Random Lengths News.
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