SPACE JUNK: The corporate media's fawning coverage of billionaires' space tourism is one of the best examples of 'Junk Food News' of the past year.

• Author: Lyons, Jen
• Position: BOOK EXCERPT

Remember the Cold War Space Race between the former Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s? During the past year, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk went ahead and turned that into a modern-day dick-measuring contest, for lack of a better phrase, to see who could get there first for the longest. Their space outfits, extensively reported on by CNN Science, received more attention than the pollution caused by this narcissistic billionaire power competition, in which one rocket launch produced an estimated 300 tons of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, where it can remain for years.

It was the "year of space tourism," "the year of the billionaires," the year space became "sexy all over again." Between summer 2021 and spring 2022, there were hundreds of news stories across corporate media outlets celebrating or criticizing the billionaire space race. While this rich dude bratwurst dish appears filling, it turns out that all this news is about as nourishing as a tin of vienna sausages.

The corporate news media's coverage of the billionaire space race epitomizes what Project Censored calls "Junk Food News," a term coined in 1983 by its founder, Carl Jensen, to criticize the type of sensationalist and inconsequential (but undeniably delicious in the moment) news stories that receive substantial coverage by corporate news outlets, thus distracting audiences from more significant, news-worthy stories.

The news of the billionaire space race launched in the summer of 2021 with Amazons Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group boldly going where no one could afford to go before--all vying to buy a spot in history. CNN was one of the main media outlets covering this new space race in detail, centering its reports on the dick-measuring contest between the three magnates. In its business pages, CNN covered the sword fight between Bezos and Branson vying to be the first to launch themselves into Earth's upper atmosphere, with Branson scooping Bezos by nine days to be the first of the billionaires to take a suborbital flight, via his company Virgin Galactic, on July 11, 2021. Not only was Bezos's Blue Origin flight upstaged by Branson, but Bezos also lost a $2.9 billion government contract from NASA to build the next lunar lander module, prompting Bezos to go to court to cry about it. If we're taking out the old measuring tape and doing this, SpaceX's Inspiration4 flight in September 2021, bankrolled by...