The new censorship.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Media underreporting of environmentally critical issues - Editorial

When an event of international importance goes conspicuously unmentioned by the media in the country where it occurred, U.S. reporters are quick to notice. They are less inclined to notice their own patterns of de facto censorship, A prominent group of analysts, however, has been watching those patterns with great interest. For the past 20 years, the Sonoma State University (California)-based Project Censored has been keeping track of critical issues that are given the silent treatment by mainstream news media. These issues come to the attention of the project through the diligence of a relatively few researchers and reporters who are willing to dig beneath the daily flotsam of scandals, murders, and bombings, and to analyze deeper patterns. Each year, Project Censored selects the 25 "most under-reported" of these stories for publication in its well-publicized book.

For Censored 1997, six of the stories draw from the past year's WORLD WATCH. They include Aaron Sachs's article "Dying for Oil," on the struggle for environmental justice in Nigeria (May/June 1996), Lester Brown's "Facing Food Scarcity," on the growing shortfall between global food production and human population (November/December 1995); our report on "America's Compromised Refrigerators" (September/October 1996); and three Environmental Intelligence pieces.

One might wonder why the issues exposed by WORLD WATCH should so often be those that are being given the silent treatment by mainstream media. It's not as though the topics we write about are too specialized to be of interest to most people, though it sometimes seems people are more interested in the pseudo-realities of Disney or MTV than in the actual world they're going to live or die in. Nor do we make any particular effort to dig up dark secrets; we're not "investigative journalists." So, why do the things we discuss turn out to be so stonewalled by The New York Times or CBS TV?

One hypothesis is that if more people really knew what's happening to their common assets - their water, food security, cultural and genetic heritage, and future prospects - they'd never permit many of today's industries to do what they routinely do. Some of these industries are engaged in practices that are rapidly spending down the planet's natural capital. And one reason most people don't seem to be particularly conscious of this, perhaps, is that these industries now exercise heavy control of the media through their expenditures of close to...