Project Censored’s annual list of most censored news stories shows one pattern dominating all others.
Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories—like Watergate before the 1972 election—that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense but in a broader, expanded sense reflective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship defined as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment: without the free flow of vital information, government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.
Yet, from the very beginning, as A.J. Liebling put it, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
In their introduction to Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press, which contains its top censored stories and much more, Project Censored’s Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth take this condition head-on, under the heading State of the Free Billionaire, in contrast to the volume’s title, State of the Free Press 2023. Following a swift recap of historic media criticism highlights—Upton Sinclair, the aforementioned Liebling, Ben Bagdikian, Edward Herman, and Noam Chomsky—they dryly observe, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite...
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