Mickey Huff
This just in!
In a country known around the world for its free press, the people who most need to know about Project Censored, which annually publishes a collection of the top 25 examples of important news stories that have been suppressed in the USA, and would derive the most benefit from reading the new 2012 collection, are the least likely to buy this year's edition.
Liberals who know that Freedom of the Press is on "death
watch" status will buy the new collection of hushed up news and not be able to
get closed minded conservatives to flip through it let alone read it cover to
cover.
America's Freedom of the Press has always been revered because of its role as "the watchdog of Democracy" but in the past 25 years Project Censored has been carving out its niche in pop culture by proclaiming itself to be the watchdog's watchdog.
The fact that the newest installment in the annual
publication series features a photo of an event at University of California's
campus at Davis, which was seen around the world the day it happened, might
seem to contradict the Project Censored mission statement but this year a
different approach has been implemented.
The mace in the face for the students was very well reported but the
underlying hidden trend spotting story has not.
The 2012 book lists the emergence of a Police State, which is exemplified by the photos showing the "pepper stray" attack, as being one of 2012's most under reported stories. It is the centerpiece for a collection of events which leads readers to the conclusion that American locations provide the dateline for a long list of "Police State" activities and thus the Police State assertion falls into the "if it quacks like a duck" category for examples of deductive reasoning.
Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley
presented a publication and author signing event on Saturday November 3,
2012. The World's Laziest Journalist
didn't want to run a Presidential Election Analysis column that might get lost
in the sandstorm of unique and perceptive analysis that was sure to become
available at the conclusion of election week, so we decided to write about the
new example of Project Censored in action.
We picked up some good column items such as: the Project Censorship team can be heard in the Berkeley CA area on KPFA FM radio on Fridays from 8 a.m. to 9 and is available online.
We paid particular attention to the speaker who outlined how
to submit suggestions to Project Censored because one of the stories that we
would suggest to their tip editor for next year is that in addition to
suppressing stories, Journalism in America is also suffering a "death of a
thousand cuts" style loss of quality reporting by switching to an emphasis of
work by "citizen journalists" as a cost cutting measure.
Like it or not, when one person makes all the editorial decisions there will be a detrimental increase in arbitrary and capricious factors which can only diminish the true journalism quality rating for the finished project. The use of work contributed by citizen journalists must, inevitably, lead to a reduction in the quality level of content.
Since it seems very unlikely that hard working content
providers would own up to providing content that would make a professor of
journalism barf, perhaps we should begin gathering material via the Gonzo Journalism
method for such an expose? We could
provide some columns in the Q & D (Quick and Dirty) style and then point
out in the piece for use in a future installment of the Project Censored
series, just what we got away with.
(Such as using a preposition at the end of a sentence?)
Here's another example of how the amateurs do sloppy work theory works: If a newspaper were to assign a staff writer the task of reviewing the Project Censored 2012 edition, they would give him/her a copy of the book and expect the reviewer to read it before writing pronouncements describing what it is about.
Keen makes the assertion that online content providers often cut and paste material found online for their story and think it is a marvelous example of journalism. Rather than reading the new book, we will paste a list of this year's chapters:
The alternative method of doing the html work to present an active link which would take readers to the list
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
