but, you know, young are reaching. they know the world is broken. they know the old vocabularies aren't working. they know that the languages that try to describe their experiences are no longer applicable in the same way. and they're reaching for something different, something new. some of them are. some of them are reaching for old languages. you know, dylann roof wasn't a baby boomer, a gen xer. you know. that's right. and so we need to understand and that the future that is in front of us is actually in our hands, all of us. and if we're going to build a future where everyone can have the can experience the dignity and standing, that will allow them to pursue their dreams and to make that dream a reality, if that's going to happen, we all have to do the hard of self cultivation in pursuit of a more just world. and at the end of the day, that that leads us to the conclusion that if the world is going to be a better place, we're going to have to be the leaders to make it happen. i love it. all right. well, eddie, brother eddie, this was a real pleasure.

a pleasure to read your latest book. and it was wonderful to have this conversation. and i'm hopeful that those watching this conversation will pick it up, learn for themselves and pass it on. ithanks for coming, everyone ths is my pleasure to welcome mickey huff for the second time. to the avid reader, we had him last year for the previous day, the free press, you know, 2023. and today i'm going to be discussing the free press 2020 before we have. he'll be discussing the book good discussing i think media

and that of thing and then ron opened it up to questions afterwards so please welcome mickey one of the others thanks so much know thanks to everybody here at the avid and broadway in sacramento it's always delight to be here and it's been a really great place since i since i moved over here from sonoma county, where project centered was founded almost 50 years ago. project has been around for a while and so i'm going to probably start just by telling you a little bit about what projects answered is what we do just real quickly show of hands how many people here already know about project censored. two. three. yeah i've got so fewer than half, but so for those don't i will just start i will start there. and as you heard in the introduction, i was going to talk a little bit about media literacy. and the interesting thing is that when project censored was

founded by carl jensen in 1976 as part of a class a college class researching the media and what they did and didn't cover. now this was in the seventies and. this was spurred by the watergate. so a lot of things came coming out of the seventies were spurred by that. of course, we know that that eventually obviously it led the resignation of richard nixon. it created tumult in the two major parties we had. well, we had some certainly interesting developments coming out of the seventies politically. but another thing we got out of that was, something called the church committee hearings and the pike committee hearings in congress that were looking at a lot of scandals and secrecy and a lot of things going on with the cia and secret covert and political assassinations and oh my is that a fun list? but that's know that tempest is where project censored was born

and it was born of the idea that we the belief that we need truly free press. we need to protect freedoms, but we also need to have constructive, critical mechanisms to be sure that the press is doing the best job it can in the public. and carl carl took that to because he came from ad and media and he a mid-life career shift into communication and sociology of media really and. so when carl started the project there was no real term critical media literacy or media literacy education wasn't something that people talked about that. doesn't mean that people didn't understand the importance of it. we press criticism and goes, we go back easy 100 years and we maybe we will hear today we'll a little bit about the fighting. bob lafollette, the progressive magazine, 1909, a full before upton sinclair of the brass that skewered the press at the time

you know was being increasingly controlled by robber barons and you know, the wealthy. i might get confused. i'm not sure if i'm talking about 21st century, if i'm talking about the late 20th century, if i'm talking about twenties, you see where that's going. but that's fun. thing is, is part of my my day job as an historian i chair the journalism department, the apple valley college and teach social science. i'm very fascinated by the history. journalism in history, to me really matters a lot and the history of project censored, i think is very significant because i'm biased the third director, but i'm biased because i believe that that historical context is very important. and so giving you the context of from from where the project is born i think maybe helps people understand what we've been doing that many years and maybe even why we're doing it and. why are we still doing it? you know, about 20 some years ago, some some of the folks now the right press is often, you know, they've either ignored us or attacked us. the left press has done some of the same, believe it or not, the

establishment press or the corporate media generally ignores us altogether because we tend to be critical of them, albeit constructively right. which i think is significant to point out. again, we'll come more back to that, some of that later and some of that history later. but back to where the project formed out of watergate, carl looks back and says, well feel like i'm a pretty informed news consumer and i feel like i read the papers and i pay attention to what's happening. but why why did we watergate? he went back, started looking at what was referred to as the alternate or alternative or independent press, and they were covering a lot of the nixon scandals, including watergate, before the other major news outlets and certainly before the washington, which gets all the credit, you know, but and bernstein and all that jazz and they go to hollywood and celebrates and the media does a great and democracy wins again. you know that's that's that's true hollywood ending true meaning false but that's where

where carl gets this idea that if he's paying attention he's missing these stories and he knows other people in the in the establishment press are missing them. what else is missing. right. so he took the watergate and he turned it into a reason to really study and evaluate press and not just critically, you know, the the failures of the established press. but to highlight the intrepid reporting of the independence of the people who languishing often in obscurity are people who often aren't really making a lot of money, or maybe they're barely making a living from being a public interest journalist and. so that's where the project gets its start. and he and carl thinks that if we were able to teach another generation of, of students, of young people the importance of the free, the importance of how it informs people for meaningful civic engagement, that this is something that isn't just a skill set, that people in society in general should have. but carl also thought, you know,

journalists can actually benefit from learning about these things, too, because, you know, we it for granted and we make assumptions that journalists are going to understand all these things because they're living them or they can them up close. and again, the irony is, well, sometimes too close and, sometimes the pressures are too great. and even reporters that have an ethical, you know, sort of conscious or moral compass when it to media issues, they succumb to the pressures of the industry and then we can pile on challenges right that come into the increased ownership and consolidation the reliance on the private for profit model from reliance on what or who is newsworthy from elite sources. and then the general ideological biases of our corporate media in the united states, which are of course pro-capitalist, neoliberal oil, pro-western foreign policy, pro naito i mean, again, a few years ago when the editor of the new york times was being interviewed about the bias of the new york times, in one sentence, he was

claiming how they were the beacon of objective journalism, and the next sentence he was talking about, how great it was. they cheerlead neo liberalism and, you know, other other, you know, sort of and western strategies and and you didn't see any disconnect whatsoever because it was there. it was sort of the the the neutrality of his bias right, as it were, is like it's the fish in the water. it's like what? what water? like, no, no. the whole ecosystem, um, of the news about which you seem be inherently unaware, yet you're a leading. leading beacon of it. you're, you're the new york times is historically referred to as the paper of record in the united states. and carl and others and peter phillips. and what we've been saying for a long time at project censored is that like places like the new york times, in fact be the paper of record, but if so, what is record? they're setting? and are there other things we're leaving out of the record? is the record accurate? you get where we're going here. and that was carl's main

question was what else are they not covering? why? and he thought the adjective portion was the key to moving the needle on these issues. and almost every and if you go back to that period, that same period of the seventies, i'll try to get out of historian mode here eventually. but one one of the fcc commissioners at the time, nicholas johnson, i don't know how many folks know him, but i bring this up. author nick johnson has been a project center judge since our inception. he still with us judges stories every year. he wrote a great book that more people need to know about called your second priority a number of years and what johnson was getting at was regardless of what your primary concern interest is in living, when you live in a society like, the united states, whether you're interested in the climate or climate change or electoral or, you know, immigration or foreign policy or fill in the blanks, any number of things, racism, etc. right. you are likely to gain very little in your primary area of interest. unless your second priority has

something to do with media democracy. media reform supporting a free freedom of information, right? so in other words, what johnson was saying it really rang true people like jensen and for us at carl at project censored. right it meant that we all to be media literate. we all have a stake in this and we all benefit. we're all a little bit better read and we have diverse news and information sources at us right? so that's the genesis, the project out of watergate. hey, by the way just as a quick aside for that and i'll get of that decade i promise we we all want to get out of the seventies the only anyway i don't how many people know this but the nixon white actually contacted the the main the head of cbs news and squelched some of cronkite's on watergate. right. i mean so that's a direct violation of the first amendment right. but again, these are the kind of things that later go on to inform what we do at project

censored is. and that's literally a prior restraint matter. now, what carl was getting at and what spent a lot of time are the other kinds of censorship, news, abuse and that we also look at censorship by proxy. so we're going to get into some of that here in bit. and i think i was as i was mentioning before we got started, i might read a passage or two from the book because novel idea, it's a bookstore and it's a book talk and i never read out of our own books. so i saw it today. i'll do that and we'll how a little bit of that goes but there's some i think there's some interesting ideas in here. and i to sort of tease out some ideas because in a little while, believe it or not, i want to i really do want to hear from you and have a sort of a robust conversation and dialog about some of these issues. so anyway, carl starts project censored before there even is a term critical media literacy, right? so you know, getting out of the seventies getting closer to today, what are the kind of challenges in our so-called and what is the so-called what is

the state of our so-called free press. well we we if ask, you know, average americans about the state of the so-called free press. we know a few things. we know that the trust in the establishment press has been declining extraordinarily right over the last couple of decades. in fact, over half of people in the united states say that they they honestly believe that the united states in u.s., the press routinely lies and manufactures information to bolster or support certain ideological interests. now, where do you imagine that people would get that kind an idea? well, if you happen to be a consumer of the media and these press outlets, you start to find out. and in fact this is at least part of where maybe, maybe we can do a little bit of highlighting of some sections here. but i think it's important to note just a couple a couple of things things.

distrust high. this is unfortunate, right? americans often see media through a highly partizan lens. audiences are hyper polarized. 93% of fox news viewers are lean republican, while 91% of new york times readers and 95% of msnbc audiences skew democrat right. and so this is we're calling this out. allan mcleod in our forward in the book this year says this leads to a shallow understanding and scrutiny of the corporate press. our media is honest. there is is propaganda and fake news. does that sound like a conversation or something that you've heard or been part of even in your own life or your own social circles? you've heard that right. i mean, again, we cover a lot of diverse stories and so we get it from all angles. we've we've managed to annoy and irritate people from across the political spectrum. it's a magic act. it's taken a long time to do it. but by golly, we've done it.

and it's something that i actually am proud of because. i believe that if we if we adhere things like the society of professional code of ethics and, we use that as that sort of moral compass of what what free press can do in the public interest. i think that we i think that we can start to see media that is more responsible in the public interest and we can begin to see media propaganda too, meaning we can even see it when it's propaganda we like or we agree with right there. our confirmation biases are very strong. someone says something we say that can't be true because i think something i go out and find something that, you know, reinforces what i think about it. i go see i'm right. and then they do the same thing in reverse. and then we keep talking and walking past each other without ever really engaging in the dialog and one of the significant things that that journalism can do is can provide a space for that dialog. it can provide a space for meaningful discourse.

yes, that isn't just i'm right. you're wrong. no matter, what? but it is based on the interest in the ideas and the things that are happening within communities. right. and so journalism, i keep saying in the public interest can do these things when it reports on things that matter most to the people that live in these news areas. now hold on because i'm going to get into a few other of the challenges as coming out of this sort of what is this the state of the so free press today? alan mcleod in our forward simply comes out and says it. the first sentence of the book is we are swimming in an ocean of propaganda, not that we usually call it that we like to think of propaganda, something that exists largely in enemy nations like china, north korea, russia. but what else to call the thousands of misleading advertise myths, news snippets or politicized messages we every day. and this is why we get into this. this issue of half of americans believing that news organizations intentionally deceive them and they retreat to their team.

red team blue, kind of interpretations. well, again, this is problematic and it's compounded by the fact only a handful of corporations control vast majority of what people our country see read or hear on a daily basis state media in the us of course, that's what we would call pbs, npr or community radio, which is different. that actually is community media can very different than that, more grassroots than that. but much of that here is also by private for profit corporations. right. but when we hear it talk state media, many americans immediately jump to, you know, r.t. wright and his the evil propaganda arm or press tv from iran right, but, but, but they seem fine with the bbc and of course npr and pbs are the gold standard of journalism in the united states. i'm curiously enough, if we apply critical media literacy sort of critiques across the spectrum to all these media outlets, we probably will

discover that they all have issues. they all have biases. they have problems. right? some of them may be more obvious than others, but they're still there and living in this hyper polarized, hyper partizan, polarized sort of media ecosystem, the team red team blue kind of dynamic, we all the gray area and we consequently lose the gray matter. right. we lose out on the significant debates, significant facts around, controversial issues, because many people afraid to go there or they're afraid challenge their own belief system. and we all know that this is really it's rooted in its tentacles into our community. it's very hard to change one's mind about certain things, particularly when they're rooted in, maybe family or community or ethnic city history place. so many different things, identity, so many. right. that's why, again, go back to the teaching of critical media literacy. education is, because it gives

us tools where can begin to assess and analyze our own biases and shortcomings and to be able understand and see them in others when we people about what ethical journalism like again we talk about seek and report it. that's what ethical does. it minimizes it doesn't cause more, right? we act independent. we think journalists should act independently, meaning they shouldn't be doing the bidding of their owners right. and we there are there is example after example, we see owners putting their thumbs. the scale, whether it's sinclair broadcasting or putting a thumb on a scale to have everybody saying the same right wing line on the same over and over and over again, or we've seen it at fox, but guess else we see it. we see it in cbs, see it at cnn, where they're incredibly biased reports. the entire cuomo brother affair that people have conveniently forgotten was, you know, one of the more disgraceful episodes of conflict of interest in corporate media in years. and yet it seems that this kind

of what what what what happened there again but if it's the more low hanging fruit, you know, if it's especially among the liberal class, it's only a problem at fox, it's only a problem the right and they refuse to see how the relentless barrage of around things like russia ukraine israel-gaza that the new york times the washington cnn, msnbc have been just repeating over and over again same kinds of half truths and distortions around key issues of our day. this is why people lack trust in media this is why we're at a great time where we can be more engaged, more informed about our alternative and independent media outlets, and we can actually choose to support independent and local media that tells us about the things that matter most, and we can turn off the distracting corporate media that tends to be very now. we also a lot of this and read a lot of this media.

i want to see what what these outlets are doing right. because we're critical of them but we also when the new york times and you know and sometimes they'll partner up with propublica or you know the wall street journal someone does a long investigative journalistic study we acknowledge that don't say that the corporate media never report things we need to know about. again, we're back in the world of nuance. it's not all black and white but more and more as time has gone on, more people in our society are sort of just cordoned off these silos and the media has both helped form the siloed but then benefits from them so they don't want people to get out of them right is as our webmaster adam harman with armstrong say, when you get people on the website, you want them to leave. so if you're writing them on the website like don't click that other source, it takes them off our website, right? very good webmaster, doing it, doing his job, trying to keep people on the website but as far as journalists go and journalism, we want people to go to all the other sites we have a

whole list of independent journalists sites that we list that we places that we have worked with and featured over the years, you know, dozens of them. we're about giving people access to information. we're about providing resources, independent. news media resources, and especially for classroom use, we really try to give people critical media literacy, education tools. that's what we do. part of in the book of what i've been reading about here is, well, why we do it so the way we started the book, is it probably a good place to discredit launch into it and then maybe give a couple quick examples it and then open things up for a conversation. but out of all this, andy roth, any lee roth or associate director and i think this is our 14th book together now on this the annual we start by talking about what are some of the key challenges and what some signs that we are seeing that where journalism is being reinvigorated right. so i know that the the cover here the cover of the book in.

anthony stevens ball and always does a great cover us he's great he gives an into annotated there's like 20 footnotes to the cover. this symbolizes that and that's what this means. that's what's going on here. and this you know and andy and steve masika, who are steve mays also that they write they wrote a really great description of some of the symbolism of that cover. but but what it's what it hints around the symbolism of the cover it's ending the slats and censorship of corporate and it's also reporting it also gives us the opportunity to think about the lack new accurate news sources that people end up getting to see. right. so slats or blinds the window actually act as as filters. right. and what gets what gets and what doesn't get through the filters. and so we ask, quite honestly, what would happen if journalism disappeared? i mean, because we've been looking at this and we've been looking at the journalistic landscape for for a very long time. and it sounds preposterous on, the face of it, what you kind of just blurted out when we were

having a conversation one day and just kind of blurred it out. right. and it's like, well, the when we seem to be dealing a we've talked about the epistemology crisis we're in and these kind of books. the united of distraction, right. but what are these? what if it disappears? so here's here's some ways in which it disappears. literally, news disappears. news deserts the rise of news deserts. what is this? well, many communities, the united states now suffer from limited access to credible, comprehensive local news. northwestern university's state of the local news report, 2022 determined more than half the counties in the united states,. 61,630 are served by only one newspaper. each, while another 200 or more counties. the homes of some 4 million people have no newspaper at all. put another way, 70 million americans, a fifth of the country's population, live in news deserts. this study also finds that news deserts are most common and economically stark. struggling communities. it's a form of in fact, this is a form of inequality known as

digital redlining. right. where we have it's a it's not an that people in some communities don't have access to information just like it's not an accident. certain people in communities don't have access to other supports or other other services, community services. news is a public service. it's protected by the amendment because it's very important. right. in fact and curiously and i ask this to my students all the time, there are five freedoms protected by the first amendment and they're very important ones. only one in a thousand people in this country know what they are. yet 25% of the population in can right now tell five characters on the simpsons right. you know, we know that or i'm sure they can tell us what's happening with taylor swift and, travis kelce and what have you. right. and again, that's the kind of junk food news that that carl jensen talked about. he coined that term in the eighties because one of the critiques was about judgment. right. and this is what we're getting here. there are fewer and fewer

outlets locally to report on things. and so news judgment is a big deal, right? when you're pink sliming astroturfing or just funneling news into people's communities, that's coming from somewhere. or worse is now algorithmically generated. right. and readers don't even often know this is happening. and these desert communities. yeah well, that's a lack of news. judgment. right? carl, you use the junk news sort of theme to be like, look. not only do i spend time looking at what you don't cover, i decided start looking at what you did and you spent an inordinate amount of time on sensationalized tabloid junk. twinkies, the brain, he called it. right there's probably no one in here that doesn't know. who? travis kelce or taylor are. right. these people can do things and there's no way you can ignore it. you try all day and hope you don't hear thing about these folks. and you will. right. we only wish it was. we only wish that the news about julian assange might.

maybe we would reach more people in that capacity. right. and we could hear more about that, of course. one of the things we do with the project is, publish other books now, mention some of that later. so rise in news deserts is a big. we also divided attention and we we see most americans engage in practice that hector hakata, a german media scholar that we've worked with. he has an article discarded news he calls it news snack. news is no longer received consciously, but rather consumed. incidentally like potato chips. instead intentionally seeking news from sources dedicated. the journalism many people now assume the viral nature of social media automatically alert them to any truly important events or issues. a belief that is especially prominent among younger media users. a 2017 study determined that the prevalence of this finds me perception is likely to widen gaps in political while promoting a false sense of being informed. yes, indeed, we are the dunning kruger nation, right? we often believe we know a lot

more about certain things than there are to know. and it shows right? we the more we open our mouths, often the more we we remove the doubt in others, right? who may be more aware of things than we are. another to diversify our media habits. well, look, we've got challenges. we're part of the challenge. the fact that we may not seek out journalistic or no, i don't understand what they are, what they look like. but there are signs of reinvention. there are important signs that we talk about in the book, of course, goes on to illustrate all of these things that we're talking about. if we talk about if journalism as, we have known it is on the verge of disappearing. right. sensationalized tabloid ized. hyper partizan. right. that's commonplace. that's mostly what passes for journalism. absolute what passes on cable news, that's for sure. broadcasting tried to limp along and keep up with those types of trends.

what are some of these reinvention signs? well, we talk about them every year in the muckraking journalists that are in our books. but there are platforms and again, these these are not perfect places or platforms, but these are places people are getting more reader supported journalism. right. whether it's substack talk or patreon reader supported journalism is coming along way to help people practice ethical journalism. right. there are also signs of reinvention when we look at public. viktor picard, the great media scholar from the university of pennsylvania, has been talking about this years, has a great article in the conversation from the other day that was picked up by scheer post the great bob scheer. picard says that media can't support the minimum levels of news media, the democracy requires. and, dare we say it, just in the last week or so, we see that places like the l.a. times and others are dumping more, more reporters, and they're saying we can't possibly.

bear in mind, the l.a. times is owned a multibillionaire, and they're running 30, $40 million loss. but do the math. write somebody did it for us. right. and the math it. that's what the critics did. was that. yeah, i'm not sure what the l.a. times owners bemoaning. they could basically run it at a loss 100 years and still have billions left over. so the problem isn't the resource. it's the willingness to do anything with them. and the people that own the press. the great press critic aj 1961. the best way to the best way to ensure a free press is to own one. right. and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. i keep bringing up the news media ownership thing. that's why we need public media and we need public options. and there are people that are talking about these solutions, but you rarely hear about them. the corporate media, where most people are going to get their news because it does not behoove those outlets to. talk about a public option. does it look? we have head of cbs who you may

remember, les moonves before he got me to mudd as. if this shouldn't have me to him right out of existence before me, too. but some of you might remember here he in 2016, before the election between clinton and trump. sorry. it's a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, donald. keep going. it may not be good for america, but it's -- good. cbs. exclaimed les moonves. he was executive chairman and ceo of cbs during a morgan stanley technology and telecom conference. he noted, i've never seen anything like this. it's going to be a very good year for us, not capital u. capital s united states, but small u, small as shareholders at cbs and their corporate owners. he says it out loud at a great convention hall, where he's cheered on by throngs of people saying, yay, the demise of democracy, civil decay, a of the look he's at least admitting that there is a completely

compromise fourth estate in this capacity again contributing the decline or lack of trust. when you start adding all real problems that we're seeing in journalism with the added on politicized weaponized problems. member trump made no he wasted no time weaponizing the fake news meme. anything he disagreed. was fake news. and then he even went back and was borrowing terms from the german right, borrowing phrases that nixon recycled, going all the way back to world war one and to about the new reagan presser, the lying press. right. well, trump was getting that. trump was riffing on all that when he was calling the press the enemy of the people. and again, it's weird because, you know, the way that the corporate media often function is an adjunct of the state or adjunct of sort of the global capitalist class. in some ways, they may be ironic. they are the enemy of the people in, the public interest, but certainly not way that trump

met. but notice how it's clever to weaponize that and confuse and poison the well, as it were. so that when actual critics come along to note where the press is falling short, it gets drowned out by the noise of the moral panic around fake news. and then, like we're the panic zone. please help us help find the facts in the dark. jeff bezos, he's going to help us with his big billion dollar flashlight. and by washington post, democracy dies in darkness. and jeff knows because he turns out the lights right when they don't report on right, it happens. this is something that happens again. the more reason why we need these public options, the ones advocated by people like picard focus on production of better quality news, the reinvention of journalism depends on cultivating broader public interest in and support for top notch journalism. this is something that our journalism schools should do. we have historic precedent at times in our society and times in our history where celebrated,

celebrated muckraker journalism, in fact, 100 years ago. was sort of a golden era of the muckrakers. item tarbell in the great takedown of standard oil. i mean, amazing, right amazing. takedown of standard oil. it the power of the pen, right? well, investigative journalism has extraordinary consequences. it not only can motivate, but it can change the direction of society in meaningful ways, lasting ways. that's this is no small issue. it's no small order. i know. live in a society that laughs off the fact that you know flint didn't have drinking doesn't have, you know, potable water, drinking water. but then we realize we did several reports that like half the cities, the country have similar problems. well well, nobody's there to cover it. right? it's like that story just like tapers off the truth keeps falling. but everybody gave up listening to it, so it's not making a noise anymore. meanwhile the water goes on poisoning people. by way, the top story we have in

the book this just real quick that forever chemicals in rainwater a global threat to human health. yet global there is no place on earth where you do not find contaminated rainwater that's seeping into the ground into the soil, into the water, everywhere, back into the air, recycle. right. we're living in in a toxic ecosystem. it is it's a very painful thing, acknowledge. but we're in it. we're the frogs in the boiling pot. it's the journalists are supposed to be the ones saying, hey, aren't you hot yet? get off the fire you know, or light it up. hired a realizes that the frogs jump the hell out. that's why we need journalists to ring the alarm bells, not the fake ones. right. russia. that canard is gone over and over. did russia try to manipulate the election? yes. successful?

no. how much did they try to manipulate? what we find out? not very much at all, actually. factually, in some of the groups that claimed in congress that they evidence of it happening later testified under oath and they didn't. crowdstrike looking you but they never the memo at msnbc they never get the memo. at cnn. rachel maddow made a cottage industry of russiagate and again it over it distorts the real challenges we have with people like putin and russia it distorts real challenges we have with people working to manipulate the last two election cycles. the largest manipulator, the largest of these groups would be aipac and israel and almost no one talks about that. even though it's been demonstrated over and over. right. it doesn't fit the and again, this is part of what we talk about about media literacy, understanding frames and understanding narratives and understanding that we have a responsibility to teach each

other how to ask the right kinds of questions. we can deconstruct and decode that kind of propaganda. we can seek out the kind of news and information speaks to us and is source of factual information, and we can try to build a better conversation to create better, more just and equitable communities we can. they did it 100 years ago and they didn't have these dumb things smartphones we can do it. we are doing it a little bit at a time. people on a saturday. come out to hear me rant and rave for a minute. but you know, when i'm going to be here for a while. sorry, but you're going to start talking soon, but i got stuff i would love for you to support the avid reader, of course, but i have other resources to give away. there's people here that i know, including a fantastic school teacher that uses some of our stuff in his class that we'll talk to. and another amazing reporter activist that has long worked on media ownership issues. and so we're going to have a really great conversation here and a little bit, but i want to get back to again just a couple these ideas about this disappearance, right so if

journalism is disappearing, not disappearing, what was talking about? right. that's that's that's that's a problem mean it is disappearing then it isn't disappearing. what kinds of it? is this disappearing? and where in what kind are not disappearing? well, again, these independent muckrakers, we still have them. we still have people like lincoln steffens, like upton sinclair. i mentioned upton sinclair earlier from, the brass check. upton sinclair, of course, know wrote the jungle teddy roosevelt's doctor read it and told teddy roosevelt about it. and it eventually roosevelt to have pure food and drug act. it led to some of the first government regulations food safety up in sinclair by the way. whoo hoo hoo. i happened to be a socialist. it's not because he's a socialist that. we bring up upton sinclair. it's that he was attuned to these kinds of issues because he asked different questions than other people did he ask

questions from the bottom? not the top? he asked questions, coming from people and workers, not owners. managers. so that you can have different views, different perspectives in the same journalistic where the public lives and and reads and shares. right. we can this too. and we think that we are in an era fact we are working on a book right now celebrating the 50th anniversary coming up of project censored. we're going to be doing a book on news that changed america, which is a follow up to carl stories that changed america. a history of in the 2020 a century. we're going be doing it with a history in the 21st century, kind of where that left off because. we so strongly believe that we have we have in it. we in us this report dies of a golden era. i think that we have we have our we have the access to many, many independent outlets. we have access to so many independent journalistic reports. but if we are not critically

media literate, can't always find them or we don't know how to develop trust in them. that's again why again, over the a lot of people again i mentioned before we've managed to annoy across the spectrum part of that is because our bias in favor of a free press it's it's in favor of the first amendment. people say you're biased you're biased on your coverage of israel or palestine. you're biased about your issue around fill in the blank, whatever issue is. and i turn around people and i say, well, yes, you're right. we are biased, but we're not biased about the issue itself or bias about the way that the establishment or corporate in our country tends to cover it. so it's our job to kind of point out the other narratives or the other stories about it, which i it's not uncommon if you have a democrat office. we tend to report things that the press won't report about, things that they might be doing, vice versa. right when trump's in office from from the last time we were critical about all those things biden comes into office. guess what we've been critical about that we were critical about leaks revealing homeland

security plans to regulate disinformation online. we were critical about the twitter files revealing government pressure on social media. most folks, when you talk about those stories, they'll just go to the bias. they'll say, we need government regulate disinformation. the russians are trying to manipulate us, again, based on other canards. you know what? the best defense against propaganda is? critical media, literacy, education, not more a private for profit outlets. you what the news is and isn't like newsguard or so-called fact checkers that show themselves to be again and again and. again you have a fact checker right with you right now. it isn't your phone, it's your brain. and if it's trained to think critically, you'd be surprised what it can. do you be surprised how you find yourself sounding different than the people next to you who are maybe engaged or less involved in media literacy and? they are less maybe civically engaged, right? so these things are connected

and i think that i'm going to try to wrap up here because i want to hear more from you, but i these kinds of muckraking, investigative missions like that we herald from 100 years ago, we highlight in the top 25 of our stories every and though maybe some people think these are largely forgotten, we think the muckraking from the last century provide another model of how journalism might be if not reinvented. the muckrakers reporting was successful in part because it harnessed the public for shame and scandal. well we certainly seem to like those things right. shame and scandal to the of political engagement, to. paraphrase i'm sorry. and appreciation of the links between trustworthy information, relevant news and political action informs. the contents of our books every year, including this one in state of the free press 2025. so with i want to conclude on two quick notes about. this is going to be a real quick because some of this is going to come in in our q&a.

i wanted to go to our friend, one friend of ours going way back the mid 20th century, george seldes. many of you, in fact, may remember george zelda as a torch bearer of the muckraking tradition who founded, in fact, which the nation's first periodically successful of press criticism in 1940. he often noted, is about telling people what's really going on in society and at its most influential journalism promotes public awareness. it's spur civic engagement real reform and even radical another from even walter lippmann. in 1920, a leading critic of the era issued a clarion call saying, quote, the news about the news needs to be told meaning in order to be critically media literate. we we don't just focus on the issues of the day but media itself an issue of the day we have to all engage in media criticism not just the negative kind where we say the other thing we don't like is fake news, but the kind where we actually ask critical questions we seek out sources maybe that

we're unfamiliar with. we look for ideas that may challenge ones that we already hold and that in large part, i think is really the spirit that motivates project centered in our curriculum. in closing i have a quick list of what see ways that we can flex our media literacy muscles and things that we are potential solutions where can all make a difference. we think that cutting junk food from your media diet is important. all have our guilty pleasures. but let's not confuse hard journalism and news with. nonsense, right? let's be honest follow the money. corporate news driven by advertising revenues and, ownership, period. that's significant. and if ever important, we have a literal billionaire. we open the last year's book with a whole list of billionaires you'd likely not heard of that tend own a lot of major media outlets and of course they have crept their way into social media and the world of the internet. you all know columbia journalism review still maintains a great

database on ownership. so it's good to make friends with that with their website, ask who's treated as newsworthy. anybody can do this. why is this being interviewed by somebody else? not being interviewed? and again, you go back to 1988 and edward herman and noam chomsky, his propaganda model, where talk about ownership, advertising elite sourcing, reference of who's the newsmaker who's the news shaper, right. the corporate news tend to go to corporate executives, shareholders, experts. they go to people that are in the more upper class or the management structure of our society. they don't often go the working class. they don't often go in people's communities. in terms of the foreign policy, we know some foreign correspondents don't even go to places they're reporting about. they just get stuff bound, right. that's common practice. believe it or not. so anyway, ask who is as newsworthy? and this is another adjunct that worthy and unworthy victims who

are treated that way in the press. how are people treated with language, age and the great alan macleod wrote, our forward has a great sort of thing on twitter acts that he does, which is he does this real simple thing. it's every day he looks at a major headlines on the major papers and he fixes them. he goes through and he's a media scholar that's also a journalist if only we had more of that people that use it for the public interest write to tell people things they really need to know and demystify it right to remind us that we can deconstruct to write who is a worthy. we can also of resist news inflation. there's so much of it everywhere all the time. that's why joke of does it disappear? how much of it is real journalism? how much of it is fluff how much of it is junk food news? how much of it is partizan propaganda? how much of it is news, while a small percentage of it really really is, but you have to be attuned to it in order to find it and last seek and support solutions journalism and so we have long promoted yes magazine

other publications we try to escape the negative bias news. media tends to focus on what's wrong and people can get really down by it. i know we're guilty the same when people look at some of our list top ten stories or top 25 stories every year. they're just like, i can't, i can't do it. i got to the first two and i had to put it down. yeah, you know, and i'm like, you know, don't shoot the messenger, but but if what we've been doing for years now is we make a concerted effort to find solution stories, we try to find stories that aren't all doom gloom. and we show people that like it is out there, but like the doom gloom thing has the it attracts and attracts our attention. it gets us. so we try to show how there are lot of individuals and organizations out there. we have a chapter in this book every year called media democracy in action that highlights pro first amendment organizations individuals that work in legal areas, independent journalists areas, educational areas, areas, so year after year

we showcase that, right? all the things we do in the book other than top censored stories we look at déja vu what's to previous censored stories? do they languish in obscurity or the corporate media pick them up? sometimes pick them up and we say yes more of that, please. good job. it took you a year or two or ten, but maybe you got to it, right? and that's why we celebrate. we don't use it as another opportunity. throw sand in face right up. hold. you sucked. yeah. i mean, it might. feel good for your inner voice, but it's not right because these are all people with pressures and interests. things too. and by the way, we wrote another book called let's agree to disagree that how we communicate with people and the kind of journalism we what kind of tone does it have? what kind of audience are we trying to reach? we preaching to the converted or are we trying to teach the people that don't know or our interest? there's a difference. and so we try to showcase that. of course, talk about junk food news in a chapter. we have a whole chapter on news abuse propaganda that shows how prevalent propaganda is every

year. i know that the sirens are coming to take us because i'm out of time, but to end on a more positive again on the positive note, i wanted to read a quick quote from our founder, carl jensen. if i might i might i might be able to i might, though i have too many papers, but only paraphrase him for you because it's a good note to end on and it's relating to media literacy. and i want i want to during the q&a and your comment period, i want to talk about some of the stuff that we do around media literacy for young people. i want to talk about how you and other people might be able to get involved with us each year and help producing these lists and teaching media literacy in our communities among among other things. but but project centered really always comes back to education and. you can go to a project center dot org and check out our work. we have all of things there for free. we don't take corporate, we don't take advertisers. we're by some grants, some generous donors. and unlike really pbs. my readers, viewers like you for

real, people that actually donate on monthly basis. you know, we give the book every year, shirts, whatever things we give you, we give you perks. but so much of what we do is online free. our documentaries, our weekly radio show that i've been doing for 14 years. so know over 40 stations, 50 stations. the project censored show. we have a ton of curriculum, media literacy, critical media literacy curriculum. now for free k-12 college we're doing we are in the devil's den on twitter on instagram doing critical media literacy action reels so you can actually see an alan mcleod or you can see us on there talking about a headline, talking about what's happening. we're going that's what this medium book is about. it's not about finger wagging at the tech generation. it's about learn how that stuff uses you. learn how you're tethered it, and you can create sort of a healthier relationship with technology in a way that maybe you can sort of get things out of it. you can find ways to undisciplined by going and looking for it, having that algorithm feed what you're seeing, right? these are things that we can do.

education, education, karl said that one of the things we could do in our schools is we can try to pump out more muckrakers, fewer buck takers. we'd all be more bent, we'd all benefit it, and we would all benefit from more journalism in the public interest journalism education in this capacity, does make a real difference. and that's why we continue do this after 48 years. that's why we started the censored press, andy lee roth and i in 2021 partnered with seven stories that's and we have since published the state of the free 24 state of the free press. 23 and to which i actually have here the media and me, which is our media literacy for young people book. we have one of the only books published on assange in the case against him by kevin costello. this book came out last march so a lot there's a lot going on with the assange case right now including next week day x on the final hearing on extradition that will impact journalists

world wide. that's what this book is about. going remote. adam bessey and peg were here at avid reader not long ago that a great book on education going so it's about technology online teaching it's also about adam's own personal journey journey in the health care system. it's a great memoir and nonfiction. it was just named by the ala as one of the top graphic books, the year nonfiction. so we're really, really proud of them and proud of this. and we're proud of what we do at the censored because it's kind of the trajectory of what we've been doing and projects as a for a long. we're really collaborative and we try to we stand on the shoulders of giants and we try to find all other people that are doing the things that we other people need to know about. and we try to amplify signal, we try to boost the signal and we try to meet more and more people that agree that that is worth boosting. and we try to find allies that will help us do. and we try to reciprocate by finding out what you're doing and find ways of we can work with you. second priority right?

how can we maybe help you get your messages across? how can you be more media literate to help have better gains in your primary, in your life and we hope in your civic interests? so with that, i'm closing things out. i thank all for being patient. plenty more say, but it'll come up in our conversation and so thanks so much for being here thanks for the thanks to our good friends from c-span are here recording that today and our session today as well. so with that i will take any comments, questions, heckling, disagreement, whatever you like to throw. those up. i threw out lots of stuff so you can tag to any of them or bring up something new. what do you think about the role of to do sort of clean up of of stories were squashed, you know. well, you know, i guess we could ask oliver stone about that the

edward snowden film which was quote, fiction. right. but but but not right. i think fiction is is a powerful vehicle for change and fiction. ironically is what sometimes we're reading in the major corporate media. but the kind of fiction that i think you're talking about really can motivate people to think critically about things. and oftentimes it's because of self-censorship and the chilling effect, a very real thing in journal, the journalistic i know people that have to writing fiction because there are certain things they can't say without destroying their entire lives, their careers or those of others. so fiction, i think, always been a great outlet to try get people to think about the questions that are around critical literacy, who is behind a certain why do they want us to know it? how are they framing it? what are they leaving out this may seem basic, but those are tenets of media literacy,

pedagogy that we think should be infused across the curriculum right. and fiction then therefore is a great vehicle to have people ask questions and to ponder things. so i'm a huge advocate of it, honestly, i wish i had more time to read fiction. i i'm too immersed in this world of nonfiction. so again, most of the fiction i read just propaganda that that thinks it's journalism but it has a different right. but again i applaud and i know a lot of educators and adam bessey, one of them teaches a whole course on dystopian, teaches a whole course on graphic novels. and it's an amazing especially for people, it's proven to be such an amazing you know, we talk a lot about people not reading books anymore and the kids don't read and i mean, i'm guilty of it. i teach, you know, i have my moments right. but the reality is is that reading is not the only i mean, i know that i'm not going to get

into cognitive psychology and stuff. there's lots of things our brain does and learns from reading. right. i'm not denying that. would never deny that. but the same time i deal with folks i teach at diablo valley college, really, really large community in the san francisco bay area feeds uc berkeley and other schools in the area and what we've discovered over the years. what we've discovered the years is it's not that students don't want to engage in discussions an, ideas. they just don't always engage with them the same way. and if i give so for example, you know, i, i'll assigned the untold history of the united states in my us modern u.s. history class stone and peter cosmic american university. it's 900 pages, so yeah, yeah. they laugh right away. but there's also the documentary series. now, this is still nonfiction, but they'll watch an hour documentary and we'll come class and have a conversation or will they read the 200 pages about the obama years and the updated edition.

well, i'm not kidding myself. i know they're going to do. but just mean i don't tell them to read it. and that doesn't mean i don't make it available. it's just i'm finding as many ways as possible meet people where they are in the classroom, out to find where the is. where is the connection? where is the thing that we can go and talk about the other things that we probably to talk about, right? so is a great vehicle. music is a stellar vehicle. music in the arts really get people thinking i'm a musician i go back a ways that's how i got into media studies and propaganda. i was an early punker and into speed metal, you know. so that's how that's where i got jello biafra. and guess what? jello biafra and the dead used to get song lyric ideas. some of the articles in the bay guardian that were put there by carl jensen of projects. oh my, how the circle comes around and i know i might have met jello before there's always room for jello but and bruce brockman was friends with carl but you see that kind of thing.

i was just this kid in western pennsylvania growing up in the middle of the sticks right. but that motive, that's what turned me on. that's what turned the bulb on. right. and and it turned on this. this it's what turned on the ethical switch is sort of like it's wrong to be lied to. it's wrong to cover things up. it's to me right. that spoke to me early on and was because of the the ways in which the were conveyed to me that i felt so passionately about it. i an early opponent of the parents music resource center, the pmrc, that was taken down by frank zappa, dee snider. all right, interesting sort of character is that you don't always put in the same room right? i was an opponent of censorship of the nea, the national endowment for the arts, the serrano and the mapplethorpe and so on. project censored over ten years as part of the banned books week coalition, we work with the ala work with banned books week people. so involved in a lot of these areas because we're opposed to

censorship. we promote intellectual and academic freedom and promote it across the spectrum, across disciplines. and so i hope that we are consistent about that. we're not perfect. and when people call attention to that, we, we take note right. maybe if you don't sound like a freight train when doing it, we're a little more receptive to the message rather than write expletives all day long and somewhere 500 words later, i get to the actual problem. right. but we're not again, we are are not perfect or infallible. but we try to live up to those standards in medium. and so again, a longer answer to the question but it gave me an opportunity to tell you a lot of the other things we do at the project, we're also part of the national coalition censorship or the ac. i've with the foundation of individual rights in education fire. so you'll see pretty consistent about those issues. and we also work on issues of where believe that the public

has a right to their airwaves and we believe the public has a right to ownership of those airwaves. and the public should challenge when corporate outlets try to gobble up local media outlets. right. that's another right of those that conflict between elites and corporate corporate interests and the interests of the public. and we the people right other people, other folks, questions, comments here, miles and dan, do you some kind of optimism about the way that younger people consume news because i've noticed that younger people particularly in the conflict israel palestine they're able to see through the the corporate narrative and i think that media which i was really cynical has actually had a really positive because people social media are like doing real journalism than the actual, you know, corporate press. so excellent, excellent topic and great question. i appreciate it.

this kind of what we're riffing on with what if journalism disappeared, right? right. it didn't disappear, but where did it go? what does it look like? and, you know, kind of what it looks like, you will find it on tik-tok through all the other noise. it's in there. there's and i'm blanking on the person's name. and embarrassingly there is a person on tik tok that actually no one a colleague that i've done a couple of books with who works with the project. it was one of his grad grad distance distance said, hey, there's, there's a person on tik tok that talks all about your work and your work at project and this used book and all this stuff. and she totally breaks down like junk news with the united states distraction stuff on tik tok and it's got like all kinds of people on there. i mean, i didn't know about it, but i go there is like thousands of views and people are all over it and i'm just like, this is crazy. this is it's a cool this is good. tiktok is bad, but this is good, right? so i mean, i too have to change the blinders and change the way i think and talk about things

because it's very easy to. get hyperbolic and flippant and reactionary. yes, i am on facebook. i am on these platforms and try and struggle to figure out to what end to what good how much of it is much right. and we know all kinds of all kinds of, mental health issues and emotional issues and problems that people can develop from. too much social media, too much screen time, very serious issues. we write about them all in the media. and me, by the way, which is one of the only critical media literacy for young people written by pen authors that we put together, including younger students, some college students. right. it's one of the only books that talks with young people, not at them. it talks to them as if they are the not like an afterthought. and we actually have a teacher right here that's been using the book in class in sacramento, and we donated to them and we will donate books to others. if you're interested in doing this. we have a school district i'm not allowed to name publicly that adopted thousands and

thousands of copies. the book first for educator training for staff development, training for media literacy, the curriculum right. so i think where you're going is back to the nuance it means that there's not easy thing if i'm allowed to say ticktock, just a bunch of junk that the kids are. yeah, i mean, then i start. i mean, what what point am i the guy that shaking his screaming for the kids to get off his lawn with the white picket fence right. mean on that version of some some iconic figure that represents intolerance and inflect ability. and i don't think i don't think we have i don't think we have time space for that. and i think in order to have that kind of a posture or a position i think comes from privilege and i think should be called out. and if we're doing it, we should call it out among ourselves. so i had to check myself with young people and i started looking at all the things that they're doing and i started looking at all these outlets.

i was like, by golly, there are some brilliant things going on here, so why is that surprising? what's not? it was only because of my bias, and then i could white wiped wipe clean open the overton window to you know remind myself right because we all have to remind ourselves we all remind each other. i think young people really deserve to be heard. listen to platformed and also equal opportunities to learn in ways don't involve shaming that don't. i'm right. you're wrong. no matter or any any degree of let me tell you you know that, right? and we all can do that, too. but i learned i'm i'm literally privileged to have jobs that i do teaching and working with students project centered is a student run organization. we work with hundreds of students every year, scores of professors across country and anywhere between ten and 20 campuses to put together this book. right. so we practice, we teach. that's what we do right.

and we try to represent a group of people that that you might want to be part of right? that you say, hey, i'm doing something like that great, tell me, what are you doing? tell about it. share it with us. come on the radio show and talk to us about it right. so we're again back to the collaborative we're very collaborative that way. and i like to try to focus getting back to the solutions journalism issue and listening to and trying to help young people this really noisy bizarre ecosystem that has just gotten so crazy crowded and different than the in my lifetime, just my lifetime. i was born in 1970. so i like it. it's like run the gamut, like then so many things have changed, but young people's passion and interest in the world and young desire to know what's going on and have a built in sort of sarcastic -- way of looking at things. i think, you know, that natural sort of teenage kind of like i won't you know that's something

you i can't say a c-span. right you know something you i won't what you tell me, right? i think that's pretty that's a little bit that's pretty healthy. and i think we and the older generation of people need to remember that. and sometimes we should be listening to the younger. well, i notice that younger people seem to have sometimes have a better understanding what's really going on. like regards to gaza and palestine, older like boomers because social media, they'll just post what's really happening and they have like actual perhaps but what i've noticed this and i've noticed that often folks may be more privy to that because their connection to that outlet, but they often lack historical context. aha. see what i mean? media literacy involves. historical context. that's a big issue. you have literacy without you cannot go general literacy mean one of the things that we talk about here that perplexes me is,

you know, you go through a whole litany of statistics which i'm not going to bother you, but the fact of the matter is that young people don't read they don't read books, right? they'll go on to a whole host of social media platform, sms. yeah. and read voraciously. the average american doesn't read a newspaper a day now. so who are these corporate newspapers propagandizing? not many people because don't read them. right. and so what you have what i found over the years is a general and it's increasing in intensity is a heightened illiteracy in the american public in general. but in all particularly among young people now, are young people sometimes more progressive than what i am, the boomer generation. yes, they are for. instance, they're not as subject to bias or gender. they're not a subject to bias or race. a whole host of, but most of them, if you push them hard,

it's almost an intuitive, sensitive to the they have these issues because they have no sense of historical cause and so forth and so on, so i worked for a fair of years in education and i really pushed in consultation with the developing high level of literacy, in particular a commitment to not letting that go away once they were through with their formal education. that's what i see project censored as hopefully thing that doesn't go away and people's lives were taken by oh thank you that's very kind of you to say i appreciate your comments you're talking and we write about multiple literacy is in this book and for me media literacy civic literacy are just joined at the hip and and that's the thing and so for a long time i'm gen x i get the variable letter what am i, i don't know if somebody should tell that to elon musk stole the x from us so, so one of the things that i

have, i became more purposeful about doing it is bridging the gap between the generations. my mentors, my teachers and icons and heroes. right? they're older. some of them are dead now. now, can that's i noticed. the older i get that happens i i'm getting there. you know, i mean it's it's it's been a rough john pilger christina borgerson. i mean my god over a hundred journalists just in gaza. but i mean, alone, but i think that we try to figure out ways that in media is a great avenue for this with the civic literacy or civil literacy issues is if we can get an older generation of people to help provide experience and historical context and the energy and the sensitivity and the intuitiveness and, the digital native capability, younger

people, right. to me, these things naturally work together, right and i told this to my friend ralph nader at the breaking through power conference. i was at at constitution hall, a number of years ago. i think it was 2016 or 17, rewrote a great, great book with city lights called breaking through power. and i kind of had an epiphany there because i was there with a younger faculty and some students and some others and. then i'm in the room with jim hightower and, ralph and a bunch of these other people and it started so it just crept into my talk because i'm just like, you know, just dawned on me that. working together means transcend adding a lot of these generational divides are further exacerbated by immediacy. carlos where the media tries to pick people and label everybody. boomer gen x, millennial y, whatever. we love labels, we love the list and label things that prevents us from getting down to real nitty gritty of the things that we all about and we need to discuss. and we both can learn from each other and we both can create. better scenarios for each other

if. we do it and we stop the divide, right? the divide is is well, look, the divide always works whether, you know, go to, you know, the art of war and, so on. we don't have to do that. but division is is division makes a lot of money. the press division works in politics. right. you know, it doesn't for the people that own paraphrasing george carlin, the people that this country. right. what work for them is when we get together and we talk this about real things and even if we disagree, we try to find ways, common paths where we can find ways to work together or encourage people right to keep doing the things that they're doing. and we ask for help when we need it. right. so yeah, you hit the nail so squarely on the head with the entire literacy issue, you know, it's just it's pervasive. dan, you wanted to say something, yeah, i was going to this, going in it. it's okay good. it's time to go in a different direction. okay. so that's why you're here. yes. if the if you thought the fairness doctrine be repealed in

the eighties had anything to do, like does have a significant impact on our media landscape today. and was the american media landscape any better before that was repealed? was it just kind of different problems? well yes and no. and this will definitely occasion me to to have sue maybe say a thing or two. he's done an awful lot work around media ownership issues, media action center and so on over years. but and i know my my, my colleague john wilson, i disagree with some of this. he's written a lot about the fairness doctrine. but on the surface, yes, the repeal of the fairness doctrine is not good for public journalism. it that plus the telecom act of 1996 under clinton, which really the media ownership landscape and opened the doors for everything from rush limbaugh and iheart radio and the 90% dominance of conservative radio. it led to and all the crappy

you'd go down and it's not just it wasn't limbaugh for 3 hours you know i listen to in the early but it was very quickly filled with three more hours of three more hours of three more hours of 12 hours of the same thing over and over and over and and the democrats and a lot of the liberals gave up on. am radio is an old dying technology. the right populist moved right in and the astroturf fires move right and they just quickly made it, oh, look this is now the new people's media. and they shoved it with all of this kind of pro right propaganda. look, there's nothing wrong with being conservative, but when we're talking journalism versus propaganda that's where things get ethically sticky. so then between that and the 96 telecom act, you open the doors for, one company to own more in a particular area. now guess what? this is still an issue. and we at project censored have been attuned to it and are fortunate to know of people and it occasionally to run into and an old colleague and ally of

ours sue wilson was sitting right here. i would give you a round of applause because of all the things that she's done over media ownership issues. and when you look look up some of sue's work, if you don't know what i think you'll agree. we did a great piece with us a couple of weeks ago on the fcc and a case involving sinclair broadcasting in baltimore. there's another case that's going on with the fcc and fox news in philadelphia. and steve music wrote an article for us last year about it. we did a show it the case with sue right? sue wrote about sue. you can talk a little bit about this and sort of about that if you want to mention some of that the issues that you do about media ownership. i'm sure people would love to hear that this case was actually petitioned right where where sinclair is in violation of of owning too many local too many, too much of a percentage. it's in a local market. but but the petition, the re licensing is almost a rubber stamp every seven years. right. so the fcc is supposed to

regulate this, but we because we suffer from things like regulatory capture people at the fcc who are like i don't see any big deal here end up creating separate agreements kind handshake nods and i sort let things go. so even the process that we the people have to petition government to redress grievances has become so obfuscated and difficult right there's been a case languishing for several years against sinclair baltimore. so maybe you want to want talk a little bit about that or this issue. well, thanks, mickey. this has just been tremendous, hasn't it? just been tremendous. thank you. look at i i want to talk a little about your question, dan, about the fairness, my work focuses on broadcasting now. i was a local broadcaster in los angeles and here in sacramento. all right until i realized how badly we were hurt by the of the fairness doctrine in the 1996 telecommunications act, which

that all our local radio stations you can own as many as eight stations in one town at this point and in a great big that might not be so big bad in minot, north dakota all six of their commercial radio stations were owned by one owner. they had nine hydrogen, ammonia spill that was poisoning the air all around the city. and there was it happened be a cut phone line that night to the six stations inside one building and the radio station was not able to get any emergency information out to the public and people died. i mean, it was and that's in a film that i made called broadcast blues, you can find it online. it's free. but we get into all these issues. the thing and notice i said broadcast blues, i like to talk about broad because we own the air broadcasting goes over the air. all right if you think frequencies in the air there's only so many frequencies in the

air. and legally the broadcasters are to quote, serve the public interest because the public owns the air. it's this if you've got enough money, you can start a newspaper. if you've got enough in sacramento, you could start 50 newspapers. if you wanted to. all right. there's unlimited amount of newspapers. you start you could put them online. you could print them whatever you want to do. there's only enough airwaves to have about six local tv stations. there's enough frequencies. it's very limited it's very scarce. there's only enough i don't know how many radio stations there are locally, but there's only so many that physically can occur. and so these big companies licensed in order to have the privilege to broadcast to us over our airwaves. so there's a real true ownership issue here that who really only stations will they own, but we

own the air. and if they violate our trust, if they poison in our air, we can fight in order to take those licenses away. and in several years ago, i took a license away in sacramento. you may remember case of the woman who died in a local water drinking contest on the radio. yes. yeah. all right. i happened to be making broadcast blues and covered in 2007. i went and covered the trial here at the courthouse when the family sued civilly, they sued entercom and of course, they won the case it was pretty clear that the station liable for luring people into the station and then giving them twice as much water as you could healthily drink and instead literally poisoned this by water to death. but then i took the next step because i am a listener here in sacramento, i have standing and i petitioned the government, i

petitioned the fcc to say no, you cannot have a license if you're going to kill people on the you don't get to have a license to broadcast and. i filed it i wrote it by myself. i had a lawyer friend who made it look and made it look like, you know, it came from a lawyer. and he told me, this is never going to go anywhere. you got to do it because it's the right to do. all right. three years later we heard from the fcc, this lawyer calls. he says you're not going to believe this. this is going to a hearing. they haven't done this in 40 years and and what i'm. long story. after bringing it back to the back to the fcc. they decided have the hearing basically we forced entercom to give up that station's here in sacramento. they cd in these frequency they lost 13 and a half million

dollars that was what that frequency we are supposed to be worth. but this the power of what one person can do in broadcasting. that's right. so a lot of my work has centered around putting together groups. we've done this in sacramento and we're trying to do this all over. you put a group together as large as we have this room and you can create magic when you start getting down to what can we do, what's real? can we have meetings with our local broadcasters and change things? yes, we can. and in sacramento, we have many times. so if nothing if you take nothing else away from what i'm talking about, it's your air their license to be on our air. and they really do have serve the public. and if they don't, we can fight. it's most people don't we know we have that and the fcc is trying really hard to not let people. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. and well so we are somehow once again. right to civic civic and media that this is a tale of the power

of the synergy within one person putting. these things together connecting these dots, using the system as byzantine as it might be, using what we have at our disposal weirdly changes things and you know, how long was it after the article that project censored the fcc article that you just how long was it before something happened with sinclair? and in the recent case in baltimore how long went by before? it wasn't like day and already had heard people heard something from sinclair challenging petition. yes after three years of saying nothing about the article was up for one day so guess looking at the lawyers that sinclair they know right? right exactly and how can they serve people like media who actually know what my rights are and that's right work those well so your dangerous right because. you're doing something that we all can do again and that's

where it comes to, you know, i think the ethos of project censored is there really the punk rock diy we can do this, we have to do it because democracy isn't a spectator sport, right? we have to participate in in order to make it matter, we need to understand how the system operates, that we're trying to participate in and what the real restrictions already are. and ditto when it comes to and media consumption. so i did find the fabulous quote from carl jensen that i wanted to end on, because we're coming up on the 330 hour here. but before i did that, does anybody else want have any other say or comment, comment before we wrap up and then i am going to hang out i am going to stick around. i hope that you'll consider supporting the avid reader. i'm here to sign books and i hope some people are here buy books if possible. if you can. but i will happily stay around and talk to anybody. i would love to get to meet more or know you more. and if there's something we can together, i'd love to hear more about it. so go ahead.

please. i was a little confused. you were saying that the emphasis on russia and ukraine and the middle east is somehow we're getting fed something that we shouldn't and or the emphasis is wrong. and i'm not clear what you think is wrong. oh, well, we're not going to have time for me to list it right now, but i'll happily after and tell you we actually have numerous articles on the front page of website that have deconstructed the corporate media coverage of both what's happening with russia, ukraine and and what's happening israeli and israel and gaza and what we're doing is we're basically just trying to decode and deconstruct the propaganda. we're not trying to too you know, we're not both sides in something on one level, but on the other. we're not putting we're not like putting our foot in or we're on. this can't run this camp. what we're seeing is propagate and we're seeing known falsehood

woods or half truths masquerade is entire stories too. these complicated narratives. and when you look at when you look at the kind of journalism that's out of those regions, it's markedly it's very tells a different story because of the people there that are telling. it could people then also be biased? naturally. but why is it always only the other side that's biased. and our side is the truth. that's part of that problem i was getting into with the team red team blue and you know example robin anderson deconstructs the myth of the hamas rapes. right that they keep repeating over and over and over again even though upon further investigation they found out that the story was mostly manufactured, it was blown way out of proportion. right. and the problem is, is any time you're talking about that kind. look, you'd scarcely gets we're talking about absolute tragic, horrific things that are happening in these parts of the

world. horrible things. but once again, devils are details. and that's where they live. and we have to look through the fog of war to find often things that don't always agree with or that we don't want to hear. and reporting in the west the fact that the western reporter is if they're working for a major news outlet have report to a jerusalem office to like have their news screened before it gets printed in the us. that's censorship that's bias. i don't care if you're in favor of it or if you think it's okay because israel is an ally from a media scholar and a journalist. i'm telling you, that's that's my position. and it's hard because people get very very passionate about the stories that are being told and they have about them. but that's why i urge people to go and listen to other outlets. if you're going to watch the western press and read the western press about what's happening in israel, gaza,

please also read al jazeera, also read electronic or press news. not because you have to agree with it, because i want you to see another side i want you to see another perspective that's factually missing from the york times or from cnn. and that's point. right. and you can see very quickly how this this can get very emotional. people can very much come to disagree it, which, by the way, is why my buddy nolan and i, this book on critical thinking, because we're all very bad at. we're all we're all bad at disagreeing. we don't do it very well. and what we try to show in this book and in many of our others is we're like, well, look, we just need to practice disagreeing more, and that doesn't mean i'm right. you're wrong, no matter. it means, tell me why. think what you think. tell me why that's happening. will you give me an to respond to something that you're saying and show me where you got information? and can we and can we not can we escape the instant gratification universe for a moment and untether ourselves, you know,

from these digital so that we have you know, i might not i didn't know. i'm going to need to look that up. can we talk about this next? you know how we always have to resolve all the global crisis in the next 5 minutes before we run off to coffee? that's not healthy and it's really not smart and it's really not respectful either, you know, and it's really easy to miss, categorize or misconstrue through what somebody might be trying to get across or say if we don't ask questions. so i'm very you asked the question and i'm happy to point you to some of the things that we have online that might be of interest and very happy to share email, contact information, do what i just suggested and that's keep the conversation going. i'm more than happy to do that. i know that's very hard to do on social media because i don't think people anti social media. i'm not sure if people understand how to converse there. but you know, i'm more and more i do think that there isn't necessarily place where you're supposed to converse. it's these are propaganda. these are propaganda sort of

outlets for forget where things like facebook come from and google come from. they come from darpa and they come from the military industrial. so they don't just come because they're fun and neat. and you can share pictures of your cat and your what you ate for dinner, right there's a lot of other things going on behind that by, the way that's how being media literate can really help and on the theory of how one person get really changed things and, why journalism really matters here is. carl jensen, the founder of project censored, who in 1995 said since we will all benefit from a more responsible media, we all really should help bring it about. to do this, the corporate media owners should start to earn their unique first amendment privileges. editors should rethink news judgment. journalists should persevere. going after the hard stories. journalism professors should emphasize ethics and critical analysis and turn out more muckrakers and fewer muckrakers. as there's the line, the judicial system should defend the freedom of the press. provision of the first amendment

with far more vigor and the public should show the media that it is more concerned with the high crimes and misdemeanors of its political and corporate leaders than it with the crimes and gossip of the effort will be well worth it. and think all these years later. carl was right the effort is worth it. the effort of people like sue is worth it. teachers like dan is worth it. people that were my students that continue to do these things and continue to pursue these kinds of they're showing us that it's worth it and you coming out here today on a rainy saturday at avid reader or at least showing me that you also must that this is worth it. so thank you very much for being here. i really appreciate it.

so. tonight we're really honored again to have amitav ghosh and to be in conversation razia iqbal. i'm just going to very briefly read a little bit of bio you and and then '