Additional information
for this story came from Censored 1999: The News That Didn't
Make the News--The Year's Top 25 Censored Stories (Seven
Stories Press, $18.95).
For more details,
check out the Project Censored Web site at www.sonoma.edu/ProjectCensored.
Project
Censored 1998 National Judges
Oregon,
Uncovered: a local version of Project Censored
Heard enough about Monica Lewinsky's blue dress over the past
year? Sick of the soft features and giant color photos that
seem to occupy more and more pages in the daily press?
Here's what you may not have read while the papers were
full of blow jobs and fluff:
Genetic engineering is threatening
the world's food supply and might be contributing to a dramatic
outbreak of infectious diseases.
Your government trained death squads
in Mexico and sold weapons to Saddam
Hussein. Money you spent at a gas station helped soldiers
kill nonviolent protesters in Nigeria.
Your eyeglasses, silverware and contraceptive devices might
be made of "cleaned" radioactive metal--and
that's the way the Department of Energy wants it. And the
governments of the world's richest countries spent last
year discussing the idea of turning the planet over to multinational
companies.
Those are all on Project Censored's 23rd annual list of
the most underreported news stories of 1998. The program,
based at Sonoma State University, combs the media for news
that didn't make the news. Some of the stories got a little
play in the dailies, but none received the prominent, ongoing
coverage it deserved.
Project director Peter Phillips says some of the stories
may have been squelched by editors unwilling to offend powerful
advertisers or corporate overseers. But he also blames the
mainstream press' blind spots on something else: the shrinking
newsroom budgets that can result from media consolidation.
"With downsizing in the mainstream media, fewer reporters
are writing and producing news stories on tighter deadlines,"
Phillips says. "As a result they're growing increasingly
dependent on PR sources for news. Today in the United States
there are more
PR people spinning stories for government agencies and
private corporations than there are journalists--and many
of those stories are being reprinted verbatim in newspapers."
Many people wonder why the crisis in Kosovo didn't appear
on the front pages until recently, despite the fact that
the ethnic cleansing has been going on for well over a year.
Media veteran Frank McCulloch, who has been managing editor
of The San Francisco Examiner and The Sacramento
Bee, blames the shoddy coverage on a preoccupation with
sleaze and scandals. "Little by little, it's all becoming
tabloid," he says. "This year [daily papers] were concentrating
80 percent of their energies on Monica stories."
To find the stories the mainstream media miss every year,
Project Censored volunteers read hundreds of pieces from
mainstream, alternative and specialty publications, both
in print and online. Faculty and student evaluators whittle
them down to a list of 25, which are ranked by a panel of
authors, scholars and media experts from around the country.
The following are Project Censored's top 10 underreported
stories of 1998. To provide some local context, we went to
the library to see how many of these stories were covered
by the state's largest newspaper, The Oregonian. Our
findings appear at the end of each item
1
Secret International Trade Agreement Undermines the Sovereignty
of Nations
The United States and other developed countries have spent
the past three years negotiating a treaty that would usher
in a new era of globalized trade, an era in which governments
could have even less power to intervene in the decisions of
multinational corporations than they do now. The treaty, called
the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, would restrict almost
any law that might interfere with investors' profits.
The effects could potentially be staggering. Laws that
would be struck down under MAI include preferences for companies
that hire minorities, restrictions on logging or mining
and bans on toxic dumping. Had the MAI been in force in
the 1980s, the United States would have been less able to
implement the sanctions against South Africa that helped
end apartheid.
The MAI was first discussed at meetings of the World Trade
Organization (WTO). After early drafts drew flak from developing
countries, the negotiations were moved to the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development, made up of 29
of the world's richest countries. The OECD kept details
of the treaty secret until January 1997, when a draft was
leaked to a French activist group.
Since then, labor, environmental and human-rights advocates
around the world have been building opposition to
the MAI, and in December 1998 the OECD announced it was
ending negotiations and scuttling the proposal. Its opponents
didn't have time to celebrate the victory: Economic superpowers
and multinational corporations are still pushing for MAI-like
regulations in a number of forums, including the WTO, the
proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas and the International
Monetary Fund.
For more information go to www.citizen.org/pctrade/mai/maihome.html
or www.preamble.org/MAI/maihome.html.
We did not find any MAI coverage in The Oregonian
in 1998.
Sources:
Joel Bleifuss, "Building the Global Economy,"
In These Times, Jan. 11, 1998
Bill Dixon, "MAI Ties," Democratic Left, Spring 1998
Miloon Kothari and Tara Krause, "Human Rights or Corporate
Rights?"
Tribune des Droits Humains, April 1998
2
Chemical
Corporations Profit off Breast Cancer
Every October the sponsors of National Breast
Cancer Awareness Month roll out a massive publicity campaign
about early detection and treatment of breast cancer. Essentially,
through events such as Race for the Cure, they hammer home
the message that women should have their breasts x-rayed.
What the sponsors fail to talk about is prevention.
There's good reason for this approach: profit and power.
The campaign was founded in 1985 by British multinational
Imperial Chemical Industries, now known as Zeneca Pharmaceuticals.
As the main sponsor, the company has the authority to shape
the focus of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In this area,
Zeneca and the other sponsors may have mixed motives. The
firm manufactures tamoxifen, the drug most often prescribed
for breast cancer, and runs 11 cancer-treatment centers
in the United States.
General
Electric, another sponsor, produces mammography machines,
and Du Pont makes the film used in those machines.
Zeneca doesn't make all its money from cancer treatment.
In 1997, 49 percent of its profits came from pesticides
and other industrial chemicals, including acetochlor, considered
a probable carcinogen by the EPA.
For more information contact the Toxic
Links Coalition at (415) 243-8373, ext. 305.
We found more than 100 stories on breast cancer in The
Oregonian last year, but only one, a column by Molly
Ivins, mentioned the possible mixed motives of the campaign
sponsors.
Sources:
Peter Montague, "The Truth About Breast Cancer,"
Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly, Dec. 4, 1997
Allison Sloan and Tracy Baxter, "Profiting off Breast Cancer,"
The Green Guide, October 1998
3
Monsanto's
Genetically Modified Seeds Threaten World Food Production
For 12,000 years farmers have followed a simple process: saving
the best seeds from one harvest and using them to plant the
following year's. Seed saving lets farmers cultivate the most
useful and robust strains, improving the food supply. The
plants we eat today are the result of thousands of years of
human selection.
That could all be over in the next decade, thanks to the
biotechnology industry and the United States Department
of Agriculture.
In March 1998 the USDA and cotton-seed giant Delta Land
and Pine Co. announced a new patent: a genetic technology
that stops plants from reproducing. Two months after the
announcement, agrochemical conglomerate Monsanto, which
has been working for years to consolidate the world seed
market, bought Delta Land and Pine for almost $2 billion.
Dubbed "terminator technology," the patent will have a
tremendous effect on farming. Soon seed companies will be
able to breed the gene into their products. Those seeds,
which should be on the market by 2004, will yield crops
that don't reproduce, forcing farmers to buy new seeds every
year.
Monsanto will benefit from farmers' lack of choices. Biotechnology
companies produce the strongest, highest-yielding seeds.
When they add terminator technology to their products, farmers
who hope to compete will have little choice but to purchase
the new seeds every year.
With the USDA's new technology, Monsanto, a world leader
in bioengineered crops, will be able to create an endless
market for its products. At the same time, they could be
sowing the seeds of disaster. Genetic engineering is still
in its early stages, but some worry about possible negative
side effects, such as plants being less resistant to crop
disease.
For more information, go to www.rafi.org.
We found nothing about "terminator technology" in The
Oregonian last year.
Sources:
Leora Broydo, "A Seedy Business," Mojo Wire,
April 27, 1998
Chakravarthi Raghavan, "New Patent Aims to Prevent Farmers
from Saving Seed," Third World Resurgence, April
1998
Hope Shand and Pat Mooney, "Terminator Seeds Threaten an
End to Farming," Global Pesticide Campaigner, June
1998, and Earth Island Journal, Fall 1998
Brian Tokar, "Monsanto: A Checkered History" and "Revolving
Doors: Monsanto and the Regulators," The Ecologist, September-October
1998
4
Recycled
Radioactive Metals May Be in Your Home
What do you do with millions of tons of radioactive metal?
If you're the Department of Energy, you let scrap companies
collect it, clean it up and sell it to manufacturers to
be made into ordinary consumer objects like pans, silverware,
eyeglasses, dental fillings and IUDs.
The government already issues some companies licenses to
sell radioactive metal for reuse. But a new plan proposed
by the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would do
away with the permit process--and increase the amount of
radiation in your home a hundredfold. According to the NRC
itself, the lax standards those agencies have proposed could
cause nearly 100,000 cancer deaths in the current U.S. population.
The radioactive-metal-processing industry is lobbying hard
for the changes and mounting a PR campaign to quell public
concern. Processing companies sterilize radioactive surfaces
with carbon dioxide, but tough standards for allowable doses
of radiation are cutting into their bottom line. The DOE's
plan would raise those thresholds, allowing the industry
to increase its output exponentially.
We found no coverage of radioactive recycling in The
Oregonian last year.
Source:
Anne-Marie Cusac, "Nuclear Spoons," The Progressive,
October 1998
5
U.S. Weapons of Mass Destruction Linked to the Deaths of Half
a Million Children
The U.S. government cites Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" as justification for
repeated bombing raids and sanctions. What the government
doesn't tell us is that many of those weapons were built by
U.S. firms and sold to Iraq with the explicit support of the
White House.
During the 1980s the Reagan administration chose to support
Iraq over Iran in their bloody war. As a result the U.S.
government issued export licenses allowing companies to
ship U.S. technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities.
In the five years before the Gulf War, the Department of
Commerce licensed more than $1.5 billion of strategically
sensitive American exports to Iraq.
In 1989 U.S. military officials even invited several Iraqi
technicians, along with representatives from 20 other countries,
to a crash course on how to detonate a nuclear weapon. The
course was held at a Red Lion Inn right here in Portland.
The government wasn't blind to Saddam Hussein's goals.
U.S. intelligence reports from the 1980s vividly documented
Saddam's mass gassing of Kurds and Iranians. At a briefing
in 1989 CIA officials reported that Iraq "is interested
in acquiring a nuclear explosive capability." The following
year, the agency informed the government of Saddam's ties
to terrorist groups.
That didn't stop Bush administration officials from playing
a part in arming Iraq.
Details of U.S. complicity in building up Saddam Hussein's
arsenal are available in government documents. But the mainstream
media never chose to investigate the issue--even when that
arsenal was turned against Kuwait, and then against U.S.
soldiers.
We found one Oregonian story on this subject:
a syndicated op-ed piece from July 13, 1997.
Sources:
Dennis Bernstein, "Made in America," San Francisco
Bay Guardian,
Feb. 25, 1998
Bill Blum,"Punishing Saddam or the Iraqis," I.F. Magazine,
MarchApril 1998
Robert M. Bowman, "Our Continuing War Against Iraq," Space
and Security News, May 1998
6
U.S.
Nuclear Program Subverts
U.N.'s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
In 1996 President Clinton signed the U.N.'s Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans countries from test detonations
of nuclear bombs. Congress has yet to approve the treaty.
But already the United States is violating the spirit, if
not the letter, of that agreement and drawing harsh criticism
from foreign powers--although not from the domestic press.
In 1998 the Department of Energy conducted five "subcritical"
nuclear tests, in which a "controlled nuclear reaction"
is produced but the bombs don't fully explode. Though subcritical
tests may not technically violate the CTBT, other countries
accuse the Clinton administration of making an end run around
the agreement.
The European Parliament has passed a resolution stating
U.S. tests "violate the spirit" of the CTBT and warning
that they could provoke India and Pakistan to carry out
full-scale tests. Officials in China and Japan also blasted
the government.
For more information, contact Bruce Hall of Peace Action
Network at (202) 862-9740.
Although The Oregonian covered subcritical testing
in 1997, we didn't find any stories on the topic in 1998.
Source:
Bill Mesler, "Virtual Nukes: When Is a Test Not a Test?,"
The Nation, June 15, 1998
7 Gene
Transfers Linked
to Dangerous New Diseases
At least 30 new diseases, including AIDS, Ebola
and other deadly viruses, have emerged in the past two decades.
Existing infectious diseases, such as cholera, malaria and
tuberculosis, are returning in force. And more and more bacteria
are developing resistance to antibiotic treatment.
Despite this mounting health crisis, one contributing factor
has been generally ignored by the media and the international
health establishment: the emerging industry of genetic engineering.
Biotechnologists invent new plant and animal species by
inserting genetic material from one species into another.
To combine genes from species that can't interbreed, they
have to break down the defense mechanisms that inactivate
dangerous foreign genes. In doing so, they may be increasing
the spread of antibiotic-resistant genes.
While the biotechnology industry risks increasing the prevalence
of infectious diseases, regulators are stepping out of the
way. The Food and Agricultural Organization and the World
Health Organization have forbidden countries from banning
imports of genetically altered foods that conform to WHO's
lax standards. And the European Commission is giving generous
grants to scientists to promote public acceptance of biotechnology.
Meanwhile, the scientific and economic assumptions on which
the field is founded are beginning to collapse. Genetic
engineering is a dangerously imprecise science: When you
insert a foreign gene into an organism, you never know exactly
what the effect will be. Animals engineered for strength
and size have turned out blind or unable to breathe, and
genetically altered crops have produced substandard yields.
We did not find any articles on the dangers of genetic
engineering in The Oregonian last year.
Sources:
Mae-Wan Ho and Terje Traavik, "Sowing Diseases,
New and Old," Third World Resurgence, No. 92
Mae-Wan Ho, Hartmut Meyer and Joe Cummins, "The Biotechnology
Bubble," The Ecologist, MayJune 1998
8
Catholic Hospital Mergers Threaten Reproductive Rights for
Women
The Roman Catholic Church is now the largest private health-care
provider in the United States, with more than $44 billion
in assets. But the church isn't content to run its own hospitals.
Increasingly, Catholic hospitals are forming partnerships
with secular hospitals and HMOs. And those partnerships
are making it increasingly difficult for women to get reproductive
care.
The Catholic Church imposes rules on its hospitals covering
abortion, contraception and sterilization, among other services.
When Catholic hospitals are competing with secular ones,
women who don't want their health in the hands of the church
at least have somewhere to go. But as the HMO system cuts
into hospital revenues, competing hospitals have an incentive
to merge or enter a partnership, often forming a local monopoly.
The result is that women in some communities can't get abortions,
birth control, tubal ligations, emergency contraception
and comprehensive HIV counseling.
In a few communities, women's health advocates have taken
on the Catholic Church and won. But across the country the
church is taking control of more and more medical facilities.
And women's health care
is usually the first victim.
For more information go to www.mergerwatch.org.
On Dec. 11, 1998, The Oregonian ran a wire story
on the decreasing number of abortion providers and included
one sentence on the takeover by Catholic organizations of
many hospitals that used to provide abortions. We found
no other reports on the issue.
Source:
Christine Dinsmore, "Women's Health: A Casualty
of Hospital Merger Mania," Ms., JulyAugust
1998
9
U.S.
Tax Dollars Support Death Squads in Chiapas
On Dec. 22, 1997, 45 indigenous men, women and
children were shot in the village of Acteal. Throughout the
Mexican state of Chiapas many more people were kidnapped,
tortured and killed.
Soldiers from the Mexican Army Airborne Special Forces
Groups (GAFE)--a paramilitary unit trained by U.S. Army
Special Forces--were charged by local officials with
the killings.
Massacres in Chiapas are one of the dirty secrets of U.S.
foreign policy: Under the guise of the war on drugs, the
United States supports brutal counterinsurgency measures
by Central American states. The U.S. government's real motive,
activists in Mexico say, is the protection of foreign
investment.
The GAFE massacres were led by Lt. Col. Julian Guerrero
Barrios, a graduate of the infamous U.S.-sponsored School
of the Americas (SOA, often referred to as the School of
the Assassins); some of the soldiers in his command were
trained at U.S. bases.
The number of Mexican military officers and personnel receiving
U.S. specialized training has increased significantly since
1996. Clinton's 1998 budget earmarked more than $21 million
dollars to fight drug trafficking in Mexico--including $12
million for Pentagon training. Anti-drug efforts continue
to focus on the Chiapas region. According to a Feb. 26 Washington
Post report, the United States is now training 1,067
Mexican officers a year.
For more information, contact School
of the Americas Watch, and the National
Coalition for Democracy in Mexico.
On Dec. 23, 1998, The Oregonian ran a wire story
about U.S. efforts to train Mexican officers, but it failed
to mention that U.S.-trained Mexican soldiers were charged
with the massacre of innocents. We found no other reports
on the subject.
Sources:
The Slingshot Collective, "Mexico's Military:
Made in the USA," Slingshot, Summer 1998
Darrin Wood, "Bury My Heart at Acteal," Dark Night Field
Notes
10.
Environmental Student Activists Gunned Down on Chevron Oil
Facility in Nigeria
On May 25, 1998, 121 Nigerian activists occupied Chevron's
Parabe oil platform and barge in the Niger Delta. The activists
claimed pollution from Chevron's oil operations was ruining
fishing and farming in their communities.
Three days later Chevron employees flew soldiers from Nigeria's
Navy and Mobile Police to the platform in company helicopters.
The soldiers opened fire, killing two protesters, Jola Ogungbeje
and Aroleka Irowaninu, and wounding several others. Eleven
activists were held by the government for three weeks.
During his imprisonment, one activist said, he was handcuffed
and suspended from a ceiling-fan hook for hours after he
refused to sign a statement written by Nigerian authorities.
On July 10 the anarchist news service A-Infos released
the testimony of protest leader Bola Oyinbo, recorded by
Environmental Rights Action. Pacifica reporter Amy Goodman
and producer Jeremy Scahill investigated the story and recorded
Chevron spokesperson Sola Omole acknowledging that Chevron
managers had asked the Nigerian military to intervene in
the demonstration and had transported the soldiers to the
platform.
We found no coverage of the killings in The Oregonian
in 1998.
Sources:
"Chevron in Nigeria: ERA Environmental Testimonies,"
A-Infos News Service, July 10, 1998
Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill, "Drilling and Killing:
Chevron and Nigeria's Oil
Dictatorship," Democracy Now, Pacifica, Sept. 30,
1998
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