Censored! Ten important news stories the national news media ignored

[UpInArms]

http://newtimes.rway.com/2004/091504/cover.shtml

In late July, more than 600 people showed up in Monterey, Calif., to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on ownership concentration in the news media. The participants had a single consistent complaint: The mainstream news media are doing a deplorable job of covering the day's most important stories.

That's no surprise: Consolidation of the media in the hands of a few corporate Goliaths has resulted
in fewer people creating more of the content we see, hear and read. One impact has been a narrower range of perspectives. Another is the disappearance of hard-hitting, original, investigative reporting. "Corporate media has abdicated their responsibility to the First Amendment to keep the American electorate informed about important issues in society and instead serves up a pabulum of junk-food news," says Peter Phillips, head of Sonoma State University's Project Censored.

Every year, Project Censored researchers pick through volumes of print and broadcast news to see which of the year's most important stories aren't receiving the kinds of attention they deserve. Phillips and his team acknowledge that many of these stories weren't "censored" in the traditional sense of the word: No government agency blocked their publication. And some even appeared-- briefly, and without follow-up--in mainstream journals.

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1. Wealth Inequality Threatens Economy and Democracy

Although the mainstream news media diligently track economic news, a fundamental point is missing from those reports: Wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled over the past 30 years. In fact, the Federal Reserve Board's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances supplement on high-income families shows that in 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of the nation's wealth. The top 5 percent owned almost 60 percent of the wealth. "We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country," New York University economics professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.

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