While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship…
I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list presented as a mock-petition: “We, the undersigned, believe that music can still be a political force of note and not just the soundtrack to over-consumption.”
The leadoff track, “The Story,” comes with a written admonishment from Herbert that we visit the website for Project Censored. For years, Project Censored, a nonprofit affiliated with Sonoma State University, has compiled a list of top-25 news stories that, if not censored outright, were underreported or overlooked by the mainstream media in the U.S.
Herbert’s listeners will want to consider that Project Censored has come under withering criticism of late from people on the progressive left, and for good reason. Back in 2000, Brooke Shelby Biggs of Mother Jones called PC’s annual list misleading, redundant and “a thinly veiled excuse for an alternative press self-love-fest.” Far more damningly, David Walls, writing in New Politics in 2002, detailed “how Project Censored joined the whitewash of Serb atrocities.” He demonstrated that PC has “departed the terrain of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.” As if to prove the point, Project Censored included on its 2007 list of top “censored” stories the theories of 9/11 Truth huckster Steven Jones, a decision which prompted the resignation of judges Robert Jensen and Norman Solomon.
But a glance at PC’s website reveals the most salient thing of all: much like the Clear Skies Act, Project Censored actually does the opposite of what its name suggests.
Director Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State, visited Cuba in May of this year and wrote this Potemkin village report under the headline “Cuba Supports Press Freedom” — a manifest lie, as this Human Rights Watch dispatch (“Fidel Castro’s Abusive Machinery Remains Intact”) spells out. Phillips mocked the idea that Cuban journalists labor under a “Stalinist media system,” which they most certainly do, and wrote:
Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. […]
In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.
This is practically stenography dictated by the Cuban regime. More to the point, Phillips accepts, without a hint of skepticism, the disingenuous argument the regime has long used to justify media crackdowns. Put another way, the director of Project Censored supports censorship. He goes on to insist, astonishingly, that the U.S. “honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system.”
Here is Human Rights Watch on the “choices” available to the Cuban people: “For almost five decades, Cuba has restricted nearly all avenues of political dissent. Cuban citizens have been systematically deprived of their fundamental rights to free expression, privacy, association, assembly, movement, and due process of law. Tactics for enforcing political conformity have included police warnings, surveillance, short-term detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions, and politically motivated dismissals from employment.”
It’s clear that Project Censored, under Phillips’s leadership, has no regard for democracy and no principles or moral credibility on the subject of censorship. As for Matthew Herbert, he should reexamine his own criteria before telling the rest of us what we should be reading.
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