The 10 most censored stories of 2017

In the United States, we commonly think of press freedom and censorship in terms of the First Amendment, which focuses attention on the press itself and limits on the government’s power to restrict it. But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in the aftermath of World War II, presents a broader framework.

Article 19 reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

By highlighting the right to receive information and ideas, Article 19 makes it clear that press freedom is about everyone in society, not just the press, and that government censorship is only one potential way of thwarting that right. That’s the perspective that has informed Project Censored from the beginning, more than 40 years ago.

Even though Project Censored’s annual list focuses on specific censored stories, the underlying issue has never been isolated examples. They serve to highlight how far short we fall from the fully informed public that a healthy democracy requires—and that we all require in order to live healthy, safe, productive, satisfying lives. It’s the larger patterns of missing information, hidden problems and threats that should really concern us.

With that thought in mind, here is Project Censored’s top 10 list for 2016-17:

Lead contamination threatens children’s health, could triple water bills

In January 2016, Reuters reporters M.B. Pell and Joshua Schneyer began an investigation of lead contamination nationwide, with shocking results. In June 2016, they reported that although many states and Medicaid rules require blood lead tests for young children, millions of children were not being tested. In December 2016, they reported on the highly decentralized data they had been able to assemble from 21 states, showing that 2,606 census tracts and 278 zip codes across the United States had levels of lead poisoning more than double the rates found in Flint, Michigan, at the peak of its contamination crisis. Of those, 1,100 communities had lead contamination rates “at least four times higher” than Flint.

In Flint, 5 percent of the children screened had high blood lead levels. Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2.5 percent of all U.S. children younger than 6—about 500,000 children—have elevated blood lead levels.

But Pell and Schneyer’s neighborhood focus allowed them to identify local hotspots “whose lead poisoning problems may be obscured in broader surveys,” such as those focused on statewide or countywide rates. They found them in communities that “stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning.”

In January 2017, Schneyer and Pell reported that, based on their previous investigation, “From California to Pennsylvania, local leaders, health officials and researchers are advancing measures to protect children from the toxic threat.”

But there’s a deeper infrastructure problem involved, as Farron Cousins reported for DeSmogBlog in January 2017. “Lead pipes are time bombs,” and water contamination is to be expected, Cousins wrote. The U.S. relies on an estimated 1.2 million miles of lead pipes for municipal delivery of drinking water, and much of this aging infrastructure is reaching or has exceeded its lifespan.

In 2012, the American Water Works Association estimated that a complete overhaul of the nation’s aging water systems would require an investment of $1 trillion over the next 25 years, which could triple household water bills.

As Cousins concluded, “While the water contamination crisis will occasionally steal a headline or two, virtually no attention has been paid to the fact that we’re pricing a third of United States citizens out of the water market.”

Over $6 trillion in unaccountable Army spending

In 1996, Congress passed legislation requiring all government agencies to undergo annual audits, but a July 2016 report by the Defense Department’s inspector general found that the Army alone has accumulated $6.5 trillion in expenditures that can’t be accounted for over the past two decades.

As Dave Lindorff reported for This Can’t Be Happening!, the DoD “has not been tracking or recording or auditing all of the taxpayer money allocated by Congress—what it was spent on, how well it was spent, or where the money actually ended up.” But the Army wasn’t alone. “Things aren’t any better at the Navy, Air Force and Marines,” he added.

The report appeared at a time when, “politicians of both major political parties are demanding accountability for every penny spent on welfare. … Ditto for people receiving unemployment compensation,” Lindorff wrote. Politicians have also engaged in pervasive efforts “to make teachers accountable for student ’performance,’” he added. Yet, he observed, “the military doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of spending … even though Congress fully a generation ago passed a law requiring such accountability.”

In March 2017, after Trump proposed a $52 billion increase in military spending, Thomas Hedges reported for The Guardian that, “the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government Accountability Office that collecting and organizing the required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming.”

Pentagon paid United Kingdom PR firm for fake Al Qaeda videos

Concern over Russian involvement in promoting fake news during the 2016 election is a justified hot topic in the news. But what about our own involvement in similar operations? In October 2016, Crofton Black and Abigail Fielding-Smith reported for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism on one such very expensive—and questionable—operation. The Pentagon paid a British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, more than $660 million to run a top-secret propaganda program in Iraq from at least 2006 to December 2011. The work consisted of three types of products: TV commercials portraying Al Qaeda in a negative light, news items intended to look like Arabic TV, and—most disturbing—fake Al Queda propaganda films.

A former Bell Pottinger video editor, Martin Wells, said he was given precise instructions for production of fake Al Qaeda films, and that the firm’s output was approved by former Gen. David Petraeus—the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq—and on occasion by the White House. They reported that the United States used contractors because “the military didn’t have the in-house expertise and was operating in a legal ’gray area.’”

The reporters “traced the firm’s Iraq work through U.S. Army contracting censuses, federal procurement transaction records and reports by the Defense Department’s inspector general, as well as Bell Pottinger’s corporate filings and specialist publications on military propaganda.”

Documents show that Bell Pottinger employed as many as 300 British and Iraqi staff at one point, and its media operations in Iraq cost more than $100 million per year on average.

Voter suppression in the 2016 presidential election

The 2016 election was the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), a 5-4 conservative majority in the Supreme Court struck down a key provision requiring jurisdictions with a history of violations to “pre-clear” changes. As a result, changes to voting laws in nine states and parts of six others with long histories of racial discrimination in voting were no longer subject to federal government approval in advance.

Since Shelby, 14 states, including many Southern states and key swing states, implemented new voting restrictions, in many cases just in time for the election. These included restrictive voter-identification laws in Texas and North Carolina, English-only elections in many Florida counties, as well as last-minute changes of poll locations, and changes in Arizona voting laws that had previously been rejected by the Department of Justice before the Shelby decision.

Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, was foremost among a small number of non-mainstream journalists to cover the suppression efforts and their results. In May 2017, he reported on an analysis of the effects of voter suppression by Priorities USA, which showed that strict voter-ID laws in Wisconsin and other states resulted in a “significant reduction” in voter turnout in 2016 with “a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters.” Berman noted that turnout was reduced by 200,000 votes in Wisconsin, while Donald Trump won the state by just over 22,000 votes.

Nationwide, the study found that the change in voter turnout from 2012 to 2016 was significantly impacted by new voter-ID laws. As Berman concluded, “This study provides more evidence for the claim that voter-ID laws are designed not to stop voter impersonation fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, but to make it harder for certain communities to vote.”

As Berman noted in an article published by Moyers & Co. in December 2016, the topic of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act did not arise once during the 26 presidential debates prior to the election, and “cable news devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.”

Big data and dark money behind the 2016 election

When Richard Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946, he and his supporters used a wide range of dirty tricks aimed at smearing his opponent as pro-Communist, including a boiler-room operation generating phone calls to registered Democrats, which simply said, “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Then the caller would hang up.

In 2016, the same basic strategy was employed but with decades of refinement, technological advances and massively more money behind it. A key player in this was right-wing computer scientist and hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who contributed $13.5 million to Trump’s campaign and also funded Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that specializes in “election management strategies” and using “psychographic” microtargeting—based on thousands of pieces of data for some 220 million American voters—as Carole Cadwalladr reported for the Guardian in February 2017. After Trump’s victory, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix said, “We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communication has played such an integral part in President-elect Trump’s extraordinary win.”

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, was more old-school until recently in elections across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. But now they’re able to micro-target their deceptive, disruptive messaging. “Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven” after they joined the campaign, Nix said in September 2016. On the day of the third presidential debate, Trump’s team “tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments” via Facebook.

This messaging had everything to do with how those targeted would respond, not with Trump’s or Mercer’s views. In a New Yorker profile, Jane Mayer noted that Mercer argued that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a major mistake, a subject not remotely hinted at during the campaign.

Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” threaten foundations of modern medicine

The problem of antibiotics giving rise to more dangerous drug-resistant germs, “superbugs,” has been present since the early days of penicillin, but has now reached a crisis, with companies creating dangerous superbugs when their factories leak industrial waste, as reported by Madlen Davies of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in September 2016. Factories in China and India—where the majority of worldwide antibiotics are manufactured—have released “untreated waste fluid” into local soils and waters, leading to increases in antimicrobial resistance that diminish the effectiveness of antibiotics and threaten the foundations of modern medicine.

“After bacteria in the environment become resistant, they can exchange genetic material with other germs, spreading antibiotic resistance around the world, according to an assessment issued by the European Public Health Alliance, which served as the basis for Davies’ news report,” Project Censored explained. One strain of drug-resistant bacterium that originated in India in 2014 has since spread to 70 other countries.

Superbugs have already killed an estimated 25,000 people across Europe, according to UK National Health Service Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies.

“At the heart of the issue is how to motivate pharmaceutical companies to improve their production practices. With strong demand for antibiotics, the companies continue to profit despite the negative consequences of their actions,” Project Censored noted.

Superbugs are especially threatening modern medicine, in which a wide range of sophisticated practices—organ transplants, joint replacements, cancer chemotherapy and care of pre-term infants—“will become more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake,” according to Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organization.

The toll of U.S. Navy training on wildlife in the North Pacific

The U.S. Navy has killed, injured or harassed marine mammals in the North Pacific almost 12 million times over a five-year period, according to research conducted by The West Coast Action Alliance and reported by Dahr Jamail for Truthout. This includes whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea lions and other marine wildlife such as endangered species like humpback whales, blue whales, gray whales, sperm whales, Steller sea lions and sea otters. The number was tabulated from the Navy’s Northwest Training and Testing environmental impact statement and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Letter of Authorization for the number of “takes” of marine mammals caused by Navy exercises.

“A ’take’ is a form of harm to an animal that ranges from harassment, to injury, and sometimes to death,” Jamail wrote. “Many wildlife conservationists see even ’takes’ that only cause behavior changes as injurious, because chronic harassment of animals that are feeding or breeding can end up harming, or even contributing to their deaths if they are driven out of habitats critical to their survival.”

As the Alliance noted, this does not include impacts on “endangered and threatened seabirds, fish, sea turtles or terrestrial species” due to Navy activities, which have expanded dramatically, according to the Navy’s October 2015 environmental impact statement, including:

A 778 percent increase in number of torpedoes.

A 400 percent increase in air-to-surface missile exercises (including Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary).

A 1,150 percent increase in drone aircraft.

An increase from none to 284 sonar testing events in inland waters.

“It is, and has been for quite some time now, well known in the scientific community that the Navy’s use of sonar can damage and kill marine life,” Jamail reported.

Maternal mortality a growing threat in the U.S.

The U.S. maternal mortality rate is rising, while it’s falling elsewhere across the developed world. Serious injuries and complications are needlessly even more widespread with shockingly little attention being paid.

“Each year, over 600 women in the U.S. die from pregnancy-related causes and over 65,000 experience life-threatening complications or severe maternal morbidity,” Elizabeth Dawes Gay reported, covering an April 2016 congressional briefing organized by Women’s Policy Inc. “The average national rate of maternal mortality has increased from 12 per 100,000 live births in 1998 to 15.9 in 2012, after peaking at 17.8 in 2011.”

“The U.S. is the only nation in the developed world with a rising maternal mortality rate,” Rep. Lois Capps stated at the meeting.

The Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, has developed safety bundles of “best practices, guidelines and protocols to improve maternal health care quality and safety,” Gay wrote. “These ’bundles’ include equipping hospital labor units with a fully stocked cart for immediate hemorrhage treatment, establishing a hospital-level emergency management protocol, conducting regular staff drills and reviewing all cases to learn from past mistakes, among other things.”

More broadly, Kiera Butler reported for Mother Jones that doctors rarely warn patients of the potential for serious injuries and complications that can occur following birth.

Many state laws require doctors to inform women of the potential complications and dangers associated with delivery, but none requires them to discuss potential long-term problems, including the fact that some complications are more prevalent in women who give birth vaginally, rather than by C-section.

DNC claims right to select presidential candidate

A key story about the 2016 election has mostly been ignored by the media—a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Democratic National Committee broke legally binding neutrality agreements in the Democratic primaries by strategizing to make Hillary Clinton the nominee before a single vote was cast. The lawsuit was filed against the DNC and its former chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in June 2016 by Beck & Lee, a Miami law firm, on behalf of supporters of Bernie Sanders. A hearing was held on the suit in April 2017, in which DNC lawyers argued that neutrality was not actually required and that the court had no jurisdiction to assess neutral treatment.

As Michael Sainato reported for the Observer, DNC attorneys claimed that Article V, Section 4 of the DNC Charter—which instructs the DNC chair and staff to ensure neutrality in the Democratic presidential primaries—is actually “a discretionary rule” that the DNC “didn’t need to adopt to begin with.” Sainato also reported that DNC attorneys argued that specific terms used in the DNC charter—including “impartial” and “evenhanded”—couldn’t be interpreted in a court of law, because it would “drag the Court … into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs.”

Jared Beck, representing Sanders’ supporters, responded, “Your Honor, I’m shocked to hear that we can’t define what it means to be evenhanded and impartial. If that were the case, we couldn’t have courts. I mean, that’s what courts do every day, is decide disputes in an evenhanded and impartial manner.” Not only was running elections in a fair and impartial manner a “bedrock assumption” of democracy, Beck argued earlier, it was also a binding commitment for the DNC: “That’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says,” he said. “It says it in black and white.”

A record year for global internet shutdowns

In 2016, governments around the world shut down Internet access more than 50 times, according to the digital rights organization Access Now, “suppressing elections, slowing economies and limiting free speech,” as Lyndal Rowlands reported for the Inter Press Service.

“In the worst cases, internet shutdowns have been associated with human rights violations,” Rowlands was told by Deji Olukotun, of Access Now. “What we have found is that Internet shutdowns go hand in hand with atrocities,” Olukotun said.

Kevin Collier also covered the report for Vocativ, noting that Access Now uses a “conservative metric,” counting “repeated, similar outages”—like those which occurred during Gabon’s widely criticized Internet “curfew”—as a single instance. The Vocativ report included a dynamic map chart, designed by Kaitlyn Kelly, that vividly depicts Internet shutdowns around the world, month by month for all of 2016, as documented by Access Now.

As Olukotun told IPS, one way to stop government shutdowns is for internet providers to resist government demands. “Telecommunications companies can push back on government orders, or at least document them to show what’s been happening, to at least have a paper trail,” Olukotun observed.

On July 1, 2016, the U.N. Human Rights Council passed a nonbinding resolution signed by more than 70 countries lauding the Internet’s “great potential to accelerate human progress,” and condemning “measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online.” It noted that, “the exercise of human rights, in particular the right to freedom of expression, on the Internet is an issue of increasing interest and importance.”