Plenty of Publicity for State of the Free Press 2023 and The Media and Me
December marks a first for Project Censored and its publishing imprint, the Censored Press: Not one, but two of our books drop this month, with State of the Free Press 2023 available now and The Media and Me arriving officially on December 27th. Both titles are available now directly from Project Censored.
We’ve been busy promoting these two great titles. Allison Butler has appeared on the Karen Hunter Show, the Keen On podcast, and, with Nolan Higdon, on Teaching Matters to discuss The Media and Me, with forthcoming interviews scheduled for The Curious Man podcast, the David Pakman Show, Getting Smart, and the Art of Advocacy.
Andy Lee Roth appeared on Rising Up with Sonali, hosted by Sonali Kolhatkar, and Corporations and Democracy, with Annie Esposito and Steve Scalmanini. Kolhatkar and Roth discussed how dark money threatens to undermine democracy and the public’s trust in government, as well as the corporate news media’s failure to cover global inequalities when it comes to the causes and consequences of the climate crisis. Mickey Huff was a guest on Davey
D’s syndicated program Hard Knock Radio with educator Andreas Jackson to discuss the state of our billionaire press and the importance of critical media literacy in fighting big tech surveillance and censorship. Mickey also appeared on The Zero Hour, hosted by R.J. Eskow.
Independent newsweeklies across the US are starting to cover the Top “Censored” Stories from State of the Free Press 2023. So far the Boulder Weekly, Santa Fe Reporter, and Random Lengths News have each run Paul Rosenberg’s feature story, “The Billionaires’ Press Dominates Censorship Beat.” Please let us know if you see State of the Free Press 2023 featured in your local newsweekly!
And, as the December newsletter goes to press, Truthdig is featuring “Space Junk,” an excerpt from State of the Free Press 2023’s Junk Food News chapter, by Jen Lyons, Sierra Kaul, Marcelle Swinburne, Gavin Kelley, and Mickey Huff.
New Classroom Resources for Educators
For educators and their students, both State of the Free Press 2023 and The Media and Me are supported by teaching guides that provide an overview of each book’s main themes, topics for discussion, and activities and exercises that teachers and self-directed learners can use to engage more deeply.
Micah Card, a doctoral student in Education at University of California, Santa Cruz who is also a certified early childhood education mentor teacher, wrote the teaching guide for The Media and Me.
Andy Lee Roth, PhD, who co-edited the latest Project Censored yearbook, authored the teaching guide for State of the Free Press 2023.
Each teaching guide, along with a variety of classroom-tested resources for hands-on lessons in critical media literacy, can be downloaded from the Project Censored website here.
The Media and Me Book Launch, Hosted by City Lights
On Saturday, December 3rd, City Lights hosted the authors of The Media and Me for an all-day online symposium, titled “The Media and Us: Critical Media Literacy and Engaged Politics,” based on the book. The program, hosted by City Light’s Peter Maravelis, featured sessions on representation and access, engaging teachers and young people, critical thinking, digital literacy, advertising, and journalism. Each session will eventually be available on demand from the City Lights Books YouTube channel. Stay tuned for updates on coverage of the City Lights event on C-SPAN’s Book TV series.
The Project Censored Show
Recent episodes of the Project Censored Show have featured Eleanor Goldfield’s interview with army veteran and investigative reporter Mike Prysner, who discussed his reporting on the sordid past of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. In the same episode, Eleanor also spoke with professor, artist, and activist Adam Broomberg. Broomberg drew on his experience growing up in South Africa under apartheid to address the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As a fellow Jew, he offered strategies to address the topic of Zionism within Jewish families. Mickey Huff featured a segment with Aaron Good, discussing Good’s latest book, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, and the roots of the Russia-Ukraine-NATO conflict, which trace back to the United States’ rise to global dominance in the aftermath of the Second World War. In that episode’s second half, Eleanor spoke with Chris Garaffa, co-host of the CovertAction Bulletin podcast, about the prospects for stronger net-neutrality protections in the months ahead, as well as the broader issue of how to “democratize the internet.”
The latest programs featured in-depth interviews about the war in Ukraine and what the corporate media fail to cover. Mickey was recently in conversation with two of the country’s best-known peace advocates, Medea Benjamin and Chris Hedges, each of whom has just published an anti-war book. Another episode focused even more specifically on the war in Ukraine and prospects for peace as Eleanor hosted activist Phil Wilayto of the Odessa Solidarity Campaign while Mickey shared excerpts from a talk by Medea Benjamin, which he hosted in Berkeley, CA for KPFA on December 1st.
New Validated Independent News Stories
Even as State of the Free Press 2023 is just hitting the bookshelves, students and faculty participating in Project Censored’s Campus Affiliates Program are already identifying and vetting candidate stories for the next Censored yearbook.
Follow the Validated Independent News link to find the Project’s coverage of how segregation by field of study limits college students’ educational and job opportunities, Google hiring former CIA employees to fill influential company positions, and a landmark study of how oil and gas drilling affects maternal health—plus more than a dozen additional exemplars of independent journalism on pressing issues that have been marginalized, distorted, or ignored by corporate news outlets.
These first VINs of the 2022-2023 cycle have been identified, vetted, and summarized by students from Salisbury University, Loyola Marymount University, California State University East Bay, and University of Massachusetts Amherst, as participants in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program, which provides hands-on training in critical media literacy to students on college and university campuses across the United States.
Still More Publications! Project Censored on Media Policy and the Twitter Files
In case you missed it, Truthout published an article by Project Censored’s Steve Macek and Andy Lee Roth, titled Can We Trust Corporate Media Outlets to Report on the Laws Set to Govern Them? Macek and Roth examined the spuriously-named Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, the 2022 EARN IT Act, and corporate media efforts to oppose FTC regulation of surveillance advertising as three examples of the corporate media’s consistent failure to inform the public adequately about media policy.
In the newest article in Project Censored’s Dispatches series, Nolan Higdon turns a critical eye on the corporate news media’s paltry, hyper-partisan coverage of the Twitter Files. In Hunting the Twitter Files, Higdon writes that the lack of substantive coverage is “rooted in the legacy media’s fears over the broader implications of the story” and its business model, which requires framing every story in terms of “left versus right, blue versus red” politics.
And, finally, the Communications Department at Loyola Marymount University featured a profile of Reagan Haynie, a senior majoring in communications at LMU, about her experiences working with Project Censored. In Fall 2022, Reagan worked as the Project’s student intern and, prior to this semester, she researched and vetted story #7 in State of the Free Press 2023, about conflicts of interest posed by the Gates Foundation’s funding of news outlets, journalism training programs, and press associations around the world.
The post THE PROJECT CENSORED NEWSLETTER December 2022 appeared first on Project Censored.
This post was originally published on Project Censored.
