Kevin Gosztola’s Guilty of Journalism Published
On March 7th, the Censored Press celebrated the publication of Kevin Gosztola’s Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. You can listen to Gosztola’s book launch conversation with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, guest hosted by Mickey Huff, at The Dissenter, and you can watch Mickey’s interview with Kevin about Guilty of Journalism on The Project Censored Show by visiting the Project’s YouTube channel.
Later this month, Gosztola will be a featured speaker at the Disruption Lab Network’s Smart Prisons conference, to be held in Berlin, March 24-26, 2023. Many events on the program—including the panel featuring Gosztola, lawyer Stella Assange (Julian Assange’s wife), and investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi—will be streamed for free. Check the event website for the full schedule and streaming information.
If you have not yet read Guilty of Journalism, you can get a copy at your local independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, or directly from Project Censored. The eBook version is available from our publishing partner, Seven Stories Press—currently for a discounted price of less than eight dollars.
Putting The Media and Me in the Hands of Educators
In February, we sent 500 copies of The Media and Me, the Project’s guide to critical media literacy, to educators and school librarians in fifteen states, from California to New York. Our mailing targeted curriculum directors and teachers at middle schools and high schools in states where lawmakers are currently considering legislation to support media literacy education.
Claire Kelley, director of marketing at Seven Stories Press, noted that the collaboration between the Censored Press, Seven Stories Press, and Penguin Random House “will help bring this important book to curriculum selectors at a time when teachers are looking for resources to teach media literacy in their classrooms.”
The book mailing also highlighted the Teaching Guide for The Media and Me, developed by Micah Card, which provides classroom-tested discussion prompts and hands-on activities for teachers and self-directed learners.
The Media and Me is available directly from Project Censored, with proceeds of those sales directly benefiting our ongoing critical media literacy programs. You can also ask for it at your local, independent bookstore. And, if eBooks are your preferred reading format, Seven Stories Press, our publishing partner, is currently offering the electronic version of The Media and Me for less than six dollars—a critical bargain, if you ask us!
Video of City Lights “Media and Us” Event Now Available
Speaking of engaging resources for teachers and learners, in December 2022 Project Censored partnered with historic City Lights Books to present The Media and Us, a one-day virtual symposium on the connections between critical media literacy and political engagement, featuring the authors of The Media and Me and hosted by Peter Maravelis of the City Lights Foundation.
Video of all the sessions from that event is now posted on the City Lights YouTube channel, including sessions on:
Special thanks to Peter for being a gracious host and for making the recordings of this event available online.
Dispatches on Media and Politics and Other Recent Publications
The Project’s ongoing Dispatches series recently published Nolan Higdon’s Journalistic Malpractice on Trial, an examination of what the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News reveals about how corporate media sacrificed their credibility to partisan falsehoods. Higdon points out that, while Fox has long-standing issues with their reporting, this issue goes beyond Fox and extends to other major cable outlets that also broadcast propaganda and falsehoods.
As technology floods the classroom, young students often fall prey to invisible violations of their rights to privacy and free expression. In their article, Is Your Teacher Spying on You?, Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon provide teen students a primer on how to protect themselves from surveillance and take back their rights.
Allison Butler also published a pair of articles on Don Lemon’s sexist remark that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was “past her prime” and Lemon’s subsequent “sorry not sorry” apology. In No Don, It’s *Patriarchy* That Is ‘Past Its Prime’ (published by Ms. Magazine) Butler analyzed how, across the political spectrum, female candidates are “swiftly censored” by establishment news outlets “when the axes of their age, public persona and behavior do not align appropriately.” USA Today published Butler’s follow-up, CNN’s Don Lemon Still Gets It Wrong, examining Lemon’s subsequent public remarks as an example of “how not to apologize.” You can listen to Butler discuss the story in conversation with Mickey Huff on this recent episode of the Project Censored Show.
Truthout published Shealeigh Voitl and Andy Lee Roth’s article, NYT Responds to Criticism of Anti-Trans Bias by Silencing Its Own Reporters. Voitl and Roth described how freelancers at the New York Times called out the newspaper’s biased coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people, and how the Times sought to muffle the alarm its reporters raised. Voitl and Roth argue that the Times adheres to “a flawed version of journalistic objectivity that equates balance with accuracy,” which helps rightwing demagogues and transphobic interest groups manipulate news coverage in their favor.
Andy Lee Roth and Steve Macek published an article, titled Billionaire’s Lawsuit Against O’Rourke May Stifle Criticism of Money in Politics, about legal efforts by Kelcy Warren, a fossil fuel oligarch from Texas, to wield political influence without being subject to public accountability—including how Warren’s defamation lawsuit should be understood against the backdrop of concerted efforts by Republican lawmakers in states across the country to make it more difficult to track the influence of dark money on elections and public trust in the political process.
Finally, Mickey Huff was a guest along with investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on The Ralph Nader Radio Hour to discuss the state of our so-called free press and the establishment media’s failure to cover substantive stories from the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline to the causes of ongoing train derailments and much more.
The Project Censored Show
In recent episodes of the Project’s weekly public affairs program, Mickey Huff hosted Shealeigh Voitl and Steve Macek who discussed corporate interference in matters of environment and human health, as reported in the Déjà Vu News chapter of State of the Free Press 2023, which they compiled. Voitl and Macek discussed the latest news on microplastics pollution, water privatization, and aggressive marketing of infant formula. Later in that episode, Andy Lee Roth joined Steve Macek to discuss their article for Truthout on Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren’s defamation lawsuit against Beto O’Rourke, including how Warren’s legal case puts a new twist on SLAPP lawsuits that powerful figures have typically used in attempts to silence journalists.
Project Censored Show co-host Eleanor Goldfield spoke with Pan-African theorist, organizer, and author Max Rameau about community control over policing, with Rameau highlighting the important difference between shifting power and reforming institutions, and the interwoven connections between the issues of housing, education, and policing. (You can also view the segment with Max Rameau on the Project’s YouTube channel.)
In the same episode, Eleanor spoke with Eliana Carlin, a political scientist based in Lima, Peru, about the political crises in Peru and their roots in the nation’s constitutionalized neoliberal ideology. The two discussed how the conditions that led people in Peru to take the streets in protest have parallels in the United States.
The US and UK governments’ persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was the focus of another episode featuring Gabriel and John Shipton, the brother and father of Assange. They spoke with Mickey Huff about Ithaka, a new documentary about the family’s attempt to win Julian Assange’s freedom. (Video of the segment with Gabriel and John Shipton can be viewed on the Project’s YouTube channel.) In the same program, Mickey also spoke with Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof about Gosztola’s new book, Guilty of Journalism, as described above in this newsletter’s lead article.
In the Show’s most recent episode, Eleanor Goldfield interviewed Brian Becker, a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the national director of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), and host of The Socialist Program podcast. Goldfield and Becker discussed the ANSWER Coalition’s plans for a national march on Washington, DC, March 18th, calling for negotiations, rather than military escalations in Ukraine, and commemorating the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.
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