On this Project Censored Show Eleanor Goldfield interviews Venezuelan political analyst Leonardo Flores, who gives updates on the ongoing illegal imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab by the United States.…
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Kevin Gosztola returns to Project Censored to explain the latest developments in the Julian Assange extradition case, including the recent ruling from the UK’s High Court of Justice. He also…
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The Top 5 Most Important but Under-Reported News Stories of 2022-2023, as Selected by an International Jury A Joint Endeavor of the News Enlightenment Initiative and Project Censored June 19,…
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By Daniel Ellsberg Editor’s Note: The late Daniel Ellsberg’s article, “On Civil Courage and its Punishments,” was originally published in Censored 2014: Fearless Speech in Fateful Times, edited by Mickey…
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By Cameron Samuels | Special Guest Writer for Project Censored’s Dispatches on Media and Politics Amid an unprecedented wave of censorship, many of our state legislators have left no mercy…
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To open the program, Mickey and former Project Censored intern Reagan Haynie speak with Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer for MintPress News. He’s just written about a new phenomenon in…
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By Adam Bessie, Author of Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey (with Peter Glanting, The Censored Press/Seven Stories Press). On Friday, March 13, 2020 the community college system as we knew it…
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In the first half of this week’s show, Mickey speaks with three students campaigning against censorship in Texas, including Banned Books Week’s Youth Honorary Chair, Cameron Samuels. They’re associated with…
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On this week’s Project Censored show, Eleanor speaks with journalist and activist Morgan Artyukhina for a powerful and vital analysis of the vicious attack on trans rights. Morgan highlights how…
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On this week’s Project Censored Show, Eleanor Goldfield recently spoke attorney Steven Donziger – the man caught in the crosshairs of one of the largest corporations in the world, Chevron…
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Program Summary: In the first half of this week’s show, Mickey and Project Censored intern Reagan Haynie speak with investigative reporter Alan MacLeod of MintPress News. MacLeod explains that a…
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By Mickey Huff May 3rd marks the 30th anniversary of Press Freedom Day, inaugurated in 1993 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with support from the United Nations (UNESCO). RSF’s original…
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On the latest program, we celebrate Daniel Ellsberg Week (April 24-30), co-sponsored by The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy & and RootsAction Education Fund, as we honor whistleblowers in support of…
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Special thanks to Project Censored’s Summer 2022 intern Sam Peacock for helping with data collection and analysis. Corporate news coverage of US gun violence skews heavily toward mass shootings. The…
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By Andy Lee Roth Two cornerstones of democracy—freedom of expression and freedom of information—are under concerted attack, in the United States and around the world. In the US, for example,…
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Mickey hosts the first segment of the show. His guest Kenn Burrows describes an upcoming conference “From Polarization to Integration,” to be held April 21 on the San Francisco State…
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On this week’s program, we hear an array of ideas about the condition of American journalism and the state of our so-called free press: red flags about the decline of…
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By Nolan Higdon NOTE: The following article is another installment in our long-form Dispatches series. It is a detailed examination of establishment media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. It critiques…
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Eleanor Goldfield hosts the program this week— Across France, millions of people are taking to the streets and blocking them in a rapidly escalating show of defiance and disdain for…
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By Kevin Gosztola
In 2021, Pentagon Papers’ whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg shared a copy of a top-secret study with New York Times reporter Charlie Savage on the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958. It was presented by the newspaper as “another unauthorized disclosure” by the “famed source.”
The study from 1966 showed the United States military had drawn up plans for nuclear strikes against mainland China after Chinese military forces attacked Taiwan.
“American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die,” Savage wrote.
But what Savage and the Times did not know is that Ellsberg had already provided a copy of this sensitive report to Times reporter Tom Wicker in 1981 before he traveled to Japan, and the Times declined to publish details from it. Ellsberg made this revelation in an interview I did with him on March 3 as part of the launch of my new book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange.
A reporter from the International Herald Tribune, which was owned by the Times, attended the press conference in Japan in May 1981, according to Ellsberg.
A “long story” was published about what Ellsberg said at the press conference, however, the report omitted the fact that he had laid out a top-secret study and allowed members of various Japanese political parties in attendance to translate the study into Japanese for their official records.
Ellsberg informed the Japanese that they would likely be treated as a “nuclear target” if the U.S. government launched a nuclear war. “All of our warships had nuclear weapons in the Japanese harbor, which the public didn’t know and their government denied.”
Wicker died in 2011, which means it is difficult to figure out what he did with the study and why the Times ignored it. However, a report from May 21, 1981, which did not include a reporter byline, described what Ellsberg revealed to the Japanese public.
“Daniel J. Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who made available the Pentagon Papers about the war in Vietnam, said today that the United States Navy stationed a ship storing nuclear weapons within 300 yards of the Japanese coast in 1961,” the Times reported.
Ellsberg claimed that the ship holding nuclear weapons was a “small amphibious vessel known as an LST, or landing ship tank, anchored off a Marine air base at Iwakuni.” Both senior Naval officers and State Department officials maintained the ship’s presence was part of an unwritten understanding between the U.S. and Japan.
The report mentioned the news conference that Ellsberg “called a news conference for tomorrow morning” and that he “gave The Washington Post a copy of a memorandum that he said he wrote in 1971 describing the stationing of the ship with nuclear weapons off Japan.”
Richard Halloran, who was a foreign correspondent in Asia for the Herald Tribune, reported on the news conference on May 22.
“Mr. Ellsberg said at a news conference this morning that his account of the 1961 incident was recorded in a memorandum he dictated 10 years later,” Halloran wrote. “The memorandum, which he made available to reporters and which came to light yesterday, covered a period when, as a Government official, he inquired into the deployment of nuclear weapons and their command and control systems.”
“He said in the memorandum that, in 1958 and 1959, ‘Japan had as the central provision of its security arrangements with the United States the explicit agreement in writing that no nuclear weapons would ever be stationed in Japan.’”
Halloran later added that Ellsberg said the ship bearing nuclear arms was there in 1967, and the ship’s home port was on Okinawa, “which was then under American control.” It had “anchored for long periods off Iwakuni in the guise of an electronics repair ship.”
Unfortunately, Halloran died in 2020 so it’s impossible to ask him what he recalls from the press conference with Ellsberg in Japan.
The Pentagon reviewed the study, “The 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis: A Documented History,” in 1975. Significant details were kept from the public, as Savage noted.
“The pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict.
“To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.”
Kuter maintained at one meeting that limiting the war geographically to air bases would have merit, particularly “‘if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead.”
Ellsberg had never talked about this publicly because he had feared any comments might alienate reporters at the Times, but after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given a few months to live, he no longer had a reason to keep this episode a secret.
According to Ellsberg, he did not tell Savage that the Times had once had the study because he was afraid that might discourage him from covering it in 2021—forty years later.
Ellsberg presumed a “phone call from somebody” in 1981 had emphasized the fact that the study was still top secret, and the newspaper was advised not to report on it. They “must have checked it with somebody.”
“It [was] not mentioned in the U.S that I had done this,” Ellsberg recalled. “So I didn’t get prosecuted that time.”
The U.S. Justice Department could have prosecuted Ellsberg in 1981 and accused him of violating the Espionage Act once again. In fact, in 2021, Ellsberg openly encouraged the DOJ to charge him for leaking top-secret information to the news media so he could challenge the constitutionality of the 1917 law.
With U.S. saber-rattling over Taiwan, the study took on renewed relevance, and to Ellsberg, the policy of readiness and threats to blow up the world in order to hold on Taiwan do not look much better than Russia President Vladimir Putin’s threats of nuclear destruction to protect his country’s control over Crimea and the Donbas.
Kevin Gosztola is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange
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Eleanor Goldfield hosts this week’s program, and in her first segment, she speaks with the Program Director of the National Priorities Project, Lindsay Koshgarian. They examine the Biden Administration’s proposed Pentagon budget, which — at $886 billion — would set a new record for annual military spending while the US social and physical infrastructure collapses. Then, 20 years after George W Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, Eleanor talks with military veteran Matthew Hoh, who points out that the US had already been making war against Iraq in various forms for decades before the 2003 invasion. Hoh also explains what factors induce young men to enlist, as well as the roots of the life crises encountered by many combat veterans and the wreckage that war leaves in its wake.
Image by Mike Cook from Pixabay
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Over the weekend, demonstrations took place in several US cities to mark the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and to demand that the US and NATO stop escalating the Russia-Ukraine war. On this week’s Project Censored Show, Eleanor Goldfield and Mickey Huff discuss both those conflicts. First, Eleanor speaks with antiwar organizer Brian Becker about the prospects for the US peace movement in the context of the Ukraine conflict. Then in the second half-hour, historian Peter Kuznick joins Mickey to remind listeners about the predetermined agendas and pervasive lies that underlay the invasion of Iraq, and the devastating consequences for the Iraqi people.
Notes:
Brian Becker is national director of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), one of the groups that organized the March 18 antiwar demonstrations. Peter Kuznick is Professor of History at American University in Washington DC, and also directs the Nuclear Studies Program at that institution. He and Oliver Stone co-authored “The Untold History of the United States.”
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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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Mickey’s guest for the first half-hour is Mnar Adley, CEO and editor-in-chief of MintPress News. She explains Israel’s everyday brutality against Palestinians and how most Western media fail to cover it. She also points out the powerful interests that aim to discredit and defund independent media like MintPress for their coverage of the ongoing occupation. Then in the second half of the program, independent journalist Ann Garrison summarizes recent developments in the Horn of Africa region, and the Biden Administration’s efforts to undermine the governments there, even supporting the “Tigray” civil war in Ethiopia, which killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions.
Notes:
Mnar Adley is the founder and editor-in-chief at MintPress News. She founded MintPress as a venue for accurate reporting on the Middle East and the US military-industrial complex. Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in northern California. Her writing has appeared in the Black Agenda Report, the Grayzone, and the San Francisco Bayview. She is also a co-producer of Pacifica Radio’s “Covid, Race and Democracy.” She traveled to Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2022 to investigate conditions there first hand.
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
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By Nolan Higdon
“This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of the ‘volume of the evidence and as to the directness of the evidence.’” This sentiment was echoed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe who noted, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues.”
In the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems accuses Fox News Channel of falsely reporting that Dominion’s voting machines fraudulently delivered victory to Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Court documents attained by other media outlets reveal that hosts and other high-ranking Fox News Channel officials – including the Chairman and CEO of Fox’s parent company News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch – knew these reports were false, but aired them because they were more concerned with confirming their audience’s belief that Donald Trump won the election.
The evidence presented in the court documents speaks to the journalistic malpractice that plagues the cable news industry. Journalistic malpractice refers to professional journalists who privilege ideological bias and profits over truth in their reporting. Fox News Channel is patient zero for the plague of journalistic malpractice. It was created in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes, a media consultant for several Republican presidents, as a political project to sell conservative culture and policy to the American public with pro-conservative propaganda disguised as journalism. For example, Fox News Channel has
Liberals were right to assert that such chicanery was propaganda, not journalism. But before liberal readers scold Fox News viewers, they should remind themselves that the plague of journalistic malpractice has also infected the liberal leaning cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC. Researchers and scholars have noted that the advent of cable and then the internet saw news media outlets shift from attaining the largest audience possible to focusing on a more specific or narrow demographic of the audience. While Fox News Channel sought to cater to Republican Party voting viewers, CNN and MSNBC did the same for Democratic Party voters. This gave the Democratic Party influence over programming that was tantamount to what the Republican Party long enjoyed at Fox.
When Senator U.S. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential bid posed a threat to their desired candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, leaders from the Democratic Party admitted they worked to undermine his campaign. Pro-Democratic party outlets like MSNBC and CNN aided in this effort by
Their smear of Sanders continued in 2020 when
Journalistic malpractice also plagued Covid-19 coverage. Starting in 2020, CNN’s Chris Cuomo utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to host his brother, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The jovial segments seemed like campaign advertisements as Chris treated Andrew as the anti-thesis to then President Trump: a competent executive who took decisive action to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Although, the Democratic versus Republican framing attracted partisan audiences, in reality, Andrew Cuomo and Trump were all too similar: both concealed the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in their jurisdiction, both put patients at risk with kickbacks to industry partners, and both utilized media contacts to stifle press reports about their alleged sexual crimes.
The partisan falsehoods in cable news includes the production of powerful, long- running false stories designed to convince their audiences that the other party is wrong and crazy. For years now, conservatives and Fox News Channel perpetuated the baseless Qanon conspiracy, which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles – mainly in the Democratic Party – runs global affairs but Trump will break up the conspiracy. The absurdity of this conspiracy is tantamount to liberal leaning news media’s reporting on Russiagate, which sought to discredit Republicans. Since 2016, Russiagate – the story that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – was perpetuated by a series of false stories from Democratic Party-friendly media including
Conservatives rightly see this reporting and believe liberals are insane.
Both factions need to look in a mirror. While audiences can clearly see the insanity in other networks’ viewers, they rarely seem to see it in themselves. Indeed, in the same week that CNN and others were having a schadenfreude moment over the Dominion v. Fox case, they hosted a commentator on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio without disclosing that he had lobbied for the train company Norfolk Southern. This example of hypocrisy and journalistic malpractice is not only costly to CNN’s credibility, but our democracy as well.
Without a robust media system that privileges truth over preaching to the choir, the public will have endless debates devoid of facts on key issues such as critical race theory, vaccine efficacy, the origins of the COVID-19 virus, climate change, transgender issues, Ukraine, mysterious balloons, and more. Democratic discourse will be reduced to seeing Republicans as MAGA-hat wearing, blue lives matter-flag waving, gun nuts, and Democrats as medical mask wearing, “this house cares about everything” front-lawn sign adorning, professional victims and virtue signalers. These caricatures have never really been accurate, but as long as the nation is infected with the plague of journalist malpractice they will surely be perpetuated.
While the courts are unlikely to deliver solace from political party propaganda disguised as journalism, they have provided some wisdom. Both Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson of MSNBC and Fox News Channel respectively, have been brought to court for spreading false information and were exonerated because the judges concluded that no reasonable person would believe either of them were telling the truth. That is good advice, and viewers would be wise to remember it every time they consider watching cable news.
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On this week’s program, two critical media literacy scholars join Mickey to examine a range of current events. First, Allison Butler addresses the notorious “past her prime” comments by CNN’s Don Lemon, his non-apology apology, and level of sexism and ageism in news media. Butler also discusses the book, Empire of Pain, which looks at how the Sackler family (of Purdue Pharma) changed both the medical profession and the media world with their heavy direct-to-the-public drug advertising. In the second half of the show, Nolan Higdon examines the persistence of the “Russiagate” propaganda narrative despite the absence of supporting evidence.
Butler’s recent piece on the Lemon affair was published by Ms. Magazine, and her rejoinder to Lemon in USA Today.
Higdon’s latest op-ed with Huff on Russiagate was published numerous places, including as a Dispatch at Project Censored.
Notes:
Allison Butler teaches in the Department of Communications at the University of Massachusetts, and is Vice President of the Media Freedom Foundation, Project Censored’s parent organization, and co-author of The Media and Me. Nolan Higdon is a lecturer in education at the University of California Santa Cruz campus. He’s also the author of the book The Anatomy of Fake News and other works of media analysis.
Image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay
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ATTN: TEENS—Stop Your Teacher (and Silicon Valley) from Spying on You
In this bonus “Dispatches from Project Censored,” Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon, two of the most acclaimed media literacy educators working today, offer no-nonsense tips for teens to protect themselves against surveillance. As technology floods into the classroom, teens often fall prey to invisible violations of their rights to privacy and free expression. These rights should not be left at the school’s doorstep, but today’s technology make snooping and spying in the classroom easier than ever. Butler and Higdon’s “Is Your Teacher Spying on You?” gives teens a primer for taking back their rights and protecting them into the future.
By Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon
As internet and social media users, we know that digital platforms monitor all our clicks, likes, and hovers. We know this because when we do a Google search for say, concert tickets, within moments, concert ticket advertisements start popping up in our feeds. While this may feel slightly cringey, it is also pretty innocent and may actually benefit us if we do, in fact, find a good deal on concert tickets. The reward for this benefit – we found what we were looking for – may encourage us to ignore the more insidious and pervasive forms of monitoring.
It is not clear if you feel the same way about the technology companies your school has contracted to monitor your clicks, likes, and hovers. Maybe your school uses Gaggle, Bark, TurnitIn, Class Dojo, or Illuminate Education. Maybe you are given ‘free’ or low-cost equipment such as ChromeBooks or MacBooks that come with pre-loaded software. Maybe you have learning accommodations and are given a program like Glean to help you transcribe class notes.
If your school contracts with any of these companies’ products and you have, at one time or another, plugged in one of your own devices (for example, you need to charge your personal phone and use your school-issued laptop to do so), you are now sharing your private, personal data with the company that runs the software, the company that manufactured the hardware, your school administrators, and your teachers. You have opened a door that can never be closed: Once you make a single connection between devices, all your information is now accessible to those companies. From now on, if you use any term that is deemed ‘concerning,’ this will set off a series of pings.
‘Concerning,’ by the way, is pretty vague which means that each company can develop their own definition regardless of accuracy or impact on the learning process. Maybe you’re searching song lyrics late at night, and the site from which you are searching is connected to the software provided by your school, and you enter a word that is deemed ‘concerning.’ Your teacher, and possibly local law enforcement, will get pinged and you may be registered as a person of concern. If you are economically unstable or of color, studies have shown that you are more likely to receive this ping for a wider variety of ‘concerning’ terms’. Research shows that big-tech platforms and programs are designed in a way to reinforce inequities and justify the disproportionate policing of people of color.
Schools and big-tech claim that these pings are designed to protect you and your classmates. For example, in the wake of mass school shootings, these technologies are touted as prevention tools: The next school shooting can be prevented by monitoring students’ online communications, even outside of school hours and even on their own devices. However, there is no evidence that this monitoring actual decreases acts of violence.
It is not clear if the hardware and software that surveils your searches and postings gathers your data for your safety, but what is clear is that these companies analyze and aggregate your data so it can be monetized and weaponized. Tech-companies’ analysis of data is sold to data brokers, governments, industry, researchers, and any other party offering to pay the right price. Technology companies view you as the product and your privacy is a wall to their profits. They put a positive spin on eroding your privacy so they can share your innermost details with the highest bidder.
These technologies ostensibly make the school environment safer for you and make grading and academic progression more convenient for your teachers. However, there is a dearth of evidence to support that claim that these technologies improve the learning process. What can you do about this? Admittedly, your options are limited. We live in a world where digital technologies are not a luxury; they are a necessity. ‘Limited options’ don’t mean nothing! There are small changes you can make that add up to big differences:
1) Work really hard to keep your personal devices separate from your school devices; only use your school computer for school tasks.
2) Turn off notifications on your phone; instead of letting all that information passively wash over you, exercise your agency to choose to seek it out. This way, you are more in control of what you watch, read, and listen to.
3) Clean out the cache on your phone/computer regularly. This clears out some of tags that monitor you.
4) Check in with your parents/guardians, teachers, and school administrators: What do they know about these technologies and their surveillance tactics? Are there options for greater privacy control?
ALLISON BUTLER is a Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Advising, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. She is a contributor to the forthcoming book The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.
NOLAN HIGDON is an author and university lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of numerous books and is a contributor to the forthcoming The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People.
Image by Gordon Johnson
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As we come to the end of Black History Month, Eleanor Goldfield recently talked with Pan-African theorist, organizer, and author Max Rameau about community control over policing – that’s not community policing. He highlights the importance of shifting power vs reforming institutions, organizing to take power, not ask for it, and the connectedness of all issues from housing and education to policing. Next, Eleanor spoke with Eliana Carlin in Lima, Peru where she leads us through the clash of crises her country and her people are in the midst of – from the deep rot of corruption to the violence of state forces to a constitutionalised neoliberal ideology. Listeners in the US may see our own struggles mirrored on the streets of Peru – a grotesque reflection that we must combat over here and over there, for the sake of all of our connected fights for liberation.
Song: Peruvian Cocaine by Immortal Technique
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