This week, Eleanor Goldfield looks at COP, climate, and change with the Minister of State for Environment, Climate Change and Technology of the Republic of Maldives, Khadeeja Naseem. They discuss the dire situation her home is in, a home that has been the vanguard not only of climate chaos but of the movement to push wealthy nations to pay for loss and damages – a hot button topic at this year’s COP27 meeting. Naseem highlights the fight to bridge this inequality gap, the need for financial systems to shift in response to climate change, and what’s at stake beyond just the loss of place – the loss of entire cultures. Eleanor then speaks with professor and activist Rory Varrato about the false solutions and shallow promises of COP meetings, and the need for revolutionary language, and actions. They also dig deeper into transformation of consciousness – the philosophy of change, from within to global systems.

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Eleanor Goldfield hosts this week’s episode, and spends the hour on conditions in Iran, where demonstrators have taken to the streets in response to the death of a young woman in the custody of the Iranian “morality police.” Leila Zand is an Iranian-American activist and scholar who joins the show to contextualize the events of the past month in Iran. She highlights the importance of understanding the history of Iran, and the US, and cautions against using events as an excuse for continued US imperialist aggression. People all over the world have the right to self-determination, be it in terms of government or how they dress. Zand’s work pushes for these ideals to be actualized without violence.

Notes:
Leila Zand is an Iranian-American peace activist and scholar, based in Washington DC.
She presently works with the womens’ peace organization Code Pink.

Music-break info:
“Mahtab” by Marjan Farsad

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On this Project Censored Show we discuss Media Literacy Week and more specifically Critical Media Literacy. We then discern the different approaches to media literacy which have been co-opted including corporate and a-critical media literacy. We explore this issue with experts Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon.

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In this episode of the Project Censored Show Eleanor Goldfield looks at the potential for a Class I railroad strike. This struggle exemplifies the power of workers and how much corporations and their media lackeys fear collective power – particularly when that collective power represents some $2 billion a day in economic leverage. Eleanor outlines the most recent happenings on this issue and then she sits down with Mark Burrows, Railroad Workers United (RWU) member and a 41-year veteran of the railroad industry. They discuss the ongoing assault on railroad workers, not only from their corporate bosses, but from the corporate media as well. Burrows describes the lived experiences of workers like him, and how workplace demands have risen while safety standards and wages have fallen. 

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On this week’s program we hear a panel discussion held in observation of Constitution Day (mid September) at Diablo Valley College, where Mickey teaches. Three expert panelists examined the state of the media, the threats posed by book-banning campaigns and cancel culture, as well as the societal changes underlying these trends. For some time, the United States has been on the road to what many scholars and pundits repeatedly refer to as a coming Civil War 2.0. Major political figures call the coming elections a “war for the soul of America.” With increased attacks on academic freedom from the left and right, and a massive uptick in book challenges and bans across the country, our panelists discuss the need for open dialogue, constructive communication, and advocate for protecting the right to teach, to read, and to disagree. Our guests present strategies to reduce tensions in our contentious political climate through critical thinking, as well as reciprocity and empathic listening, while seeking alternatives to censorship in the quest to overcome current challenges and ameliorate our differences.

Notes:
Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the national Banned Books Week Coalition. Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education. Nolan Higdon is a university lecturer in media studies and history. He’s also the author of The Anatomy of Fake News, Let’s Agree to Disagree, and other books on media and society.

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This week, Eleanor Goldfield digs into mining – past and present. First, author and organizer Mitch Troutman discusses his latest book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners who Seized an Industry. Mitch shares the importance of remembering and sharing a radical past, as he puts it: nothing was ever inevitable and that history is taught best when it gives us agency in the present. He also explains the role of media in uplifting the miner’s struggle, something more difficult to recognize in today’s media landscape. Next, Eleanor talks with Jamie Kneen from Mining Watch to discuss the fallacy of green growth vis a vis lithium – a metal that many are saddling with utopian hopes for the future while the reality screams of neocolonialist extraction in line with other precious metals in a global capitalist market. Kneen highlights the importance of scale in discussing a livable future as well as the dirty fallout from lithium mining.

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For the first segment of this week’s show, Mickey talks with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges shares some of the stories from his newest book, The Greatest Evil Is War. The book is based on interviews with dozens of victims of war, including families of soldiers, wounded veterans, and civilian survivors of battle. Hedges lays out the many costs of war, and having seen it up close, calls for its unequivocal end across the world. In the second half-hour, historian Peter Kuznick explains the often untold historical legacy of the recently-deceased former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Kuznick says that Gorbachev not only brought vital reforms to the USSR, but made unprecedented arms-reduction proposals that might have put the world on course to complete nuclear disarmament, had the Reagan Administration not rejected the ideas. Both guests call out the horrors of war and the need for a seriously rejuvenated global movement for peace.

Notes:
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist with a long career as a foreign correspondent around the world, including battle zones like Iraq and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Death of the Liberal Class, America: The Farewell Tour, and his new work The Greatest Evil Is War. 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-wrote The Untold History of the United States.

Image by Annette Jones from Pixabay

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On this Project Censored Show, host Mickey Huff dedicates the hour to Banned Books Week 2022 (Sept. 18-24). Now in its 40th year, Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating and promoting the freedom to read, and resisting efforts to ban books from library shelves, especially in school settings. Mickey’s four guests bring a variety of perspectives to the program, but are united in their opposition to censorship and staunch advocacy of the freedom to read. Project Censored is a longtime co-sponsor of the Banned Books Week Coalition.

Notes:
-Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the Banned Books Week Coalition.
-Cameron Samuels is a recent high school graduate and activist from the Katy Independent School District near Houston, Texas. Cameron was named the Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week (the first time the title has been awarded) for actively opposing book banning in the District as a student there.
-Jordan Smith is the digital editor at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
-Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, an organization specializing in protecting academic freedom.

Image by Pretty Sleepy Art from Pixabay

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The latest Project Censored Show features a recording of a panel discussion from this summer’s Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival, held in Washington DC. Mickey and Project Censored’s Associate Director, Andy Lee Roth, moderated a discussion with journalist Kevin Gosztola and Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders. This panel, “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange” examined how the imprisonment and prosecution of Assange for his work with WikiLeaks will have a negative impact on journalists and publishers. The final ten minutes of the show is an update with Kevin Gosztola explaining to Mickey the latest developments in the Assange extradition case.

Notes:
Kevin Gosztola is an independent journalist, and the publisher of ShadowProof.  He’s also the author of “Guilty of Journalism: the Political Case Against Julian Assange,” to be published in early 2023 by The Censored Press. Rebecca Vincent works at Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit organization that advocates for press freedom worldwide.

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On the first half of this week’s show Eleanor speaks with musician, producer, and songwriter Samantha Blanchard – talking to her about the exploitation of artists in today’s often cookie cutter market, the sad trope of paying dues, and the harsh clash between capitalism and art – which is in fact just human emotion. They also discuss an upcoming EP of hers which covers several Elvis songs, his legacy, and the responsibility of white artists in regards to the black, and indigenous artists who they borrow from, and who largely never got their due.

On the second half of the show, Eleanor speaks with organizer India Walton about the student loan debt crisis. India shares her thoughts on the Biden administration’s latest announcement, as well as the road ahead. They discuss how those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, including canceling student loans, free higher education, and everything else under the sun.

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In the first half of the show, Mickey talks with attorney and author Heidi Boghosian and Project Censored associate director Andy Lee Roth about the confluence of surveillance and censorship, and how that impacts journalism. Many people believe they have nothing to hide online, but that myth is dispelled by today’s guests as they address everyday precautions citizens can take to defend their privacy online. Later, Clayton Weimers of Reporters Without Boarders joins the discussion with Mickey and Andy to address the rising incidences of violence (or threats of violence) against journalists, how they should be confronted, and the impacts they have on a free press and society at large.

Notes:

• Heidi Boghosian is executive director of the AJ Muste Institute, and former executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is I Have Nothing to Hide, And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy.
• Andy Lee Roth is Associate Director of Project Censored, co-editor of the Project’s annual volume of censored stories, and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. He has published widely on media issues, including most recently, The Deadly Business of Reporting Truth.
• Clayton Weimers directs the Washington DC bureau office of Reporters Without Borders, an international institution which works to protect journalists around the world; it also publishes the annual “Press Freedom Index” ranking of countries around the world on press freedom issues.

Hosts: Mickey Huff and Eleanor Goldfield

Producers: Anthony Fest and Eleanor Goldfield

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For the first half of the show, Eleanor Goldfield looks into unionizing workers at a Trader Joe’s store in Minneapolis and what issues they are facing. She speaks with organizer Sarah Beth Ryther about the efforts as part of growing nationwide movement of organized workers. Then we hear a rebroadcast of a conversation recorded last year between Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth, the associate director of Project Censored, about how big tech companies are increasingly turning to proprietary algorithms (instead of human editors) to decide what material they post on their platforms, ultimately determining the news we see.

Notes:
Sarah Beth Ryther is an employee at the Trader Joe’s store in Minneapolis, MN and a leader in the campaign to organize workers at that store. Andy Lee Roth is Associate Director of Project Censored, co-editor of the Project’s annual volume of censored stories, and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. He has published widely on media matters, including the article discussed from The Markaz Review on “The New Gatekeepers.”

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This week on the Project Censored Show, Eleanor and Mickey begin the hour in conversation with esteemed historian Dr. David Goldfield, who is a long-time academic and author who has just recently been asked by publishers to censor some of the shocking and uncomfortable aspects of his work so as to not “offend anyone.” As he puts it, if you offend no one, you teach no one. Eleanor, Mickey and David highlight the importance of never censoring the past, lest we distort our present, and thereby condemn our future to one built on falsehoods. In the second half of the show, Eleanor is joined by journalist Mirna Wabi-Sabi to discuss food waste as a colonialist and capitalist paradigm…moving beyond the argument for individual responsibility for climate change and incorporating global systems in our understanding of both the problem, and indeed, the solution.

Image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay

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Eleanor Goldfield hosts this week’s show. This past May, the US Supreme Court narrowed the protection of the Sixth Amendment, by ruling that a person convicted of a crime cannot cite ineffective legal representation in state court as grounds for appeal to the federal courts. In the first half of today’s program, attorney Mark Loudon-Brown explains the implications of that decision. Then in the second half-hour, Eleanor explores some of the ways big-party power brokers attempt to block third parties from the ballot, as well as constrain the influence of grassroots activists.

Notes:
Mark Loudon-Brown is a senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and previously was a public defender in New York City. He holds law degrees from New York University and Georgetown University.

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For the first half of this week’s show, Mickey brings on co-organizers and participants of the upcoming 2022 Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival in Washington, DC, including Marcel Reid, Michael McCray, and Marsha Warfiled. They make the case for a broader public understanding of what whistleblowing is, and why those who call out corruption need better protection and support given the retaliation they face for exercising what Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers fame, has called civil courage. In the second half-hour, Eleanor Goldfield and her guest look at the recent election in Colombia, which saw leftist candidate Gustavo Petro winning the presidency and the first Afro-Colombian, Francia Marquez, an environmental activist, win the vice-presidency. They discuss what this may means for the region and US influence and imperialism there.

Notes:
Michael McCray and Marcel Reid are the co-founders of the International Association of Whistleblowers and co-organizers of the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival. McCray is also General Counsel for the Federally Employed Women Legal Education Fund. Reid is a former member of the Pacifica Radio National Board. Marsha Warfield is a nationally-known, comedian and actress, and will be hosting some events at the Whistleblower Summit. Gimena Sanchez is a staff member at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Image by German Rojas from Pixabay

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This week’s program begins with an update from Kevin Gosztola on the Julian Assange legal case in the UK, including the recent ruling by the Home Secretary authorizing Assange’s extradition to the U.S. Gosztola explains why Assange didn’t receive an impartial hearing from the UK authorities and what this portends for press freedoms worldwide. In the second half-hour, Nolan Higdon looks at the recent Supreme Court opinion reversing Roe vs. Wade, and asks why national-level Democratic Party politicians never took preemptive action to protect abortion rights (the topic of a recent article he and Mickey co-authored at Salon). He and Mickey also discuss the state of the media, including the lessons from the rapid failure of CNN+, the cable network’s futile attempt to compete with new media by adding a streaming service that did little to garner a broader audience.

Notes:
Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of ShadowProof. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from the beginning, as well as other press-freedom and whistleblower cases. Nolan Higdon is a university lecturer in media studies and history in northern California. He’s also the author of The Anatomy of Fake News, and is a frequent guest on the Project Censored Show.

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This week on the Project Censored radio show, we sit down with Fiore Longo of Survival International to discuss the colonialist and racist realities of so-called conservation, not least of all in the case of our own country’s beloved national parks. Highlighting the current forced eviction of the Maasai from their ancestral lands, Fiore speaks to the need of shifting our paradigms on both eco-tourism and conservation, pointing out that removing tribal and indigenous peoples from an ecosystem not only harms the biodiversity of that place but perpetuates violence against these people. The so-called Global North’s perspective of tribal and indigenous peoples must change, not only for the sake of human rights but in a very real sense for the sake of biodiversity and climate justice. There’s no such thing as cuddly colonialism, there’s no such thing as green capitalism.

Later in the show we’re joined by Jimmy Dunson, co-founder of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief to discuss the importance of community preparedness for extreme weather driven by climate chaos, as well as relational infrastructure. We also discuss his upcoming book Building Power while the lights are out – about mutual aid, disasters and dual power published by Rebel Hearts Publishing.

 

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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This week’s program focuses on whistleblowers — their contributions to society, the retaliation they often endure, and the legal protections they need. Mickey’s guests for the hour include Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization that supports whistleblowers, and three historic whistleblowers who dared speak truth to power. We learn about the dangers and abuses these three men exposed over the past half century, and what reforms are needed to defend individuals who take the risks of becoming whistleblowers, and the journalists who help bring their stories to the public.

Notes:

Tom Devine is Legal Director at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project. Frank Serpico is a retired NYPD detective who became a household name after exposing widespread corruption within the department. His story was the subject of the 1973 Hollywood movie “Serpico.” Rick Parks is a nuclear engineer who worked at the damaged Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, and has spoken out about management’s and regulators’ failures to prioritize safety above utility profits. He is featured on the new Netflix docu-series “Meltdown: Three Mile Island” Robert MacLean was fired from the Transportation Security Administration after criticizing dangerous shortcomings in airline security procedures after 9/11.

A National Whistleblower Summit will take place in July; more information can be found here.

Show Transcript

Mickey Huff: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host Mickey Huff. Today on the program, we focus on the importance of whistleblowers and the work of the Government Accountability Project. We’re joined for the hour by their legal director, Tom Devine, to discuss how whistleblower rights need to be upheld and greatly improved. We welcome three historic whistleblowers to the program to share their incredible stories of civil courage, including the legendary Frank Serpico on outing police misconduct, Rick Parks on averting total disaster in containment and cleanup efforts at Three Mile Island. Last but not least, we [00:01:00] welcome back Robert MacLean on TSA flight security after 9/11. Today, an hour honoring whistle blowers and the important role they play. Stay tuned.

Welcome to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, I’m your host Mickey Huff. On today’s program, we’re going to address all things whistleblower. We are joined for the hour by Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project. He is their legal director and has worked with the organization since 1979, and he has formally or informally assisted in over 7,000 whistleblower cases, people defending themselves against retaliation and in making real differences on behalf of the public. So Tom Devine will be with us for the hour today, and then we are also honored to be joined by several whistle blowers themselves. [00:02:00] We are joined by Frank Serpico first, Frank became a national hero and of course folks may know of a well known film of the same name about him. We’ll talk about law enforcement whistleblower cases and why we still need whistleblower protections. We’ll also be joined by Rick Parks, who is affiliated with a film, Meltdown, about Three Mile Island. So a whistleblower from 1979, going all the way back to the Three Mile Island disaster, and we also have Robert MacLean with us on The Project Censored Show today, and he’ll be talking about an ongoing case with Transportation Security Administration and we’ll get into the details of each of these people as examplars and examples of whistleblowers, how they’re important, why they’re important, and why we need to support them. You can learn more about the Government Accountability Project at whistleblower.org and Tom Devine, let’s start with you. Welcome back to The Project Censored Show. 

Tom Devine: Thanks for having me Mickey. 

Mickey Huff: It is always a pleasure Tom. We were out of the loop for [00:03:00] a few years, but we’re glad to be back together for the National Whistleblower Summit coming up at the end of July. Project Censored is back co-sponsoring that with you and we’re looking forward to being back in the loop, supporting whistleblowers. By the way for listeners, stay tuned, in next week’s show, we’ll have Kevin Gosztola, Abby Martin, with significant updates on the Julian Assange case, speaking of other important whistleblower cases. So Tom, let’s start with you and let’s talk about why are we still talking about the need for protecting whistleblowers?

Tom Devine: Whistleblowers are the people who have kept organizations and those who have power honest or tried to keep them honest and have been our most essential check since the beginning of organized society. Whistleblowers are just individuals who use free speech, rights to challenge abuses of power that betray the public trust, and as long as we’ve had organized society, and as long as people have had power, they haven’t been able to resist abusing it for their own ends instead of for the public good. And when [00:04:00] people fight back with weapons, we call them revolutionaries. When they fight back with words, we call them dissidents and whistleblowing’s just the modern slang for something that’s as old as the history of organized society. They’re the people who change the course of history. We’ve got three people today with you on this program who actually have changed the course of history. 

Mickey Huff: Indeed, it’s remarkable, and I’m looking forward to speaking with each of our special guests here today. Tom Devine, whistleblower protection though, it’s interesting. The history of it in the United States goes back to 1777, is that right? 

Tom Devine: That was the first kind of anecdotal whistleblower protection for some whistleblowers on a Navy ship with a corrupt captain, but we really didn’t get into having any credible free speech fights until 1978 for government workers.

Mickey Huff: So, this is a pretty significant history and it sounds like in the last 40 years there’s been a lot more attention being paid to the importance of whistleblowers. Again, granted, going all the way [00:05:00] back to Daniel Ellsberg, one of the more famous in the latter 20th century in the Pentagon Papers, but so many whistleblowers since, and many that ought to be household names, but many that folks just never seem to hear about because there’s a connection between whistleblowers and press freedom. The corporate media don’t always like to cover these kinds of stories, because whistleblowers often are saying things that are very damning or incriminating about the corruption of our public and private institutions. Is that right Tom Devine? 

Tom Devine: Absolutely. Whistleblowers threaten those who are abusing their power, and animal instinct is if something threatens you, you want to destroy the threat. You don’t think about whether or not you deserved it as a lesson to be learned, or you had it coming or this or that. You want to eliminate whatever is getting in your way and that’s the way organizations react with whistleblowers and because of that, I’m proud, in one sense, of the United States. We pioneered a global legal revolution in whistleblower rights, we passed it in 1978. The second one [00:06:00] wasn’t until 1998 in Great Britain. Now there’s 62 countries that have national whistleblower laws. We got this started, but it’s kind of frustrating. Unlike the rest of the world, we don’t get a fair day in court for our whistleblowers, at least if they’re federal workers. The protection is limited to just employees, not to anyone who peddles the truth where it’s needed. And the protection is generally limited here to workplace harassment, which means that you can be hit with a SLAPP suit that’ll bankrupt you, or you can be criminally prosecuted for the things that you couldn’t be fired from your job for. So our laws have become kind of a caricature. 

Mickey Huff: And it’s very unfortunate because it is great work, but rights don’t enforce themselves and laws don’t enforce themselves and corruption and conflict of interest, they are age old challenges and they continue to be, I’d like to bring in one of our whistleblower guests here today. Frank Serpico, of course, folks may know Frank [00:07:00] Serpico in the late 1960s and seventies Serpico blew the whistle on police corruption. This eventually prompted something called the Knapp Commission. Tom Devine, you and Frank wrote an article back in 2020 about changing the culture of silence to protect police whistleblowers specifically. But Frank Serpico welcome to The Project Censored Show. I’d like it if you could talk a little about your historic story with our audience today, Frank Serpico. 

Frank Serpico: Yeah, thanks Mickey. Thanks for having me. Well, first, you know, all your guests and all this all has to do with the safety and wellbeing of the society, whether it’s pollution, air safety, or protecting and serving. And as people know from the movie, those that saw it, I mean, it was actually going back to 1971, there was systemic police corruption throughout New York City police department. And I thought, boy, [00:08:00] wait till they hear about this, speaking about internal affairs, that they were going to do something. I didn’t know that internal affairs knew more about it than I did, and they were part and parcel of it. And if it wasn’t for one brave police inspector, Paul Delise, who was my boss at one time, who put his career on the line and went with me to The New York Times, and one good newspaper reporter Dave Burnham, which are hard to find today. The editor didn’t even want to publish the story because, he said, we’re paying off the cops too. And so corruption, it has a purpose and it greases the wheels of corruption when people want favors but it hurts the community as a whole. In my case, they call it the blue wall of silence or the code of silence, which is an unwritten code that is as [00:09:00] strong as the mafia’s omertà. So me having blown the whistle, the term that I hate, because it sounds demeaning, on the corruption, I was on duty with three other offices and I ended up getting shot and exchanging fire with a drug dealer and they left me for dead. And one police car that showed up because a tenant called the police and they didn’t even know that a cop had been shot because they never put out a 10-13, which is officer down. So this one police car took me to the hospital and I was thinking, well, at least it was two cops. Later, I found out the guy that picked me up, he said: “if I knew it was Serpico, I would’ve left him there to fester.” So this is the attitude. The whistleblower is the opposite of the criminal because the whistleblower [00:10:00] exposes the criminal, and the criminal, no matter what guise they come under, doesn’t want to be exposed and they want to keep that code of silence that protects them. And that’s why we need a bill to protect the few that had the courage to come forward and expose corruption, and maybe if we had a whistleblower protection, more of them would be encouraged to come forward. But as in my case, the police want to make sure that they don’t forget, and so they continue to treat me with disdain. Here’s a classic example, right up to date. The Daily News was going to write a story about the 50 year anniversary of the Knapp Commission, which came to be due to my charges of police corruption, which did a very good job of exposing the corruption. But the police did a very poor job of correcting it, although they pretended [00:11:00] that they did. So I was awarded the Medal of Honor for my bravery in exchanging fire with a drug dealer. But what happens? They never gave me my proper medal or my certificate. And I constantly asked every police commissioner for my certificate, they all ignored me. The last one, I thought, you know, this is enough. I got in touch with Civil Liberties and they said, we’ll look into it. And so they said, oh, Frank, I got your certificate. They send it to me in a tube. And I look at it and it’s signed by commissioner Murphy, who was the commissioner at the time who was supposed to be the reform commissioner, which he wasn’t, and it doesn’t have a department seal on it. So I go, what? And so I called the newspaper and he says, well, I got a story coming out about the 50 year anniversary [00:12:00] of the Knapp Commission. I said, great, maybe you can tell them I still haven’t gotten my certificate. And the article comes out on Twitter of all places. And I said, nice article, but you have forgot to mention, I didn’t get my certificate. So the new mayor, Adams, says “Frank, you are my hero. I want to make sure you get that certificate.” Great, but how about addressing me as detective Serpico? I mean, do I know you? Are you in the official police department? It’s like everybody wants to get in on the act. So I don’t say anything and then I get a call from Civil Liberties saying, Frank, I just got a call from the mayor’s office. Now, I’m 86 years old. They want to know, can you get down here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning? I started laughing. I said, wait a minute, I don’t hear too good, would you repeat that? No, I heard him right. I said, what the hell’s he think, I’m waiting for him? [00:13:00] Maybe I want to bring some friends or relatives. “They’ll pick you up and drop you off.” No, that’s not the question. Why don’t they treat me with the respect that any recipient of the Medal of Honor gets in the department. He calls me back: “Okay, here’s your choices: you can come pick it up, they’ll deliver it to you,” I forget what the other choice was. I said, look, just tell him to put it in the mail. “Well, what do you want on there?” I want what every other member that got that award, nothing less, nothing more. Framed, proper seal, proper date, et cetera. Calls me back again. “Oh, Frank, can they deliver it to the Sheriff’s office?” Why are they jerking me around? So finally I do get it, and it’s framed with my picture and I look at it and it’s signed by the current commissioner, [00:14:00] Sewell, and the date is January 1st, 2022. Wait a minute, that’s not when I was issued this medal, it was back in [1972]. So it appeared and the media picked it up, that I was being rewarded for blowing the whistle on corruption. So you see how I’m at a loss for the word of how disgusting and divisive and deceitful. And this is 2022. So I hope you followed what I’m telling you because that’s the way it happened and there are other officers that blow the whistle on corruption and they become the victims. Not only victims, they make them criminals. As in the case of one officer he’s facing, I [00:15:00] don’t know how many years in jail, because he exposed that these cops were responsible for the death of their suspect. So that’s where we are. 

Mickey Huff: So detective Frank Serpico, thank you for sharing your story again with us today, and I’m afraid that the story you just told seems to be all too common with people that have the civil courage to blow the whistle on corruption. And I just wanted to thank you for all that you’ve done to call attention to this. This is still a significant problem in 2022, the code of silence, the blue code of silence. It’s still something that we need to address and Tom Devine, after the break, maybe we can talk a little bit about one of those bills that’s in Congress. And then of course, we also are going to get to our other guests today. We have Rick Parks to talk about Three Mile Island, we have Robert MacLean to talk about the TSA. I’m your host, Mickey Huff for The Project Censored Show. We’ll continue our conversations all about whistle blowing after this [00:16:00] brief musical break.

Welcome back to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, I’m your host Mickey Huff. before the break we were speaking with Tom Devine, the legal director at Government Accountability Project, who will be with us for the hour. We were also joined by Frank Serpico and we were talking about his famous case and of course, lingering concerns that go all the way up to this year. Tom Devine, some of the things that Frank was mentioning, that these are still problems., These are still real issues and challenges. Can you [00:17:00] talk about one of the bills that you’re fighting to get past in Congress about police accountability? 

Tom Devine: You have to have a baseline to compare what these bills would be changing and right now they’d be pretty much changing a vacuum of credible rights against retaliation for police officers who defend the public. Right now, if somebody wants to blow the whistle, a police officer, they go to an internal affairs operation that may be collusive and actually engaged in the same corruption. And if they’re retaliated against, they get to go to the same police department that’s engaging in the harassment and ask them to change their minds. In other words, they don’t have any viable channel to get the truth out and they don’t have a viable channel to defend themselves. There’s legislation in the house of representatives by representative Gerald Connolly, H.R.6762, and it would protect everyone who provides evidence of police illegality or misconduct, [00:18:00] whether or not it’s a law enforcement officer from the local beat to the federal government, the military police, or criminal investigators. It would protect citizens who were witnesses on the street with their smartphone, it would protect victims who are currently afraid to file charges that they were beat up because it’ll get even worse. It’ll protect the media, it would protect civil rights groups. It would give all these people access to jury trials, global best practice confidentiality protections that they don’t want to be exposed, and probably most significant it would give them a right to defend themselves in court against civil or criminal liability. All too often what we’re seeing is that police officers who blow the whistle on crime get charged with the same crime that they were challenging, like Javier Esqueda, that Frank was talking about. He discovered a George Floyd style murder in Joliet, Illinois, did the research to prove it, and they’re charging him with [00:19:00] four felonies and seeking 20 years in prison because he investigated and found the evidence of the murders. They said it was unauthorized for him to see it, even though it was one of his trainees and he was the training supervisor who had to. Or there’s a whistleblower down in Miami, Florida who blew the whistle on the police there in Broward County planting drugs on teenage minority youths and busting them as a distraction from their own drug dealing. So it looked like they were enforcing the law instead of cashing in on the drug trade. Well, this police officer, after he made internal disclosures, they prosecuted him three times. He was found innocent all three times because he was squeaky clean, but he spent a year and a half in prison, a lot of it in solitary confinement, they put him in with the general prisoners who want to kill cops. This is for what we call committing the truth and we need these rights. 

Mickey Huff: My goodness, Tom Devine, legal [00:20:00] director, Government Accountability Project. And something tells me with your cadence and stride there, that you could go on for quite a time longer with lists of names of people that need protection and that we need to hear their stories. So Tom Devine, let’s also bring in to our conversation, Rick Parks and Rick, welcome to The Project Censored Show. It’s an honor to have you with us today.

Rick Parks: I’m glad to be here. 

Mickey Huff: I understand that you are involved, were involved, with the Three Mile Island disaster that happened back in 1979 and you also have a film that is now a Netflix documentary, it’s called Meltdown. Could you talk to our listeners about Three Mile Island? I heard about Three Mile Island as a kid and my father worked at a local power plant and actually was very familiar with Three Mile Island. So in our house, when we heard about Three Mile Island, we heard a different story than the one that the media was telling. Let’s hear it from you. 

Rick Parks: First of all, Mickey, I know the power plant your dad [00:21:00] used to pay a visit to, Shippingport, and I worked at Beaver Valley Power Station also. So I was not at Three Mile Island during the accident. Actually I started to work there in 1980. Specifically, I will not name the company, but anyway, it was another beltway bandit. We were there to do the startup testing on the Submerged Demineralizer System (SDS), the system that was going to be built and implemented to process the million gallons of highly radioactive water that was in the basement of the reactor building. That’s how I got there. Actually, it was a golden opportunity for me because I’m, to that day, to this day, still very pro nuclear. I am an advocate for nuclear power when it’s done right. There’s a couple of ways it can be done right, but that’s not germane to this conversation. What is germane to this [00:22:00] conversation is that along as it does talk about in the movie, and the process, the original concept was we were going to restore unit two to operations. What we found in July of 1982, when we did the quick look process, procedure where we stuck cameras and radiation monitoring equipment, et cetera, down into the reactor vessel. We determined that the upper half of it was all but gone. Big problem with that, as we knew a large part of it had to be in the bottom reactor vessel head. The laws of gravity and physics tend to make that happen after a meltdown, Chernobyl also proved it. So that changed the whole ball game. We knew it was going to take the cleanup a lot longer. By that point in time, I was no longer involved with the SDS project. [00:23:00] Larry King had come on site as director of plant operations. Bechtel had taken over under the auspices of GPU and the DOE, and they were putting people in every department. And since, in the operations department of a nuclear power plant, their operators have to be nuclear operators, they put me in with him. So Bechtel, who I did not work for, approached me about coming to work for them so they could put me in Larry King’s department. And I said fine. Larry King gave me the polar crane as a project, as an operations engineer, myself and the other operations engineer interfaced with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we reviewed everything that was to be performed on that power plant that could affect the fuel inside the reactor vessel. I mean, we weren’t the only ones we approved it for operations, Ed [00:24:00] Gischel’s guys approved it for engineering aspects, that sort of thing, and radiological aspects. When we said you could do it, you could do it, because our people had the license that was required by law to be in charge of that fuel and make the final decision about what was done. Unfortunately, money stands in the way of everything, the pursuit of man’s livelihoods, and when we wouldn’t approve the procedure, because we considered that there was a chance that we could drop the reactor vessel head and shear the transverse in-core probes on the bottom of the reactor vessel, because we figured that the reactor core, when it melted, damn sure came close if it did not exceed the ability to melt some of the thinnest parts of the reactor vessel, which [00:25:00] was where the transverse in-core probes go to. Ultimately, it was proved those tubes were braided during the accident, so it was a good damn thing they never dropped the head. The problem being if they had dropped the head because they had violated every aspect of the requirements of 10 CFR 50.59, which means if it’s not been thoroughly reviewed and approved from a nuclear safety protection standpoint, it’s an unreviewed nuclear safety question and you’ve got to take another look at it. So Bechtel put the procedure on our desk, which became my desk and I started reviewing it. I went and started looking for the records, because during my stint under the SDS program, I was the assistant startup and test manager at unit two and I knew what the test program was and I knew what type of records [00:26:00] we had to have, and there weren’t any that I could find. So in my mind, that made every part put on there a suspect or counterfeit part until you could prove otherwise because that’s what the regulations require. So I was accused of being a super by-the-book-er and I was threatened as soon as I put that in writing back to not only Bechtel, but to the NRC. A guy who had been instrumental in getting me to come back to Bechtel and work for them, a friend of mine, walked up to me the day after I made those comments and issued that memo and said, management is really pissed at me and they were looking every way they could to get me off the island. That blew me away. And it was because they didn’t like the positions I was taking. I wasn’t a team player is basically what he was saying. They wanted me there to push stuff through and [00:27:00] I would’ve if it had been safe. You tell me what I asked for, give me the load drop analysis to prove that if we drop the load sufficiently, we would not create a special shape missile, and I want to make sure that missile cannot break the pressurizer surge line. And by the way, can you prove that if we drop this, or any portion of that weight, will the fracture potential for the bottom of the reactor vessel head be adequate. And everybody: “oh, yeah, we have all the calculations.” I went all the way up to Mr. Sanford, the senior vice president of Bechtel at Gaithersburg, Maryland issuing my complaints and my concerns and I went to the NRC, and the NRC told me, take your silly ass problem to the Department of Labor. This is an employer employee relationship [00:28:00] problem. I said, wait a minute, threatening me because I won’t go along with it, you’re saying that I should just take it to the DOL? Okay. Well, when I went to Mr. Sanford there were three of us: Larry King, my boss, Ed Gischel, the director of plant engineering who reported to Larry King and myself. And when Ed refused to approve that procedure from an engineering standpoint, a man who sat on the committee that wrote American National Standards Institute procedures for how you test polar cranes in a reactor building, so therefore they thought he didn’t know what he was talking about, they required him to have a neuropsychological evaluation. Larry King, they [00:29:00] fired, accused him of conflict of interest. They flew in a special investigator from San Francisco, Bechtel did. Put me in a room with this guy and my boss, whom I’d never met because they hired me over the phone, I never went to the home office, I just went to work under a different hat. So these two guys are asking me, I’m accused of conflict of interest. What’s the conflict? So my instincts told me I was being set up. I mean, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I damn sure ain’t stupid. I told them I didn’t want to talk anymore unless I could have an independent witness inside that room and they assured me that that wasn’t necessary, and I assured them if they wanted to hear anything from me it was. As history has demonstrated, there’s not a lot of backup in me, but they finally gave in [00:30:00] and the guy I asked to come into the room was another Bechtel engineer, a friend of mine. And as we walked out of that room, he said he had never seen that before in any of his experience with Bechtel, never even heard of it. So I demanded to see the vice president who was the lead dude down in Gaithersburg. And his name was Sanford, as I said. I go in telling the story, he tells me, well, you know, all those calculations exist. And I said, well, I sure would love to see them. I have never seen them. Not in all my lifetime. They don’t exist. Unless they doctored them up yesterday. Then he told me I’d probably be fired for putting Bechtel in a bad light with a customer, and I’m thinking, holy Jesus here, if we drop that head and we shift that fuel just enough, put it [00:31:00] into a critical mass, it’s not going to be critical, it’s going to be super critical because it’s going to have the water there to feed it until it cracks, and it’s going to eject all of that stuff out. And the reactor building was open. They like to claim that the reactor building was sealed. I walked on board that side in 1980 and that reactor building had more penetrations that were open than a porcupine’s got quills. So they lie about that too. Ed Gischel even made awful lot of stink about that and they chose to ignore it because we were compromising reactor safety to the general public, and they ignored it. So I had no choice. I knew that after I found pot in my vehicle and I was pulled over and searched, I mean, high and low. I should’ve smoked that pot instead of flushing it, I’d have probably been better off. My [00:32:00] apartment was broken into. I mean, I had every position of authority stripped from me so I could no longer be an impediment because until I signed off that I accepted the response on my comments, declaring the whole thing an unreviewed nuclear safety question, they were up the proverbial creek without a paddle. And they were wanting me to agree to sign off. I decided that since I couldn’t trust the NRC, because I’ve never seen such incompetency in my life as I witnessed on the part of some members of the NRC, definitely demonstrated to me that they would not hesitate a moment to do anything that it required to further their career and the revolving door concept between the NRC and the beltway bandits like Bechtel, Stone & Webster, Burns & Roe, Babcock & Wilcox. It existed [00:33:00] then the same way it exists now, best way to advance yourself from going to lowly paid beyond working for the U.S. government is to suck up to the big boys. And so to make long story short I knew they didn’t care, and I knew that I not only had two men I respected above all else, Ed Gischel and Larry King, who agreed the same thing I did, I know the other guys in the upper management within site operations department agreed fully too, but by then, those guys had been so compromised, the ones that had been involved there during the accident that they toed the line. That’s a story that would take more than this radio show to tell, because I don’t think it’s ever been told, but I worked with those guys for years. I drank beer and played pool with those boys. We all had common backgrounds, we were all ex-Navy nukes, [00:34:00] most of us anyway. Story that was fed, I thought was, to the people during the accident, I think the movie, Meltdown: Three Mile Island is the actual title, did an excellent job of showing it. I know to a lot of people, it was yesterday’s history, but that very same thing goes on in this country to this very day within the nuclear industry. There may not be a blue wall of silence, as Frank Serpico referred to, within the industry, but there is certainly a wall of silence because they know the guys that are licensed to operate these plants know, when in doubt, put it out is the rule they like to shout about, you do that once. Because, a million dollars a day in purchase power it costs, at a minimum, to take a nuke off line. Okay. [00:35:00] So all of management puts the thumb on the guys that have the license and the guys that have the license have to decide: do I do it knowing that I’m falsifying records? Do I do it knowing I’m keeping a reactor at power, full load, base load, with a leaking pilot-operated relief valve? How do I know it’s leaking? Because the tail pipe temperature’s been out of spec for God knows how long and the technical specifications says: thou shalt shut down the reactor. They didn’t do it. So it’s pressure, management integrity. 

Mickey Huff: And also regulatory capture. You mentioned the revolving door, Rick Parks. I’d like to remind our listeners, you’re tuned to The Project Censored Show. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. We were just hearing from whistleblower Rick Parks talking about Three Mile Island, there’s a new series at [00:36:00] Netflix called Meltdown: Three Mile Island. You can see that story here. We’re going to continue our conversation about whistleblowers. We’re going to bring back Tom Devine and also Robert MacLean and I believe Rick Parks, you’re going to stay with us and certainly can chime in here again in the next segment. Stay tuned for more talk on whistleblowers on The Project Censored Show after this brief musical break.

Welcome to The Project Censored Show. Once again, we are continuing our conversation on whistleblowers. Today. We are [00:37:00] joined by the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, Tom Devine. Earlier in the program we heard from Frank Serpico from the historic whistle blowing case about law enforcement corruption. In this last segment, before the break, we were speaking with Rick Parks talking about Three Mile Island. He is a whistleblower on the Three Mile Island case. There is also a new Netflix series called Meltdown: Three Mile Island that tells that story. And in this segment we want to bring in Robert MacLean. Robert MacLean was on The Project Censored Show several years ago. As I mentioned at the outset, Project Censored is one of the co-sponsors for the National Whistleblower Summit, and we have reconvened and reupped our relationship with the wonderful folks doing that important summit at the end of July. You’ll hear more about that coming up on a future Project Censored Show. You can learn more at whistleblowersummit.com and also to learn more about the Government Accountability Project, you can go to whistleblower.org. Tom Devine, that was an incredibly riveting [00:38:00] story that Rick Parks just shared with us. Could you talk to us a little bit about some of the things going on in Congress that might be able to address some of these issues? 

Tom Devine: It’s the things that haven’t been going on. Congress has been pretty much letting the NRC have the field to itself in terms of how carefully to enforce the nuclear safety laws, and this is playing with a lot more than fire it’s playing with nuclear disaster. If Rick hadn’t stopped the Three Mile Island cleanup and the polar crane had dropped the 170 ton reactor vessel head, it could have triggered a meltdown that would’ve taken out Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC, with massive evacuations for years. And we’re seeing a similar, the NRC is turning its head and just looking the other way about similar risks today. About a quarter of the nation’s nuclear power plants are located downstream from dams, upstream dams. And if there’s a dam break, they’re not able to withstand the [00:39:00] floods and those floods could cause meltdowns that would cause multi-state multi-year evacuations. And the NRC has known about this since the 1990s and even after a whistleblower named Larry Criscione was backed by the government whistleblower agency, the Office of Special Counsel said that there’s a substantial likelihood it’s a threat to public health and safety. The NRC responded with what they call a post-Fukushima reform by lowering the requirements for flood walls from 18 feet to four and a half feet, which is where they are currently, which means that we are at the mercy of any hurricane that comes near a nuclear power plant for taking out large regions of our country and the NRC is just sitting there watching and letting it happen. We need to have effective congressional oversight to keep this industry honest, because it’s a lot worse than playing with fire. 

Mickey Huff: Tom Devine. That’s extraordinary to hear and we’ve certainly done many shows on Fukushima on some of the known [00:40:00] dangers with nuclear power and here in California, like New York, we have the threats still looming and people fighting about what to do about them as the danger still looms and lurks. Robert MacLean, we want to bring you in. I mentioned you before that you were on The Project Censored Show. So your case is ongoing, involving the Transportation Security Administration and of course your case clearly illustrates the need for whistleblower rights that allow you to seek justice from a jury. But this also involves the Department of Homeland Security, the war on terrorism, terror threats. So remind our listeners, Robert MacLean about your case and what’s happening right now.

Robert MacLean: Thanks for having me on. Because of the 9/11 attacks, almost $2 trillion have been lost, wasted or spent and hundreds of thousands of lives were killed or maimed after the 9/11 wars, both military and civilian. And Mickey, I [00:41:00] always ask the question. Do you know how the cockpits were breached? Most people don’t know. They believe the TSA narrative that the cockpits were opened under duress by the pilots because they wanted to save the flight attendants from their necks being cut. That’s absolutely preposterous because six of the eight pilots were seasoned military veterans who attended survival school and the terrorists knew that it would’ve been a ridiculous risk to have a hostage standoff when one of those pilots could have simply said, I’m not opening that cockpit, I’m going to emergency land this thing, we’re over land, but I’m not letting anybody into my cockpit. And that would’ve foiled a multi terrorist plot that was in the making. The other myth [00:42:00] is that the cockpits were broken open. That’s also absurd because 13 months before 9/11, a man tried to break down a cockpit door on a Southwest 737 and he failed, and the reason was because the passengers crushed him to death when they thought, hey, we could all be killed if this guy gets in. So I’m pretty certain that the masterminds of 9/11 read that in the New York Times and everywhere and go, well, trying to break open the doors, that’s probably going to be stupid and the next absurd myth is that they forced the flight attendants to give them keys to unlock the cockpit doors. That’s also absurd because a lot of airlines don’t have keys. Some do, some don’t, and the terrorists would have to risk that the keys were misplaced, lost, or didn’t [00:43:00] work. So that would be dumb. So the easiest way, and it’s right in the it’s on page 5, 158 and 245 of the 9/11 Commission Report. They simply waited for the pilots to need to use the lavatory or get their breakfast. This is why they chose those flights. These were six hour nonstop flights. They knew at least one of those pilots was going to unlock that door, either to chat with the flight attendant about issues, get a food tray, get coffee, get water, but primarily to use a lavatory and that’s how they got in. And 20 years later, we are still in the same situation and I use the analogy is, if today we had no radar systems around Hawaii and we parked the entire Pacific Naval fleet in Pearl Harbor. That’s essentially what we’re doing today. And one of the biggest things that we couldn’t put [00:44:00] into my Supreme Court arguments was that three months before my disclosure in July of 2003, the pilots went public that the airlines and the government failed to put in a secondary barrier system and instead they spent millions and millions of dollars on armoring the doors, making them bulletproof, and making them impossible to break down, even though they were already impossible to break down, they just made it harder. But the pilots went public to Associated Press and CBS News in April of 2003, once again, three months before my disclosures, that those multimillion dollar armored doors, they still open up throughout the flight. So for the past 20 years I’ve been screaming and yelling: using flight attendants’ bodies and drink carts to protect unlocked [00:45:00] cockpits is provably absurd and I found a secret report that was issued in 2011, that the TSA and the FAA refused to go public about. They were making a report about doors that we see all day long opened on a flight, that is secret and we can’t read that. And in that report, it said even federal air marshals couldn’t stop an attack on unlocked doors, just like what happened on 9/11. And I mentioned to you drink carts. We have two airlines, major airlines, that don’t even have drink carts on their flights. And I’ve seen it repeatedly after I was reinstated from the Supreme Court decision, flight attendants, they have their backs turned. I even saw on one flight they allowed the passengers to line up behind the forward area while the cockpit was open. And last month, [00:46:00] the chairman of the house transportation committee, it’s on video because I captured it, he said that while he was flying, it was Peter DeFazio, while he was flying from Oregon to DC he said the flight attendant left the door open for almost 15 minutes, chit chatting with the pilot. At the same time, looking behind her back to make sure that nobody’s attacking. So, okay. Let’s just say a terrorist is not crazy enough to jump in a cockpit and kill everybody. Well, on December 16th, 2020 in a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, it said Cholo Abdi Abdullah was obtaining flight training in Philippines. He also conducted research into the means and methods to hijack a commercial airline to conduct the planned attack, including security on commercial airlines and how to breach a cockpit door from the outside and information about the tallest building in the United States. It gets [00:47:00] better, Khalil El Dahr observed, on a Jet Blue, door open and he grabbed a flight attendant by her collar and tied with one hand while using his other hand to grab the overhead compartment to gain leverage to kick, the FBI affidavit says. As the Jet Blue flight attendant was kicked in the chest, El Dahr yelled for the flight crew officer to shoot him. The pilot actually had unlocked the door and he’s asking for the pilot. Well, it gets better. Last month, The Wall Street Journal came out with an exposé. They concluded that in March, there was a China Eastern Boeing jet, brand new, that took a straight nosedive. The investigators are leaking to The Wall Street Journal that that was intentional. So bottom line is, I’m blowing the whistle and just to finish off, this is pretty much just like the Ford Pinto scandal. Ford spent all [00:48:00] this money engineering and manufacturing the Ford Pinto, which was marketed for poor people, but they figured out that this thing was a bomb and they knew it. But the lawyers said, hey, it’s cheaper that we just pay out injury and wrongful death claims than to fix the problem. So Congress recently tried to fix the problem about unlocked cockpit doors. They issued a law. So now the terrorists could just read the law on the books. In 2018, they said we’re only going to put secondary barriers on newly built aircraft. So now you just told all the terrorists don’t bother with the new jets that were just built, attack the old ones. 

Mickey Huff: Part of your story too, is that you’ve been terminated from two positions for speaking out? 

Robert MacLean: Right after the Supreme Court decision, and I was reinstated, they were coming after me with everything. So I had a perfect law [00:49:00] enforcement officer career, numerous awards, all kinds of commendations. And for the Supreme Court case, they only could get me on one charge. This time, they got me on 13 charges ranging from being this serial sexual harasser, obstructing their investigation into me, and while they’re withholding all this information, they can influence witnesses, they can destroy evidence. They altered an exhibit that they used to fire me. They literally went in there and took whiteout, they spliced something together, they put it on a photocopier, and they used that exhibit to fire me. That’s a felony. That’s how far they went. They tried to have me criminally prosecuted. They wanted me in federal prison. 

Mickey Huff: So Robert MacLean, this case is still going on. Is that correct? 

Robert MacLean: It’s been over three years since they fired me again. So that goes to show you, and I’m back in the United [00:50:00] States Merit Systems Protection Board that was empty for three years, which couldn’t stop my termination. And when we got through the discovery, the guy who fired me, he made the decision to fire me, he had the draft in his possession for five months. So why did he sit on it for five months? Because he knew the Trump administration wasn’t going to put any people on the Merit Systems Protection Board, and all of the Merit Systems Protection Board members, they got forced out, and days after they fired me, because they would’ve stopped my termination. 

Mickey Huff: That’s an incredible story, Robert, thank you for sharing it with our listeners here on The Project Censored Show. Great thanks to the whistleblowers we’ve had on the program today for their courage and their willingness to speak up and speak the truth and speak truth to power, even though it obviously has negative repercussions for their own positions, their own lives. Tom Devine, let’s bring you in here. What’s going on in [00:51:00] Congress around Robert MacLean’s issue in the TSA. Any bills, anything we could talk about? 

Tom Devine: The pioneer whistleblower law that was first passed in 1978 is now up for its fifth generation. These are timeless struggles and the law, which was a pioneer law, is a dinosaur right now. The whistleblowers don’t have access to a jury of citizens to who they’re purporting to defend when they risk their careers to seek justice. Robert right now is before an administrative judge who used to be part of the DHS team that tried to fire him the first time. And now is the judge for when they’re firing him the second time. There’s no chance for justice there. We’ve gotta get access to jury trials. If we’re going to be having credible rights. There is no protection in current law against retaliatory investigations. And so Robert was put under six criminal investigations immediately after the Supreme Court reinstated him. It went on for several years until they’d [00:52:00] accumulated enough garbage that they could assemble a series of pretexts and he couldn’t defend himself against those investigations until they fired him. And then there’s to get a real chance for injunctive relief, for temporary relief. These cases drag on routinely for three to five years and even if a whistleblower survives the gauntlet of political bias and actually wins, it may be too late. They’ve already lost their home, their family, they’re bankrupt, their professional reputation is irrevocably destroyed. We need credible rights for federal employees. If we expect them to defend the public, they’ve gotta be able to defend themselves. 

Mickey Huff: Indeed, Tom Devine. And where can we go to get more information about these cases? Of course, Tom, you are legal director at the Government Accountability Project. You’ve been there since 1979. You’ve been involved with some 7,000 whistleblowers defending themselves against retaliation. [00:53:00] And of course I think our listeners can tell, the folks that have been on this show today have made significant differences and they’ve put those differences in the public interest, above their own personal interests. And that’s something that we always talk about when we talk about whistleblowers on The Project Censored Show, whether it’s Rick Parks or Robert MacLean or Frank Serpico or Julian Assange or Reality Winner or Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, we could go on and on, John Kiriakou. The list is long Tom and there’s a lot to do, but can you tell us where to get more information? whistleblower.org is the Government Accountability Project. Rick or Robert do you have any sites or any places you want to direct people to? Of course, Rick, you have directed us to the new Netflix series Meltdown: Three Mile Island. Is that among the better places to go? 

Rick Parks: That is. 

Mickey Huff: And Robert MacLean, anything you’d like to share as far as contacts, connections, where [00:54:00] to follow the case? 

Robert MacLean: Call your members of Congress, your house representative, both of your U.S. senators, call them on the phone. Don’t email them, the emails go nowhere. Call them on the phone, blow up their lines. H.R.911, 9/11, needs to be passed. H.R.911 would mandate secondary barriers on all cockpit areas, just like Israel has had since the seventies. That’s why nobody’s hijacked in Israeli jet when they were hijacked left and right in the fifties and sixties. So H.R.911, and I’m looking at it right now, we have 52 co-sponsors. That is huge. If anybody knows, Tom knows, 52 co-sponsors on that bill shows that we’ve got a serious problem because it’s going to cost a lot of money to put in those secondary barriers, but it needs to be done. And you could find me real easy, to get a briefing on this, is my Twitter [00:55:00] account: Robert MacLean, M A C L E A N, and my Twitter handle is R as in Robert, J as in James, and then my last name, MacLean, M A C L E A N [@rjmaclean] and you will see my tweets that’ll make your toes curl, but we could all fix this by passing H.R.911.

Mickey Huff: Robert MacLean, thanks so much for joining us and for your work. Rick Parks, thank you for joining us on The Project Censored Show today. Thanks too to Frank Serpico, who joined us earlier and Tom Devine, last words from you today. Obviously much more to do and more to say but wanted to leave you with the last words on the hopes for protecting whistle blowers and why we need them.

Tom Devine: Thanks Mickey. If your listeners want to help, they should go to the Take Action page at GAP’s website, the Government Accountability Project’s website, whistleblower.org. And it’ll give you instructions for the bill numbers, which members of [00:56:00] Congress to contact, and the message to make and we need your help to get real rights for these people. The politicians need to catch up with the public. Right before the last election, there was a Marist poll and 86% of likely voters said that Congress should pass stronger whistleblower laws. But unfortunately since the impeachment trials and president Trump saying that whistleblowers were traitors who should be hanged, we’ve gone from always having unanimous support for these rights, to it being a partisan issue. So your listeners should, if they’ve got a Republican Congressman or Senator, they should be demanding that they make their first loyalty to the voters, not to Trump, and being loyal to the voters means having a safe channel for the truth about what’s happening with their lives. And for the Democrats, if you’ve got a Democratic Congressman or Senator, demand that they fight for those who expose the truth, [00:57:00] because otherwise we’re not going to get it.

Mickey Huff: Tom Devine, thank you so much for the work you’re doing, protecting whistleblowers since 1979, Government Accountability Project. And again, Robert MacLean, Rick Parks, Frank Serpico, thanks to all of you for your work and thank you for joining us to share these stories on The Project Censored Show today. 

And that does it for another episode today, you’ve been listening to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, established in 2010. I am Mickey Huff, executive producer and co-host of the program, along with co-host and associate producer, Eleanor Goldfield. Special thanks to Anthony Fest, our longtime senior producer, and the man behind the curtain.

The Project Censored Show airs on roughly 50 stations around the United States from Maui to New York. You can find any of our previous archive programs by going to [00:58:00] projectcensored.org, please follow and like us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram before we get deplatformed and be sure to subscribe to The Official Project Censored Show on your digital tethering device’s podcast application. Please feel free to share your feedback or learn more about our work at projectcensored.org and see our new publishing imprint, The Censored Press at censoredpress.org. Last but not least, thanks to you our listeners for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.

 

 

 

 

Image by Daniel Bone from Pixabay

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This week on the Project Censored Radio Show, Eleanor Goldfield dives into Pride: talking about some of the misconceptions of pride, the corporatization of pride, the radical roots of pride – from this past century and indeed beyond – and the myriad intersections of pride that are glossed over and whitewashed. Later in the show, we will be joined by Jen Deerinwater who is a bisexual, two-spirit multiply-disabled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, an award-winning journalist and organizer. She joins us to discuss the corporatization of pride and the power of pride outside those confines.

Produced by Eleanor Goldfield, Co-Host and Associate Producer.

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Mickey’s guests for the hour are the creators of a forthcoming graphic book that explores the far-reaching consequences of replacing classroom teaching with remote instruction and increased technology during the coronavirus pandemic. Author Adam Bessie and illustrator Peter Glanting collaborated on Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey. The book is also a personal memoir in which Bessie recounts issues such as his cancer diagnosis. In addition, Mickey and the guests examine disturbing trends in the administration of higher education that resulted from decades of neoliberal policies.

Adam Bessie teaches literature, English composition, and critical thinking at a community college in Northern California.  Peter Glanting is an illustrator and product designer based in Portland, Oregon. Their book is scheduled for release in early 2023, from The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

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Mickey’s guest for the first half of the program is the theologian and philosopher John Cobb; their topic is the Living Earth Movement. Cobb explains the need for humanity to change its behavior so as to live in harmony with all other life on the planet. Addressing U.S. politics, Cobb stresses the need for cooperation with China, rather than confrontation. In the second half-hour, we hear a rebroadcast of a summer 2021 Project Censored Zoom event featuring poet and author Lisa Wells; she spoke about her new book Believers: Making A Life At The End Of The World, for which she interviewed people around the world who were working to make positive changes in their local environments, undeterred by the specter of catastrophic climate change.

Notes:
John Cobb is an eminent theologian, philosopher and environmentalist. He taught at the Claremont Colleges in California, has authored over 50 books, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lisa Wells is a poet and author based in Portland, Oregon. Her conversation with Mickey Huff took place as a Zoom event in the summer of 2021, sponsored by KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA) and Project Censored.

Music-break info:
1) “Let’s Work Together” by Canned Heat
2) “Who’s Going To Save Us From Ourselves” by Styx
3) “Something In The Air” by Thunderclap Newman

Web sites mentioned in this week’s program:
www.livingearthmovement.eco
www.claremontecoforum.org

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On May 2, 2022, a rare leak from the US Supreme Court revealed that the court was likely to reverse its historic 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which established a legal right to abortion. On this week’s Project Censored Show, Eleanor Goldfield spends the hour addressing abortion and abortion rights, including her personal experience. In the first half of the show, she explains reproductive choice as part of health care, and as an essential element of bodily autonomy. In the second half-hour, Eleanor interviews Jessica Pinckney, who notes that even being in a “pro-choice” state (California) does not guarantee that women actually have access to abortion services. They also discuss how providers will adapt if Roe is indeed reversed.

 

Notes:
Jessica Pinckney is Executive Director of Access Reproductive Justice, a California organization that advocates for choice, and also provides support services for women seeking an abortion.

Image by Mark Thomas from Pixabay

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Eleanor Goldfield recently spoke with former leader of the Feminist Initiative party in Sweden, Farida al-Abani. They discussed the supposedly “neutral” country’s militaristic tendencies– from the push to join NATO to being one of the world’s largest weapons exporters. Farida al-Abani also shares her personal experiences with NATO as a Libyan as well as her professional struggles for peace in the din of ever crescendoing war drums. In the second segment, Mickey talks with attorney and author Charlotte Dennett about her latest book, Follow the Pipelines, which explores the pervasive role that oil and gas have played in politics and war, in both the 20th and 21st centuries right up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 

Notes:
Born in Libya, Farida al-Abani was brought to Sweden at an early age, grew up there, and became a leader in the Feminist Initiative party. Charlotte Dennett is an attorney and author, and the daughter of a US intelligence official who died while on assignment in the Middle East just after WWII. Her previous books include The People vs. Bush and Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil with Gerard Colby.

Music-break information:
1) “The Resistance” by 2 Cellos
2) “The Military and the Monetary” by Gil-Scott Heron
3) “Pipeline” by the Alan Parsons Project

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Mickey is joined for the hour by former co-host Peter Phillips and University of California, Santa Barbara sociologist William I. Robinson. They discuss Robinson’s new book “Global Civil War: Capitalism Post Pandemic” out from PM Press. Robinson says that the many types of digital technologies created, enhanced or expanded in recent years have changed the nature of world capitalism, and that — with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic — the capitalist class has hastened to deploy these new tools to control populations, with the aim of suppressing the peoples’ uprisings that have been growing in extent and scale for more than a decade. Phillips and Robinson offer ideas about what sort of popular movement will be needed to confront this new variant of predatory capitalism.

Notes:
William I. Robinson teaches Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara campus. His previous books include Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity and The Global Police State. Peter Phillips is Professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. He’s also a former director of Project Censored, and the cofounder of the Project Censored Show. His most recent book is Giants: the Global Power Elite.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

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Mickey’s first guest is Alan MacLeod, senior writer for MintPress News, speaks about PayPal’s sudden cutoff of service to MintPress, Consortium News, and other journalism sites that publish antiwar opinions and analysis; Mickey and Alan also discuss the recent trend of individuals from the US/NATO security establishment being given influential posts at Facebook, Tik Tok, and other social media platforms as well as the Biden Administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board, a virtual Orwellian Ministry of Truth. In the second half of the show, Steve Macek and Shealeigh Voitl of Project Censored discuss their recent Ms. Magazine article on corporate media’s failures in coverage of women’s’ issues, especially gender violence and inequity. They also comment on the recently-leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court, which would reverse the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, thereby giving states wide latitude to criminalize abortion.

Notes:
Alan MacLeod is a media critic, a senior staff writer at MintPress News, and has also contributed to many other publications. Steve Macek is chair of Communications and Media Studies at North Central College in Illinois, and is co-coordinator of Project Censored’s Campus Affiliates Program. Shealeigh Voitl is a Journalism graduate of North Central College, and a research associate at Project Censored. The Macek/Voitl article can be found here.

Transcript of This Conversation

Mickey Huff: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Eleanor Goldfield will return later in May. For the first segment of the program. Today, we look at more online censorship. This time, not from YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, but from the digital financial services side of the internet, as PayPal has begun seizing and or freezing the assets or funds of progressive left and anti-war news sites. These include MintPress News and Consortium News. We talk with Alan MacLeod, the senior writer from MintPress News about these matters. Later in the program, Steve Macek and Shealeigh Voitl join us, both of Project Censored. They talk about the news that didn’t make the news in a [00:01:00] recent Ms. Magazine article they had published. They talk about how the media ignores important stories about gender violence and inequity. Tune in to The Project Censored Show today for an hour about censorship and under-reporting of key and important issues. Stay tuned. 

Welcome to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host Mickey Huff. Today in this segment, we welcome back to the program Alan MacLeod. He is senior staff writer for MintPress News and after completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books: Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent [00:02:00] as well as a number of academic articles. Alan MacLeod also contributes to FAIR, fair.org, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Gray Zone, and many other outlets. Alan MacLeod, of course has also been a repeat guest on this program, The Project Censored Show. Alan MacLeod, it is always a delight to catch up with you and talk with you about all things media, censorship, and propaganda. However, the occasion of our conversation, this time is certainly not a favorable or positive one, but I definitely want to hear it from you, given that you have been at the receiving end of the latest online targets for demonetization and online censorship, this time not from a cable provider or not from Alphabet, Google, YouTube, and of course you and I have talked about this several times before, but now it’s the digital financial services realm of the internet that is clamping down on dissent. [00:03:00] Clamping down on online news websites that don’t conform to official narratives or particularly NATO narratives in the wake of the Russian attack against Ukraine. Recently, PayPal had suspended accounts for Consortium News. Goes back to 1995. Of course, you know Robert Perry, the late great Robert Perry, that was his site. Now, Joe Lauria the chief editor there, and also MintPress News. Your home, where you write, editor in chief Mnar Adley. MintPress had their PayPal account frozen and could you give us this story of what’s happened? And I know that this is an ongoing story. We’re recording May 5th. 

Alan MacLeod: Thanks for having me on, I guess it all started when I received an email from PayPal telling me that they were turning my account off, completely zapping it. They didn’t really go into much detail about why, but it basically said that I had broken the rules. Now, I’m not a big PayPal user, so actually assumed that [00:04:00] it was because I wasn’t using my PayPal account. I hadn’t used it in months, and yet, for some reason, they decided that I had broken the rules somehow. So I thought maybe that was the reason, but very quickly, within a couple of hours, the CEO of MintPress, Mnar Adley, said that her account had been blocked. So the company account had also had their assets frozen, and so this clearly began to look like more of a coordinated thing, and as you said, with Consortium News and with a couple of other journalists have been blocked as well, all within around a 24 hour span, this really started to look like a targeted assault on independent media. I really consider this to be kind of a shot across the bow at anybody who has an anti-war journalist or who is in any real way, antiestablishment, whether left or right. It doesn’t really matter here. Whether you live in the U.S. or you live abroad, this is really an attempt to fire a warning shot at everyone, because of course, PayPal is this enormous corporation who has pretty much got a kind of monopoly [00:05:00] on wire transfer services. So many people have to actually use PayPal that we kind of can’t really get around it. It’s one of the main ways, especially in alternative media, that journalists are paid. It’s a very easy way to send funds in any currency, really, you want to, anywhere you want without too much of a price or too much hassle. I tried to contact PayPal, but the link they sent me to say, if you want to dispute this, you can go here, it was a dead link. So clearly they had absolutely no interest in me disputing this or getting in touch with them. Fortunately for us, there has been enough of an online hooha, a big brouhaha going on, whereby people were really freaked out by this, and I think justifiably, as I said, anybody who is vaguely antiestablishment really understands that this isn’t just about MintPress, this could be about a much wider swath of censorship, whether it’s algorithmic, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, or whether it’s financial in this [00:06:00] case. So a lot of people have been getting involved, sending us messages of support, trying to get PayPal on the phone, or get their representatives to respond to them in email. And so, as it stands right now, we’ve just received a note saying that actually PayPal, while not unfreezing our accounts, is allowing us at least to take the money out of the accounts. And that’s really one of the extraordinary things about this. We at MintPress received a note saying that PayPal was essentially freezing all the money in our accounts and after 180 days, they would do a review and decide whether they would give us that money back or whether they would keep it. And so that’s really something for listeners to understand. That, if you’re using PayPal, or if you’re sending money through PayPal, that bank balance, unless it’s in your bank, it doesn’t belong to you. Essentially, in PayPal’s view, it belongs to them until it’s in your bank. So if anything, if I would, you know, advise listeners to do anything, it would be to at least take the money out of your [00:07:00] PayPal account and transfer it into your bank. Consortium News has faced similar problems. But again, this is something that I think will probably not be the only example of this going forward. We’re seeing a sort of increased air of censorship online, especially with the tensions in Ukraine spilling over. I think, for want of a better word, the establishment is using this time as a convenient excuse to crack down on dissenting voices. And so I think that’s why this story isn’t just about me or MintPress, it’s really about everybody who might challenge the government or the national security state or corporate America in anything they do, this really should be a warning shot a warning sign to everybody there. 

Mickey Huff: Well, Alan MacLeod. I agree about the shot across the bow, but how many warning signs will we need in order to understand that big tech is a global force? The digital realm is basically controlled by totally unaccountable corporations. They have extraordinary influence on governments in many cases, their [00:08:00] power transcends many global governments. And what you’re saying here is very curious too, about PayPal, is that basically they’re saying that if it’s in their account, it’s their money until you take it out. And this is related to a couple of other warning signs. We saw a number of years ago when Twitter deplatformed people like Alex Jones, to much applause from the liberal class, only to then turn around and deplatform hundreds of progressive left and anti-war and pro-peace sites. We saw Twitter do it again with Trump. Again, applause from the liberal class, and we’re now seeing in the Biden administration the creation in the Department of Homeland Security, their own ministry of truth, their Disinformation Governance Board. You can’t even make this up, it’s so Orwellian. It seems that now government is working hand in hand with big tech for the last several years, government in the United States has been asking big tech to censor these voices and to weed out what they call fake news purveyors online and the real problem there is that while there certainly is disinformation online, Alan MacLeod, and you know that well, that we really paint [00:09:00] broadly with the brush here. That if they’re just going to start throwing around labels like conspiracy or labels like “that’s disinformation” or misinformation without actually having to provide evidence and having the power to just silence these voices without any means to challenge it. Haven’t we had a bunch of warnings over the last several years, if I’m not mistaken, and maybe you agree, I’d like to hear, do you think that this has ramped up significantly? And do you think that this is even a more egregious and more in your face example of the types of censorship that we’re going to be seeing in, in months? 

Alan MacLeod: Yeah. In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of people really saw the internet as a liberatory force, where we could find alternative views or find or create homes where we could build audiences and really challenge what people read in newspapers or saw on the television and to a certain extent, that was true. It was certainly wasn’t some sort of golden age where, everybody was sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya and reading Chomsky or something like that. [00:10:00] But certainly in the last few years we have seen, as you said, a number of warning signs hitting us that perhaps the internet is not quite as free as we think. PayPal, of course suspended the account of WikiLeaks many years ago, stopped anybody being able to donate money to them. And in the wake of Trump’s incredible 2016 election victory, I think we saw these algorithmic censorship campaign really dialed up to 11. There was a Washington post article which detailed how this new website, proper or not, which purported to be a group of independent internet experts who had identified and published a list of over 200 websites that routinely pedaled Russian disinformation. And they basically insinuated that that was the reason that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. Not her own unpopularity, not the fact that she stuck the knife into Bernie Sanders, not the fact that she didn’t campaign in Wisconsin or Michigan or any of these key [00:11:00] battleground states. The fact of the matter was for them that it was that Russian disinformation that did it. And this list of 200 websites included a lot of libertarian ventures like the Ron Paul Institute and antiwar.com. It also had Trump supporting websites like the Drudge Report on there. And there was also a lot of left-wing, anti-war, pro-peace websites like MintPress News, Consortium News was also on there, the Black Agenda Report, Truthout, Truthdig. It was so many of us on there and basically what they said, in no uncertain terms, was that if you criticize Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the United States, the war machine, or NATO, or even express fear of a nuclear war with Russia then that is a key sign that what you’re reading is Russian disinformation. 

Mickey Huff: Craig Timberg is the guy that wrote that article and he came out of the national security state complex as well. And Marty Baron, who was editor at the WaPo at that time before this was even factually vetted, the editor at the Washington [00:12:00] Post was crowing about how great this piece from Timberg was and what an important piece of information it was and it turned out to be completely bogus. 

Alan MacLeod: Months later, once the horse had bolted from the stable, they put this very long disclaimer saying, we don’t actually know very much about this, this is their idea, it’s not us, we’re not doing this. But the fact of the matter is this went super viral, it got more than a million shares, it was picked up by dozens of other outlets and it formed the basis of what Google called Project Owl, which was a widespread change of their algorithms to support what they called, I can’t remember their exact words, but “credible sources,” and derank, delist, demote, and in some cases even delete what they called fringe opinions. And the effect of this was enormous and also overnight. So we saw a complete collapse in traffic for alternative media across the board. MintPress News lost around 90% of its Google traffic, even very well-known sites like Democracy Now lost 36%. [00:13:00] The Intercept lost 19%. Even slightly left of center publications like The Nation and Mother Jones were also hit really bad by this algorithmic suppression. And what we find out now, a little while later, is that this PropOrNot organization was almost certainly a creation of the Atlantic Council, which is a NATO think tank. So we have a situation where this NATO think tank is saying, oh, there’s a lot of state disinformation online, and we have to save you from it. This is state propaganda about state propaganda, in effect. And over the last few years, not just Google, but big social media apps like Twitter, TikTok, like Reddit. Have all changed their algorithms in order to promote establishment sources and delist alternative media websites, which has meant that the internet is very much turned much more into a mainstream corporate friendly realm than it was even six years ago. People used to go to [00:14:00] the web to try and get an alternative to what they saw on television. But now its increasingly hard to get any sort of alternative whatsoever. And what’s even more worrying is how groups like NATO are embedding themselves within big tech platforms like Facebook and TikTok, with their agents getting key positions in these organizations.

Mickey Huff: The Atlantic Council was functioning as a fact checker for Facebook. So this is very problematic, so we would definitely want to talk a little bit more about that. But before we do so, just want to remind our listeners: you’re tuned to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, I’m your host Mickey Huff. We are speaking with Alan MacLeod from MintPress News, and we will return to this conversation after this brief musical break, stay with us.[00:15:00] 

Welcome back to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host Mickey Huff. Today in this segment, we are talking with Alan MacLeod. Alan MacLeod has been a guest on this program several times before. He is a senior staff writer for MintPress News. He’s published with numerous other outlets, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Gray Zone, The Guardian, Salon, and others. And before the break, we were talking about the many nefarious, insidious, big tech ways that we have seen a clamp down on the internet, a clamp down on free expression. This is definitely something that we refer to as censorship at Project Censored, and Alan MacLeod, before the break, you were going to start getting a little more specific about how [00:16:00] some of these groups do this online, and again, I also want to remind our listeners that if you want to read some of Alan MacLeod’s recent work, you can go to mintpressnews.com. He has a piece on “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent is Becoming the New Norm.” That’s one of the pieces that he’s written there more recently. And of course there’s another piece from not long ago called “The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?” So, much to unpack here, Alan, but go ahead and pick up where we left off. 

Alan MacLeod: Well, I guess we can start with TikTok then. You might remember around 2020, there was this real panic in the national security state and then corporate media that TikTok was this Chinese app that was propagandizing our teens and, turning them into communists or whatever. And there was this big push from the Trump administration to actually simply ban and delete TikTok altogether, but then very suddenly that narrative just got dropped like a hot stone and it [00:17:00] really had a lot of people scratching their heads as to why. The more and more I looked at who was being employed by TikTok and who was being appointed to keep positions in TikTok right after this ban was rescinded, it started to get a little clearer. So for the last three years, or two years or so, TikTok has been employing a worrying number of national security state agents in key positions, especially in content moderation. So for example, the content policy lead for TikTok Canada, Alexander Corbeil, is also the vice president of the NATO Association of Canada, which is a NATO-funded organization that’s headed up by a former Canadian Minister of Defense. There’s also global policy manager at TikTok, Ayse Koçak. Before joining TikTok, she went through three years at NATO. She actually spent an entire year in Iraq as some sort of lead for NATO. It’s news to me that NATO was even in Iraq. Perhaps the most worrying NATO alumnus from a public perspective is Greg Andersen, who’s a [00:18:00] feature policy manager there. According to his own LinkedIn profile, Andersen worked on, quote, “psychological operations for NATO,” and then seamlessly went into a job with TikTok. And it really leaves me scratching my head as to why somebody who is working on, PSYOPs and, you know, public manipulation at a national security state organization like NATO, would just be parachuted into TikTok. Unfortunately, this is not just a problem with TikTok. As you alluded to before Facebook, now called Meta, has a very close relationship with NATO. In 2018 it announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s think tank. The Atlantic Council had helped curate everybody’s newsfeeds, which means nearly 3 billion people around the world have their newsfeeds designed, more or less, by this NATO organization, which means that they decide what you see, what you don’t see, what news is promoted, what news is demoted. Not only that, Facebook’s head of [00:19:00] intelligence is Ben Nimmo, who was a former NATO press officer, and also works at the Atlantic Council as well. Reddit’s director of policy is Jessica Ashooh, who spent many years at the Atlantic Council and also worked for the government of the United Arab Emirates. It seems that she was, coordinating the dirty war against Syria in the middle east for a number of years and went straight from this extremely hawkish, mandarin position and dropped into a sort of antiestablishment tech company where she designs policy. It seems very head-scratching indeed. And I think once you put these pieces together, we can start thinking about these big media outlets as increasingly appendages of the state. And that’s precisely what people like [Jared] Cohen and an Eric Schmidt wrote about in their book nearly 10 years ago. They’re Google executives and they talked about how, in the 20th century, Lockheed Martin was the tip of the spear for the American empire, but in the [00:20:00] 21st century, big tech companies like Google, they wrote, will be that weapon. And so they really see online operations and psychological warfare as the new battleground, and I think this is the sort of early salvoes of what’s going on here. The first shots are being fired. 

Mickey Huff: We say early, but for those of us, you obviously included, who’ve been paying attention. If this is an early stage, we’re in for a long dark ride and you, by the way, in your MintPress piece, it’s not just NATO. You talk about Chris Roberts, you talk about you want to talk a little bit about a couple of the other folks or the couple of other people. And this is, again it sounds really banal in some ways, when people look over this and they see, oh, somebody is a senior director of technology policy at the Albright Stonebridge Group. What does that actually mean? Who is, who are we talking about? Of course you then say that’s the late secretary of state Madeline Albright. Who is Chris Roberts? Before that they’re working at the national democratic Institute. That sounds nice until you unpack for us, what do these kinds of organizations do? [00:21:00] The adjective shadowy was oft used to describe what was happening at PropOrNot, which you referenced earlier. One might say that these organizations, they kind of operate in the shadows. It’s quote, “in the open” if you’re looking, but you have to be attuned to know where to look, how to look, and follow who these people are to understand what the significance is, which is, I think one of the high points of the work that you do is the dot connecting that you do, Alan MacLeod. So can you maybe talk a little bit more about some of these folks? 

Alan MacLeod: Yeah, sure. You mentioned Roberts and his connections to the Albright Stonebridge Group, who basically are the think tank, which provided the bulk of Joe Biden’s cabinet, frankly, they’re all members of the Albright Stonebridge Group. Before that he worked at the National Democratic Institute, which was set up by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA to do what they call democracy promotion, but maybe people in Latin America or Eastern Europe or Asia might call overthrowing our government. I don’t know. You can look into that if you want. There’s also ex-CIA men being put [00:22:00] into important positions in TikTok. For instance, from that piece, Beau Patteson is working as a threat analyst for a TikTok, but between 2017 and 2020, he was a targeting analyst for the CIA, after which he joined the state department, and he’s currently an active duty military intelligence officer for the U.S. Army while simultaneously serving as a senior role in content moderation and trust and safety in TikTok. So the idea that TikTok is some sort of Chinese-controlled app, maybe if you’re being very generous, that might’ve been true a few years ago, but right now, I think that’s just not the case. It was actually somebody who worked for the Department of Homeland Security, Victoria McCullough, who then went on to work in the White House for Obama, literally in the White House, and she is now a senior person at TikTok as well, again, in this area of trust and security, which is basically the department which decides what people who are [00:23:00] using TikTok and there are more than 1.2 billion users now, actually see and don’t see. And you might think TikTok is some sort of like fun place where people just go to, watch crazy dance memes or something, but in fact, an enormous amount of people actually use TikTok for news. So for instance, I believe 9% of all people worldwide aged between 18 and 24 said they used TikTok in the last week to get news. And 31% of the same age group actually used it. So they’re probably imbibing news anyway. So this is an enormously important platform, far more important than New York Times, or CNN, or the Wall Street Journal or anything like that. This thing reaches more than a billion people every week. And so that is obviously a reason why the national security state would want to do business with it.

Mickey Huff: And these aren’t secrets. You have to look to find it, but it’s not a secret that Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council to quote, “protect democracy,” as you put in your article and in [00:24:00] fact, you use the term “Surveillance Valley” rather than Silicon Valley. We started this with the PayPal flap, the controlling of funds to shut down antiestablishment organizations or anti-war organizations, the kind of journalism you’re doing at places like MintPress. Peter Thiel is one of the people that has been floating behind the scenes for long time. Anything you want to say about Thiel and his politics? 

Alan MacLeod: I don’t know too much about Peter Thiel, I better look into him, but I know he’s got some very weird politics, both internationally and personally. I believe he was paying people to inject him with the blood of teenagers because he thought that would make him live perhaps forever or at least prolong his life, so he’s got some very odd opinions, that’s for sure. 

Mickey Huff: On the more libertarian side of the spectrum, for sure, but has definitely had a lot of very authoritarian kind of ideas about the control of technology. And you also, in this same piece, you talk about Mockingbird 2.0. Listeners to this program though, we’ve long talked about CIA media manipulation programs the mighty wurlitzer. We saw this in the Church Committee hearings in the [00:25:00] 1970s. Carl Bernstein, Watergate fame, wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1977, talking about some 400 individuals considered assets, including the owner of the New York Times. We’re hearing a lot of these people in the corporate media, establishment media talk about the dangers of disinformation, right along with government, the Biden administration, echoing “we’ve got to lasso people back in.” CNN+ was just this epic failure. This epic failure that CNN launched that they were trying to capture more streaming audiences and so on. And the problem we discover as Nolan Higdon recently wrote is not really the medium, it’s the message. People are tuning out of corporate media because it’s less and less relevant to what’s going on in their lives. And more and more people begin, even though they’re effected by the propaganda, more and more people are turning to other platforms. And as part of this attacking of these other platforms, and using big tech to shut down alternative platforms, is a way to corral audiences. And so that’s been one of the new challenges, but in many ways, that is an extension of the kind of information control programs we saw [00:26:00] coming out of the Cold War. Alan MacLeod:

Alan MacLeod: I agree with the Biden administration and with all the CNN analysts who say that fake news and disinformation is a real problem, but I think we have to go beyond the idea of fake news just being the purview of some Macedonian teenager, writing on Facebook, or your crazy aunt in Ohio who talks about the lizard people or whatever. The most damaging fake news and disinformation of the last, let’s say 20 years, I think was clearly the sort of disinformation that led to the Iraq War, whereby outlets like the New York Times and CNN spread the dangerous hoax that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that really lied the public into supporting these heinous wars that have destroyed an entire region of the world and killed millions of people. That is the real damaging fake news. And it was damaging because outlets like the New York Times and CNN have this enormous platform and this enormous credibility. Not only that, because they partnered with the national security state in putting out this [00:27:00] nonsense. And it wasn’t so long ago that the New York Times actually admitted that they often send articles to the government for vetting before they publish them, articles on national security matters, just in case there’s something in there that might embarrass the government. And even if you turn on cable news, you will see so many people who are former CIA agents, former DIA agents, people who worked for the FBI, DNI, et cetera. Now they’re well-paid pundits or military generals who are brought on to wax lyrical about what Russia is doing. These people should be being seriously scrutinized, not being given platforms to spread what might be disinformation or false news, or at least wild speculation, to an audience of millions. So, this is really the problem. In the 1970s, the CIA was really doing this undercover. The Church Committee totally blew this apart and the CIA’s credibility was destroyed for decades, but now what’s going on is it’s almost much more outrageous in a way that they’re doing it [00:28:00] completely out in the open, and they’re just showing you what’s going on. And very few people are really connecting the dots or even raising any sort of alarm that some of the people who have spent decades in organizations where they are paid to lie and manipulate the public are now being treated as these unquestionable sages when it comes to international affairs, it really is opposite world, it’s like we’re living in some sort of upside down dystopia, frankly. 

Mickey Huff: Alan MacLeod, anywhere you want to tell people where they can follow you, contact or see the other work that you do.

Alan MacLeod: Follow me on mintpressnews.com or if you’re on Twitter or Instagram, I’m on there @AlanRMacLeod on Twitter, or @alan.r.macleod at Instagram.

Mickey Huff: Alan MacLeod, thank you very much for joining us today. 

That was my conversation with Alan MacLeod of MintPress News. Up next on The Project Censored Show, Shealeigh Voitl and Steve Macek talk about how the media ignores important stories about gender violence and inequity. Stay tuned.[00:29:00] 

Welcome to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host Mickey Huff today in the program in this segment, we’re going to talk about “The News That Didn’t Make the News: How the Media Ignores Important Stories About Gender Violence [00:30:00] and Inequity.” This is actually the title of a piece that was written by Steve Macek and Shealeigh Voitl, both of whom work with us at Project Censored, both of whom have been contributors to our annual books. Many chapters. This article was published by Ms. Magazine. And we give great thanks too, to our publicist Lorna Gaurano for getting this very important work out there and at Project Censored, we were really honored that Steve and Shealeigh were able to not only do this piece, but get it really widely distributed, and of course, right now this is more timely and topical maybe ever, at least certainly in contemporary American politics, we’re going to get into that, of course. But first Shealeigh Voitl is a recent graduate North Central College outside of Chicago, Illinois. Shealeigh studied journalism there, and she is a research associate with Project Censored and a contributor to State of the Free Press 2022, which is the project’s most [00:31:00] recent yearbook. We are also joined by Steve Macek, professor of communication and chair of the department of communication and media studies at North Central College. He is coordinator, along with Andy Lee Roth, of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and he contributed to State of the Free Press 2022, the project’s most recent yearbook, but many others. And Steve of course has been on with us before, but we are delighted to welcome both Shealeigh Voitl and Steve Macek to The Project Censored Show today, so, welcome to the two of you. 

Shealeigh Voitl: Hi. 

Steve Macek: Thanks so much. 

Mickey Huff: It’s an honor to have both of you here, and Steve and Shealeigh, I know you’re both working on the next Project Censored book as we here are speaking, but earlier in April, and I’m going to cite again, msmagazine.com, April 4th, 2022, Shealeigh and Steve have an article: “The News That Didn’t Make the News.” that’s the tagline riffing on Project Censored and underreported stories. So guess what Shealeigh and Steve talk about? They talk about how the media, the corporate media legacy establishment press ignore [00:32:00] important stories about gender violence and inequity. And so each year, of course, at the project, we list the news stories that went underreported in the for-profit news media. Many of these stories involve violence against women, trans- and homophobia and related topics. So what they wrote this article in hopes of doing is what can we do to promote gender equity in the news media? So Steve Macek, let’s start with you. What went into the beginnings of this and what helped you focus on this very significant, important and timely subject? 

Steve Macek: That’s a great question, Mickey, and thanks again for having me and Shealeigh on the show to talk about this important issue. As you referenced, I’ve been working with the project for a while. I have students in my classes routinely research, validate independent news stories, and some of their stories have gotten selected for the Project Censored top 25. I’ve been reading the Project Censored yearbooks [00:33:00] probably going back to the 1990s. I know going back to the 1990s, because I used to work at an independent bookstore and we would get the projects yearbook in every year and I would read it and then I started assigning it to my students and my media criticism class. And one of the things that you notice, if you follow the project’s work every year and you look at the top 25 list every year is that there are certain patterns that emerge in stories that the corporate media does a pretty horrible job of covering one of them, that I know I’ve written about with Andy Lee Roth, is coverage of labor issues. They do a horrific job of that, and they do a horrible job of covering stories related to the environment and environmental degradation and global climate change. But I think they also do a pretty horrible job of covering stories that have to do with systematic gender inequality, with gender violence and [00:34:00] gender inequity. If you ask most casual consumers of corporate news media, they would probably say lately the corporate media have been paying a lot of attention to these issues. The corporate media over the last four or five years have been full of stories related to the #MeToo movement, there have been stories about violence and abuse and harassment by powerful men in all sorts of industries, including the broadcasting media and film industry. So most people I think would believe that the corporate media has done a very good job of covering these stories. But as somebody who’s looked at the top 25 lists year in and year out, but I can tell you that there are a lot of important stories related to violence against women, harassment of women, gender inequity, gender inequality that simply aren’t showing up in the New York Times and the big broadcast news outlets, ABC, CBS, NBC CNN. And so Shealeigh when she was hired on as the research associate for this. And I talked about maybe [00:35:00] doing an op-ed or an article that looked back at some of the stories that have been on the list that have been overlooked by the corporate media that dealt with this crucial problem. So that was the genesis of this article is that I have been noticing this pattern for a long time, just looking at all the different top 25 lists. And we felt that it was worth investigating, using the top 25 lists to investigate what stories were being ignored and marginalized, and then ask the question, why is this happening? What are the structural, economic and other organizational institutional forces inside the corporate media that are leading them to marginalize or ignore or overlook these stories? And then what, if anything, can we do to change this? 

Mickey Huff: Absolutely Steve and thanks so much. That was a fabulous outline of a pretty lengthy article that really goes into a lot of detail. Shealeigh Voitl, let’s bring you in here now and talk about this. What kind of stories are we talking [00:36:00] about here? Maybe you have some examples?

Shealeigh Voitl: The mainstream media often overlook stories that center poor women of color, as well as other intersecting marginalized identities and the corporate media loves stories about women’s issues that can be summarized with a striking photo, like the Handmaid’s tale costumes on the steps of the Senate office building during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. It’s not that these stories aren’t important or newsworthy, because they are, but it’s that even the attention, the establishment press pays to those kinds of stories, ones that are sensationalized and frankly, dystopian are still fleeting. And so you have to wonder what was still left in the dark and what are we not hearing and what are we not seeing and who needs our help. And one of the stories that we highlighted in our article, for instance, which was included in the project’s 2019/2020 list of top 25 stories [00:37:00] was a report by ThinkProgress about the wave of violence against Indigenous women and girls. And there are, despite all of the missing cases and violence, there is still no federal database to record cases of missing Native women and girls, including Two Spirit or non-binary identities. And so the lack of coverage and reporting on this crisis sends a very clear message to native people that their pain and trauma and abuse is just not considered newsworthy, and that just perpetuates violence against Indigenous people.

Mickey Huff: There’s also an intersectional component here. You’ve already delved into it. In this case you’re talking about that particular story, which was the top story from the censored ’21, State of the Free Press 2021, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. So we’re now talking about age diversity as well, very young people, women of color, and in many cases, these people are [00:38:00] also from poor marginalized communities as well. And so you kind of have that trifecta of what do the corporate media not cover well, unless they’re covering it sensationally or to buttress another one of their Trojan horse agendas. If the corporate press covers the poor it’s because it’s the problem of the poor and the burden on the capitalist system like Steve would talk about with labor, why do they attack labor? They don’t really write about labor in a positive way, the corporate media. But what we saw in the past year, and with the flip over to the Biden administration, we did see a Native American woman elevated to the Department of the Interior. We did see a little bit more attention initially paid to it, but the big problem, and Steve, I know you can talk about this, the big problem is the corporate media love to do that because they like to then hang their hat on it and say: “well, we covered it January 21st and we’re good to go.” So Steve chime in about that issue.

Steve Macek: I think you’re absolutely right. I think that the corporate media, to the degree that they cover stories about [00:39:00] impoverished or racially minoritized women, for example, they practice tokenism and it’s really crass tokenism. There’s not a systematic investigation of the inequities, the oppression facing, especially, as Shealeigh and I write about in the piece, especially impoverished and racially minoritized women. So one of the stories that Shealeigh and I also talk about in the piece that I absolutely want to mention, because I think it’s such a striking story and it was virtually invisible in corporate media, was a story from Project Censored’s 2020/2021 list about the work that was done by California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and this academic organization, Sterilization and Social Justice Lab to draw attention to the huge number of disabled [00:40:00] women and women of color and incarcerated women who were sterilized without their consent in the 20th century. According to reports that appeared in Ms. Magazine and in Yes Magazine and some other independent publications, upwards of 30,000 women in the 20th century were sterilized against their consent and this practice actually continued and continues to this day inside of some of America’s prisons and immigration detention centers, and a number of groups have been trying to draw attention to this, and really only the independent media covered it. The corporate media, there were a couple of scattered reports, so there was an isolated report in CNN, an isolated report in the Washington Post. A few local network-affiliated television stations covered it, but really this effort to [00:41:00] publicize the scale of the mass sterilizations that have taken place, forced sterilizations that have taken place, really did not register with the corporate media nor did the effort in California to try to compensate some of the victims of forced sterilization, because in the state of California, there’s been a legislative initiative to try to compensate people who were victims of forced sterilization. So this is something that is horrific to think about. We associate forced sterilizations with Nazi Germany and other barbaric, authoritarian regimes and this took place in the United States and it affected upwards of 30,000 people. The fact that the corporate media is not talking about this is just stunning.

Mickey Huff: 10 years ago, and you wrote this in the piece, you both wrote about the electronic Intifada piece on Palestinian women, this happening in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Shealeigh, did you want to come in and talk about some of these other examples?

Shealeigh Voitl: There was that [00:42:00] story, the mistreatment of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons, it was pretty shocking. Because of the occupation in the West Bank, because of that, women were not able to see their families, they were mistreated during childbirth. It was brutal to read these stories and obviously that was an older story for the project, but is more relevant today, obviously with recent news. For me, writing this article, especially, and going over some of these stories with Steve during the process of writing it. It’s still, as a woman, knowing how our stories are overlooked in the corporate media, still shocking and disheartening and frightening, frankly, not knowing how much out there we’re not hearing about. So that was definitely one that was startling. 

Mickey Huff: I’d like to take this opportunity to remind our listeners you’re tuned to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, I’m your host Mickey [00:43:00] Huff. Eleanor Goldfield will return as a co-host later on in May. Right now we’re speaking with Shealeigh Voitl and Steve Macek co-authors of a piece published April 4th, earlier this year, for Ms. Magazine. The title of the article is “The News That Didn’t Make the News: How the Media Ignores Important Stories About Gender Violence and Inequity,” and we will continue our conversation about this issue and many others related after this brief musical break. Stay with us.

Mickey Huff: [00:44:00] Welcome back to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, I’m your host Mickey Huff. Today on the program, in this segment, we are speaking with media scholars Steve Macek, and Shealeigh Voitl. Quick reintroduction here: Steve Macek is a long-time contributor of Project Censored. Steve Macek is Professor of Communication and Chair of Department of Communications and Media Studies at North Central College, outside of Chicago. He’s also Project Censored’s campus affiliate program coordinator with Andy Lee Roth, And again, a long time contributor. Shealeigh Voitl, recent graduate of North Central College is also an intern with us at Project Censored, contributed to our last book, is contributing to the one that we’re actually writing right now. Censorship is everywhere, and today we’re focusing on this article for Ms. Magazine that these two focused on the way the corporate media cover or don’t cover women’s issues, issues around gender violence and the like. Shealeigh Voitl, something else here in the article, and then of course we want to weigh in on some current events.

Shealeigh Voitl: We did mention in the article and [00:45:00] the story about how black children, despite accounting for 33% of total missing children cases in the United States, only make up 20% of news stories. It is interesting because we were just introduced to this phenomenon of missing white woman syndrome and how Gabby Petito received so much coverage for such a long time. And obviously it was important to have that coverage, but it makes you think.

Mickey Huff: So Shealeigh Voitl, since we did introduce the latest news of the leak from the Supreme court.

Shealeigh Voitl: It’s terrifying. It’s very scary and obviously would not stop abortions, it would stop safe abortions. I think that’s very clear, that if this decision happens, it will kill people and the Supreme court and politicians in the United States, knowing that, being fully aware of that fact, that people will die as a result of this decision and making it anyway, is horrifying. It’s [00:46:00] scary when you see people in the news saying I have a daughter and I have a sister and I have a mother and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Cause it’s, you should care regardless of your proximity to women. It affects all of us and women dying as a result of this decision should scare you.

Mickey Huff: So well put. Steve Macek. 

Steve Macek: It’s very important and I’ll just say nobody wanted to believe that the court would actually do this, but it was clear that when Donald Trump was reviewing his nominees for the Supreme Court, that he was using a litmus test, he asked them whether they’d be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he packed the court with people who are willing to make this decision, which as Shealeigh correctly points out, is going to kill people. People are going to die as a result of this decision and many thousands more, tens of thousands more, maybe even hundreds of thousands more lives are going to be ruined because [00:47:00] of this decision. And yet we sort of knew that this was coming in some ways, and actually I want to make reference to some Project Censored stories that we covered, that Project Censored highlighted in past years. So if you go back to Censored 2020, which was the censored stories from 2019/2020 The number eight story, I believe in Censored 2020 was U.S. women faced prison sentences for miscarriages, about how states like Alabama were passing laws that will essentially endow fetuses with personhood rights for the first time and potentially result in hundreds of women facing prosecution for the outcomes of their pregnancies. So if they have miscarriages and they can’t prove that these were natural miscarriages, they could be sent to jail for having an illegal abortion. So that was our number eight story that year, and then the following [00:48:00] year the number 23 story on Project Censored’s top 25 list was “The Global Gag Rule Continues to Compromise women’s Health Around the World,” about how the Trump administration reimposed a gag rule, which basically said that any nonprofit NGO around the world that gets aid from the United States cannot discuss abortion with any of their clients. And this is something that Ronald Reagan initially put in, and then it was repealed when Clinton came in and it kept going back and forth. But Donald Trump put in the most stringent restriction on the ability of public health officials who get any kind of funding from the U.S. around the world to talk about abortion with their clients, and that should have been a sign. These two stories. It should have been a sign that this is what was coming down the road. So I think if you were paying attention to the independent media and to the alternative press and their reporting on women’s [00:49:00] reproductive health, you would know that the Trump administration and the current Republican party planned to end Roe, and they do not want women to have control over their own bodies, bottom line. You would have known that if you had been reading those stories and so I think the corporate media is in part to blame. I’m not suggesting they didn’t dig into Amy Coney Barrett’s past when she was appointed or Brett Kavanaugh’s stance on these issues. But I think if they had been reporting on some of the stories that Project Censored highlighted, people would be more aware that Roe was so tenuous. 

Mickey Huff: You both write in this article at Ms. Magazine from April 4th, we’ll link it to the program when it goes up, you both write about, what’s behind this kind of coverage. You rightly say, The New York Times, there’s a woman there, there’s a woman at The Washington Post and the leadership positions of USA Today and so on, but far outnumbered are women in these key roles in the upper echelons of management at commercial news outlets, also tilts [00:50:00] male. You both included these amazing statistics in here to really paint a picture, and Shealeigh Voitl, we’re going to talk about more things we can do about these kinds of situations to improve media coverage and improve conditions for women just in general, across the board as a human rights issue. And you rightly pointed that out earlier. You all say here, even when you’re looking at the boards of directors of the eight major media companies, a few years ago it was between 8% and 33% of the board members were women, that was it. So far out numbered in the boards, far out numbered in the management. 2020, only 19% of TV general managers were women, on and on. And again, I want people to go read the article because it’s got so much great information in it, and it’s a fantastic teaching tool by the way, to bring this kind of thing into multiple disciplines and give people the opportunity to really discuss and debate real issues in real time. But Shealeigh Voitl, how do we promote gender equity in news?

Shealeigh Voitl: We go over a lot of different things we can do. I’m sure Steve can talk about this as well, but inclusivity just has to be a [00:51:00] priority. There were recent initiatives, like the 50:50 Project, which was developed by the BBC and that sort of set out to guarantee that at least 50% of BBC contributors were women. And then by April 2019, which was like a year after, it was set up 74% of BBC contributors were women. So it is imperative in newsrooms. Simply put, in many cases women and journalists of color are just better equipped to address certain interests and needs of the communities that their news organization serves. I mean, this benefits, obviously the readers greatly, but it also benefits the news outlets as well as they’re expanding their readership and that puts money in their pockets too. So why wouldn’t they want that?

Mickey Huff: Incentive.

Shealeigh Voitl: There is incentive, and I guess you have to look at it that way because nothing is waking them up I guess. But it’s true. It’s important for people to be seen and heard in the news and that’s [00:52:00] just one way, but yeah, I’m sure Steve has some thoughts on that as well. 

Steve Macek: As we say in the article, as Shealeigh and I write in the article, one of the things, one of the basic things people can do is to support independent feminist journalism, where it exists. That’s publications like Women’s eNews, Ms. Magazine, Bitch Magazine, Rewire News Group. Rewire News Group I think is especially relevant right now. It’s a new site that specializes in reporting about women’s health issues and women’s reproductive rights. Incredibly important outlet. Those four outlets are all kind of non-profit. They don’t take advertising they’re supported by foundations and donations for the most part. So people should not only read the reporting read their content, which is excellent, but they should also contribute money because they will only survive if people contribute money because they are not getting subsidies from [00:53:00] advertisers. And I think that’s one of the most important things we can do because one of the things we point out, Shealeigh and I point out in this article, is that even when women’s voices are included in the corporate media, oftentimes they’re not talking about issues from a feminist perspective. So one of the studies that we cite in the article discusses the fact that like 1 out of 10 women who are writing on the editorial or opinions pages about issues or approaching issues from an explicitly feminist point of view. So I think there’s a real value in providing financial support for explicitly feminist journalism and media outlets. The other thing, and this may sound self interested since I’m involved in Project Censored, people should give their support to media monitoring organizations that do the work of pointing out the kinds of stories that corporate media are overlooking, and that includes organizations like Project Censored, but also Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, [00:54:00] GLAAD, the Women’s Media Center. There are many worthy media monitoring organizations that do the work of trying to hold the corporate media accountable for the kinds of representations they put out in the world. 

Mickey Huff: That’s why it’s important people support community media and community radio. We go out to 50 some stations across the country, we’re back on WBAI in New York. This is just such a vital resource where you hear all these voices. And again, people listening to this program are like, what do you mean we hear about women’s issues we hear about these shows. That’s because you’re tuned into this station or these kinds of media. And Steve, you just rattled off a list of others. And I think that’s really a fantastic takeaway from the Ms. Magazine article that you both did. Congratulations again, it’s a fabulously important article. Again, I’ve been speaking with Steve Macek and Shealeigh Voitl. The article is titled “The News that Didn’t Make the News: How the Media Ignores Important Stories About Gender Violence and Inequity.” Reminder, Steve Macek is a Professor of Communication, a Chair of the Department of Communications at North Central College. Shealeigh Voitl is a recent graduate from there, where she studied [00:55:00] journalism. She is a research associate with us at Project Censored and last, but certainly not least I wanted to point out that Shealeigh is also an artist and a musician and has recently released some more music, and the music that you heard earlier on the break, Shealeigh gave us permission to play. So it’s not enough just to support women in journalism, women in the arts we need to do, we need to be doing this everywhere we can, and especially supporting our young people. So, thank you so much, Shealeigh, thank you, Steve, not just for your work but for taking the time to come on here today. So it’s been a pleasure and I’m sure you’ll be back on. Thanks so much for being here with us.

Shealeigh Voitl: Thank you.

Mickey Huff: You’ve been listening to The Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio, established in 2010 by myself and Peter Phillips. I’m Mickey Huff, [00:56:00] the executive producer and host of the program. Anthony Fest is our long time senior producer, The Project Censored Show airs on roughly 50 stations around the United States, from Maui to New York. To learn more about our work or find any of our previous archived programs go to projectcensored.org. Please follow and like us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be sure to subscribe to the official Project Censored Show on your cell phone’s podcast application. Please feel free to share your feedback about our work at projectcensored.org. And last but not least thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. Stay well, we’ll see you next time.[00:57:00] 

 

 

 

Image by Michi S from Pixabay

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This week’s show is excerpted from a recent online panel discussion for the Sonoma County Library and Lumacon! in Northern California about efforts to ban certain books, keeping them from children or youth by removing them from libraries and schools. The panelists explore the possible motives for book bans, and explain why it’s vital for young people to have access to books that represent diversity and marginalized communities that are most frequently targeted for banning. The featured panel members were Maia Kobabe, author of “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” and Noah Grigni, illustrator of “It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity.” The panel also included two local student activists. Both the aforementioned books have been targets for banning. The discussion took place on April 9, and was sponsored by the Sonoma County Public Library. Project Censored’s Mickey Huff was the panel moderator.

Audio used by permission of event organizers and parents of the minors.

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In the first half-hour of this week’s program, Mickey’s talks to author and professor Valena Beety and veteran investigative journalist Geoff Davidian about the widespread problem of wrongful criminal convictions and the obstacles that both legal investigators and journalists encounter when they try to uncover information. Then in the second half of the program, Eleanor Goldfield speaks with long-time single-payer advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers about prospects for universal health care in the U.S. today.

Notes:
Valena Beety teaches law at Arizona State University, and previously worked at Innocence Projects in two states (Mississippi and West Virginia). Geoff Davidian is a reporter with over 40 years’ experience, including at the Milwaukee Journal, Arizona Republic, and Houston Chronicle. Margaret Flowers is a retired pediatrician and a long-time advocate for universal single-payer health coverage. She’s a member of the steering committee for HealthOverProfit.org, a group that campaigns for “a national improved Medicare for All healthcare system.”

 

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Uruguan poet and political analyst Eduardo Galeano once wrote, “Every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” 

And this week on the Project Censored show, we look at the reality behind Uncle Sam’s particular brand of saviorism – talking US economic warfare – also known as US sanctions – which as of 2021 affect a third of humanity with more than 8,000 measures impacting 39 countries. First, we sit down with Code Pink’s Latin America coordinator Leonardo Flores to discuss the sanctions against his home country of Venezuela and how recent US thirst for Venezuelan oil could translate into the much needed lifting of some of the most oppressive sanctions. Next, we sit down with Jacquie Luqman, organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace and radio host to discuss the economic warfare against Afghanistan – which analysts suggest could prove to be deadlier in one year than 20 years of active war on the ground – and also what our role is in combating these acts of violence, as children of the empire. 

This episode features the song Pyre by Eleanor Goldfield

 

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Censorship by proxy continues in the US with the latest wave of Big Tech censorship and deplatforming spurred by increased Russiaphobia that lead to the cancellation RT America. This week, Mickey talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges about the matter noting how Roku and DirecTV pulled the channel from subscriber services. In addition, Youtube deleted the entire catalog of RT America, which housed his book review program “On Contact,” as well as all other programs there, from Lee Camp’s Redacted Tonight to Abby Martin’s Breaking the Set, in effort to suppress dissenting views not found in US corporate media. Mickey and Chris discuss issues with RT, but also the problematic media landscape in the US that drives critical journalists out of our so-called “free press.” Later in the program, journalist Kevin Gosztola returns to review the recent developments in the Julian Assange extradition case and offers additional analysis about Big Tech censorship and how “community standards” are used as an excuse to ban content at places like YouTube with no means of appeal or accountability.

Notes:

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist with a long career as a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Death of the Liberal Class, and America: The Farewell Tour. Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor at Shadowproof. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from the beginning, as well as other press-freedom and whistleblower cases. His interview with Mickey was recorded on March 25.

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This week on the Project Censored show, we share audio from Code Pink’s recent panel on Media Censorship of Voices for Peace with Abby Martin, Lee Camp and Chris Hedges. Code Pink’s Jodie Evans talks to them about how they came to speak truth to power, their personal experiences with censorship and what this latest silencing of dissident views means for what’s left of free speech and free press, as well as the importance of these so-called dangerous viewpoints in contextualizing US empire, and combating violent propagandization in the face of nuclear war.

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