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Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
"Don't Believe Your Own Eyes"... State of the Free Press w/ Project Censorship's Mickey Huff (G&R 466)
00:52:06
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- [00:01]
Mickey Huff
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics.
- [00:03]
Bob Bozanko
For Scrappy People, a regular podcast on.
- [00:07]
Mickey Huff
Radical environmental and anti capitalist politics brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
- [00:14]
Scott Parkin
Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I'm your co host, Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California. And as always, I'm joined by Bob.
- [00:24]
Bob Bozanko
Bozanco in Niles, Ohio. Mickey's old stomping grounds.
- [00:28]
Scott Parkin
Mickey's old stomping grounds. And today we've got a return episode with Mickey Huff, who is the director of Project Censored, co host the Project Censored radio show on Pacifica, is a professor at Ithaca College at the Park Center. And we're going to be talking about the state of the media in 2026. Project Censored has a new book out called State of The Free Press 2026. Both Mickey and I are showing it right now. Last year we talked with Mickey about the state of the Free Press. Oh, Bob's got it too. State of The Free Press 2025. Mickey, welcome to the Green and Red.
- [01:03]
Mickey Huff
Podcast, Scott and Bob, it is a delight to be a repeat offender on your wonderful program. And we all three have the book in question. So ready to have a great conversation with the both of you.
- [01:14]
Bob Bozanko
Let me just say that is a wonderful book cover. It looks like Salvador Dali did it or something.
- [01:18]
Mickey Huff
It's the Dark carnival man. Right. Anson Stevens Bolan does it again for us. And we certainly are living in some dark carn. So the theme is apt, if unfortunate.
- [01:28]
Scott Parkin
So it's the 50th anniversary of Project Censored.
- [01:30]
Mickey Huff
Yeah.
- [01:31]
Scott Parkin
Maybe we could just start off, we've had other Project Censored authors on, but maybe just give us a quick overview of what Project Censored is for those who need to be need to know.
- [01:41]
Mickey Huff
Yeah, sure. Fair enough. Project Censored is what we refer to as a media watchdog. It's a media, a news media literacy organization that was founded in 1976 by communications scholar Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University. Carl founded the program as a class to address what he saw as a lack of understanding about how media work in the United States under the Free press system. And he was particularly pointing out to both failures and successes in the media that really for him attuned the question of what is why does some news not make the news and how do we analyze and ask questions about that? And are we not living up to our First Amendment protections and privileges, privileges in the with the First Amendment. And so Carl was actually influenced by the Watergate Scandal, as many in that generation were, but not necessarily by the breaking of that story, quote unquote. Breaking. It wasn't broken by the Washington Post per se. There were other people writing about it. But Carl said on one hand, yes, we want to laud the fourth estate for covering such an important issue, but why did it take so long? Why were other independent reporters covering it earlier not taken seriously? Why was there not enough reporter power, if you will? Or why weren't enough journalists working on the case? Why did the fourth estate not think some of the scandals of the Nixon administration were important as they historically came to be? And especially coming out of the Watergate period previous to that was the Pentagon papers, right? The great Dan Ellsberg in the league of the Pentagon papers. And back then we had a fourth estate that published those and championed the whistleblower and the supreme court supported it. I'm afraid to say, Bob and Scott, if that were to happen now, I think we know the supreme court would say something very different. We certainly saw the from Obama through Trump and Biden, the efforts to squelch and suppress people like Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Ed Snowden, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning. So we know that our government has long had disdain for truth tellers and whistleblowers and that does extend to some of their attacks on the fourth estate. And so the founding of Project Cetera in 1976, again coming out of the heels of Watergate, went and looked back at this general question. What if we had a fourth estate that always really worked towards report factually and transparently in the public interest? What if people knew a lot of the crimes of the Nixon administration? They were taken seriously before the 72 election, would he still have won all but one state? The woulda, coulda, shoulda is like bar, bar room talk for historians. But it was an important question and it led to Carl having a whole class that would investigate the independent and alternative media to see what stories are they covering that are accurate, true and important, but they're not covered in the legacy press or the establishment press. And you remember in the 70s we had a few networks, PBS, some radio. We didn't have ca, we certainly didn't have Internet. And as that changed, of course, we however, did see the same kinds of patterns of concentration, suppression, myopic winnowing of acceptable discourse and viewpoints and so on. But that's the great beginning of the project was a question of what are we missing? What are important independent people covering that the mainstream corporate media are missing? And Carl went from there. He ran the project for 20 years, got involved with even people as like Walter Cronkite and Izzy Stone were actually champions of Project Censored because they believed that Carl was a constructive critic of the press to try to improve their ability to ethically, transparently and factually report in the public interest. And you'll remember like even the Nixon White House just to show how much things change and stay the same, the Nixon White House did work to suppress the Watergate story with Cronkite. Or the Nixon White House contacted the president of CBS and asked them to squelch reporting on it. And then it wasn't picked up on more until later into the Washington Post years when Nixon eventually resigned. And fast forward to today when we have a regulatory captured FCC right under car Brendan Carr. We have a Trump administration that routinely exploits, extorts, blackmails and threatens media corporations, media outlets with lawsuits. Has his billionaire friends and cronies line up and buy the outlets so he can control them like over at CBS one time house of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. Now Bari Weiss. Again, it's always a mixed bag when we talk about media and the fourth estate. And I know that much of our culture right now really lacks nuance. Nuance is a corpse in our culture. Everybody's got to be at one extreme or another. And you all know that there are complicated realities often lie somewhere in between. And at the project that's what we've always aimed to do is try to report the news. It doesn't make the news while analyzing. Why teach people in the public the importance of critical news literacy skills so they can be better managers of how they get their information and broaden their news media habits. And and of course we also like to highlight not just the independent news media outlets that cover the news that you should hear, you need to hear. We also talk about the importance of solutions journalism and journalistic outlets and nonprofits that are trying to actually build a better future for people in this country, not just report constantly about how it's falling apart.
- [06:40]
Bob Bozanko
I have some, we both have some specific questions about the new report, but I have something a little more impressionistic which actually is I think relevant to this. And it's something I've been thinking about for a while because I think a lot of us every day will look at like the New York Times or not the Washington Post anymore, but kind of the mainstream legacy media. And occasionally you'll say hey, things are changing. Like I noticed maybe six months ago, you Started seeing a lot more critical coverage of Israel. Right. But then I'm thinking, not great. They started to just talk about things I hadn't talked about before. My curiosity though is like, where do people get their news from? Because I think like you and I, the four. The three of us. Four of us. I'm counting myself and three people on the screen. The three of us, I suspect, get our sources from somewhere very different than somewhere in a red district in Oklahoma or Louisiana or even in Iowa or wherever.
- [07:26]
Scott Parkin
Right.
- [07:27]
Bob Bozanko
Where are people actually getting their information?
- [07:31]
Mickey Huff
Yeah, or Western Pennsylvania or eastern.
- [07:34]
Bob Bozanko
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [07:36]
Mickey Huff
Fill in the blanks. The news deserts are everywhere. About a quarter of Americans live in a news desert and that means that they're likely more susceptible to piped in top down managed news propaganda from a handful of corporations. Those are the loudest and easiest to find or hardest to avoid, which is where a lot of people still go to get information. Which is ironic because if you take a look at the last decade, public trust in the media has been cratering. Yet they're still going to Team Red or Team Blue friendly media to have their confirmation biases fulfilled. Yet there are many independent outlets that are trying to report in the public interest that the public just largely doesn't know about. Only six states teach media literacy in this country. And that's another part of the problem. We lack civic literacy, historical literacy and media literacy. And that's also testament to the failing educational system by design from the top down, as it was taken over by a neoliberal cabal of corporate managers over the last couple of decades from no Child Left behind on. And so that's part of the challenge and part of the problem here. And then when Trump comes in and puts some wrestling queen in charge of education to completely dismantle it from inside, that's contributing to the problem. And over on the Fourth Estate side of the spectrum, where you have a handful of corporations increasingly conglomerating and increasing their profits, they're also shrinking their audience sizes to be more myopically or media siloed into one ideological principle of belief or another. Again, back to the confirmation bias problem. But what we've been doing at Project Censored for a long time is we believe that the stories that we highlight in our first chapter of the top underreported stories, and by the way, your viewers, listeners can go to project censored.org and you can see all those stories for free going all the way back to 1976. We have 1200 stories and that we have Hundreds a year. These are just the ones that we go through with our judges and so forth. We can talk about some of that too, if you're interested in getting into the weeds pedagogically about process and how we look at that. But many Americans now, as Bob and Scott, get their information from social media platforms, half or more. And so that's another half a dozen, not even fewer than half a dozen tech companies that are controlling that with algorithms, shadow banning, again, appealing to confirmation bias, these kinds of things. The real issue is that many Americans believe that they can get the information they need as a result of what's called news snacking. In other words, if something important is happening, it'll find me. I'm plugged in, I'm wired. If something's happening, it'll be like alert notification. But again, because we don't ask what's behind the screen, what's behind the headlines, what's behind the news, who's curating it, where does it come from, how's it being pushed into my feed, why does somebody want me to know this? And in the process, what's being pushed out of that Overton window that's incredibly been shrunken by the corporate owners of either the press or big tech, Right? That means that the American public has often a sort of a Dunning Kruger effect in terms of how much it thinks it knows about current events or what's happening. Unfortunately, Bob and Scott, we all know that Americans mostly, when they learn about things like geography, it's because of warfare or settler colonialism. It's not because they're curious about other cultures necessarily. And it behooves the political class and the corporate media to maintain a level of ignorance in American society that quells curiosity and suppresses important questions. And that should be at the root of a free press, is finding the most significant questions and getting them into the places where they need so that the public can hear important answers from people in power. And instead what we see from powerful institutions like Congress is a dog and pony show, dark carnival circus of Pam Bondi just going on and on with red herrings and ad hominem attacks and appeals to emotion and outright falsehoods. And it doesn't participate. The president, not just a misogynist, someone that routinely deflects and manufactures information during press conferences with her and Lovett. This absolutely, I would say it's important to note this not because it hasn't always been this way, but this is an extraordinary increase, if you will. There's a certain sense of brazenness about the degree to which these things are now manifest. That before it's almost as if we operated under a veil of some kind of assumed civility that we would disagree but we wouldn't totally cross the line. We would not purposely go after people personally and try to destroy their lives and careers and fire them. I know, Bob, you just got out of the educational system in Texas, for example, right? What's happening there is such a direct assault on academic freedom you almost have to be asleep not to notice it. But what's scary are the people that are cheering it on, right, that are cheering on wanton censorship, wanton. Their celebration of a wanton exclusion of viewpoints no matter how significant and how factual or no matter how much damage is done as a result. As long as the right can win and own the libs, anything is acceptable. And unfortunately the fourth estate has got pulled into that circus whereby they are now not only the target of the administration, that they in fact have become almost self lampooning in ways that have contributed to their own degradation in term of terms of public trust. Because often the public will have to seek out information on social media and other places and they'll start to see reports that are factual and are accurate. Like over at TikTok reporting on Gaza for example. And then, oh, it created a great national emergency whereby we're losing control of the narrative. We're losing control of the narrative. Instead of changing what's causing the narrative, what's causing the want and violence in Gaza, instead of addressing the root of it, we'll just turn off the cameras and shoot the messengers. That was the whole campaign behind the resting TikTok from The Chinese company ByteDance was so that they can control the narrative. And by the way, Bob and Scott, they said the quiet part out loud for two years leading up to what just took place. They were worried that this information was radicalizing young people on campuses. They never could say that the information was, quote, false. Hillary Clinton pretended that it was false. They liked to pretend that it's false. But no one's ever refuted it. They don't address it head on. They don't talk about the over 200 journalists that have been killed in Gaza more than anywhere. More journalists in the last year killed there even than in World War II, for example. That just seems to escape the attention of people both in the government and the establishment press, which again, the more the public becomes aware of the things that they're not being told, the more it degrades public trust in those institutions. But back to your question. Where do you go? We have sites on our web pages, projectcenter.org and parkindymedia.org we have independent media source lists by topic. We're not pretending that these are exhaustive lists. We're not saying that everything at all these outlets is 100% factual every minute of the day. What we're saying is this. If you're trying to broaden your media habits, you've got to start somewhere. So why not go to people who have been studying independent media for decades? Why not go to people that know about these sources and can even talk to you about their biases right up front, so that you have a better sense of what you're looking at and the kind of information you're getting when you go to another source? The root of this all is to get people to break their toxic media habits, to break their reliance on the corporate establishment, legacy press, and to really tune in to community and public interest ethical journalism where they can find it. And I tell you, we fill our books every year with them, Bob and Scott, as you both know, and you can find out more about those stories and the other things we write about for free at projectcensored.org you can tune into the Project Censored show weekly, been going on for more than 15 years, where we talk about the news that didn't make the news every week. We teach courses on it, we run workshops, we write books on media literacy education. So, you know, we try to walk the walk. We try to practice what we teach. And education is a real central part of Project Censored, which also sets us apart from other media watchdogs like fairness and accuracy and reporting and others that do fantastic work and media criticism. But we specifically try to translate a lot of the work we do into critical media literacy pedagogy. Education and student research is a big part of the kind of work we do. It's not just that we sit around and talk about the stories that don't make the news and why we have students doing it and talking to us at the same time so that they are learning. We are training a new generation of people to be critical about the media, and we are hoping to churn out more muckrakers and fewer buckrakers. As the founder of Project Censored, Carl Jensen, used to say, I think that's.
- [16:08]
Scott Parkin
An important point, is that you've connected this sort of media literacy to the education system. And what we're seeing right now is I also agree that we've seen this neoliberal assault on public education and we've seen this. I don't know if the, the concentration of media, corporate media power is definitely greater now than it's ever been because concentration of corporate power is greater anytime since the 18, the late 1800s. But one thing I'm noting is that there's this pretty full on assault by Trump and the right on knowledge, right, abolish the Department of Education, get the Ellisons to buy CBS, get the Ellisons to buy TikTok. We're seeing a lot of that. And in the book you talk, in all the books y' all talk about Ben Bean, where he put out this important study I think in the late 70s on the concept 83. 83, early 80s, where he talked about the concentration of media power. And, and so can you actually they're trying to do away with, you said there's only six states where there's like media literacy programs and we're seeing this kind of full on assault on the education system at all levels. And I guess my question is how much is the concentration of media, corporate media power, how much has this escalated because of that? Like this full on knowledge on assault. That's. Sorry, that's a long kind of rambling question.
- [17:24]
Mickey Huff
No, that followed it perfectly. Scott, It's a brilliant question and great framing of it and I really appreciate it. Particularly the nod to people like Ben Bedikian, who wrote that book about five, six years after Carl Jensen founded Project Censored. And this is before Herman and Chomsky did manufacturing consent in 88. And of course in between there sandwiched, you've got Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, followed by Technopoly in the early 90s. So look, we've had people warning us about where we've been heading for some time, which is why in the United States, a distraction book. Nolan Higdon and I had a Lao Tzu quote in the beginning that if we're not careful we might end up where we're heading. Are we there yet? Scott, by your recent, by your questioning in the framing of that, it sounds like we're getting very close to being in an authoritarian society where we don't have freedom of information and don't have freedom of access to information. And we'd no longer really have the right to express these views if they run counter to people in power. And Bodikian was like a canary in the coal mine around these things. Steve Masik, who's been working with us at the project for a long time, a Comms professor out of Chicago, North Central College just wrote a great dispatch for us late last year called Trump's War on Epistemic Institutions, which contains the assault on the universities first and foremost, including student newspapers like the sacking of Jim Rodenbush over at. I think it was. Was it Iowa or. It was Indiana, I'm sorry, University of Indiana, where the faculty advisor of the newspaper was fired because he wouldn't censor the student reporting. And we also looked at the slashing of funds for scientific and medical research. We're seeing the dismantling of government research, research agencies. We're seeing decimation and abandonment of the National Archives. We're seeing increased suppression of government data. We're seeing word lists that are blacklisted that the government is saying we're not allowed to talk about. In places like Texas, they're literally searching professor syllabi to see who can teach what and why and how it's happening. This is an extraordinary period of censorship and it's something that we should note that it also clearly affects the news media. You rattled off a list of people buying media, the conglomerations of it. We're living in a bonanza period of consolidation, including big Tech, Silicon Valley, Nvidia being the center of that whatever multi trillion dollar circus of money laundry for AI AI garbage and slop that's halfway all over the Internet. Half the Internet's bot traffic as it is already. So we're in some interesting times, I would say interesting and perilous in many ways. But again, I see these things as working in concert. The assaults on education and an academic freedom, the assaults on freedom of the press, they're coordinated and they're connected and they boil down to having an uneducated class of voters in this country. And you'll remember that Trump said in his first term, we love the poorly educated. Right? In other words, he wants to be the one that's informing people with his screeds and his propaganda and his interpretations of history and nobody else even has a seat at the table, as we mentioned earlier. As I was saying is that it's not as if we haven't seen these strains in American political culture before, because we certainly have. But this is a brazen kind of gloves off, mask off approach to it, to where they're not even pretending anymore. When the administration lies, they double and triple down like George Santos style. There's shame in the lexicon anymore. You can't shame somebody into admitting they were wrong or mistaken. And that's part of the culture that is very toxic that we need to reverse. But in order to do it, we really need to teach skills, go along with media literacy, like constructive dialogue, constructive communication, independent critical thinking, devoid of fallacious reasoning, self awareness of cognitive biases. And look, we just frankly need to realize that the world is a diverse place. It doesn't have to be scary. But if we don't embrace the differences that we have. And again, I'll go back to a slogan that we go to all the time. We need to work on building bridges, not walls. And media is an important part of our society that can contribute to which what? Which way do we go when we come to the fork in that road, right? Do we want to build relationships and understanding and to mitigate differences and work together in common cause where we can? Or do we want to throw up walls and attack everybody and turn ourselves into a warfare state? Everywhere from the workplace, the lunchroom, the dining room table, to the United nations, we're really at an impasse here. And I think we have another opportunity. I don't get to quote Rahm Emanuel very often, but we don't want to let a good crisis go to waste, do we? This is a crisis and it's not a good one. But this is a time to rebuild news institutions from the ground up. Movement, Media alliance and other groups that we write about in our book this year in the Media Democracy for Action chapter, are people actually doing fantastic, stellar, important work, Drop site news, right, with Ryan Grimm and Jeremy Scahill, for example. We highlight their work in the book this year, Jody Rave spotted Bear on indigenous news we highlight. So Project center doesn't just get stuck in the negative news cycle where we focus on all the problems. And Scott, you certainly frame the challenges that we face, but we also like to focus on some of the solutions by looking at the independent news outlets that are countering and bucking those trends, and also independent news, independent journalists and outlets and nonprofits in particular, which are also under attack, that are trying to get information to the public in meaningful ways so that we can have a society where there are more meaningfully civically engaged people in the electorate.
- [22:52]
Bob Bozanko
I want to talk a little bit about some of the topics covered in the book, and one that stands out to me, which I think the last few years especially it's been incredibly, incredibly important, is the weaponization of anti Semitism and which is again, not new. We've seen it. I was a part of it. I was targeted myself 25 years ago. So it's been around. But And I've said before, not facetiously, that I think the editors in the New York Times should be in a docket along with everybody else at the end of all this. Right. You want to give. So we all know that Israel's role in American politics, but it seems like more than that even, and it does seem, even though it's been around, an intensified problem now where the media is just parroting these ideas that like from the river to the sea is a call for genocide or free Palestine, is harmful, anti Semitic, Is that simply just a product of Israel's role in American politics? Or is it to curry favor with Trump to capitulate? We see, like you mentioned, I'm on a rant myself right now, but as a professor, we've seen these institutions which we would consider liberal in the sense they believe in freedom and all that kind of stuff, simply cave in. And university administrators are as bad as anybody. Just absolutely. They're horrific. And I would put newspapers in that, elite law firms, all these institutions we count on and they've all fallen in. And I think the kind of use of anti Semitism is a great example of this, how it shut down debate, criminalized it. Actually it's more than a weaponization, it's criminalization.
- [24:19]
Mickey Huff
You know, it's really interesting that you point that out, Bob, and I appreciate that you bringing the topic up because it's very difficult often for people to even talk about it. And now there's a chilling effect as a result of these attacks that have been going on. The Anti Defamation League is really just really almost weaponized itself in ways where it just takes on these definitions that somehow any criticism of Israeli government activity is akin to antisemitism. And it's just or in hogwash. It's complete nonsense that there can't be criticism of a global state that is simply reduced in essentialist fashion to some kind of racist screed. And you know what? It actually is dangerous because it does a real disservice because there are actually organizations and people around the world and around this country that are anti Semitic and that are vitriolic, have a vitriolic irrational hatred for Jews. And that's what makes this worse is that rather than addressing head on legitimate criticism in debate, we've resorted to having entire institutions adopt policies that don't even allow you to ask questions. I'm looking at Gavin Newsom in California, right, in the bill that they just passed, basically criminalizing this if it's unapproved curriculum. Right. So if you bring up any of the bottom up histories, people's histories of places in the Middle east, you're somehow akin of anti. Akin of being guilty of committing anti Semitic crimes. We have a whole chapter in the book, by the way, by a scholar, John Collins, from the Weave News that actually looked at Stefanic, Israel and anti Semitism and long shadow of that kind of abuse. And beyond Stefanic, he goes well into detail about the different kinds of organizations and the different kinds of efforts that have been put forward to make serious these bogus claims that if you criticize Israel, you're anti Semitic. And again, we see it almost on a daily basis somewhere when the subject comes up, if anybody bothers to quote facts and statistics, even case in point, for the last couple years, we. No one was even allowed to acknowledge in this mainstream that tens of thousands or more people were being wantonly slaughtered in Gaza, which would lead us to lend towards the G word that the word that we're not allowed to say, genocide. For a couple years we had to pretend that we weren't killing record numbers, that Israel wasn't killing record numbers of journalists. We have more journalists died there than any war, including World War II. This is outrageous, outrageous that this is going on and then the state of Israel won't let international journalists in to see the rubble and the bodies buried beneath. And for the last two years, we saw the ritual condemnation of the Gaza Health Ministry as a propaganda arm of Hamas. Now all of a sudden the IDF and the Israeli government say their numbers of dead people look okay to us now. So now they acknowledge the 71,000 dead Gazans since October 7, even though as Nader and other people have pointed out, that number is likely hundreds of thousands of people potentially dead when you go in and sift through the rubble.
- [27:32]
Scott Parkin
That's why they think those numbers are.
- [27:34]
Mickey Huff
Okay now, because interesting though that now all of a sudden there's a flick of the switch and the IDF is, I guess the Gaza Health Ministry is right about that. After all, this is the kind of stuff we're talking about. And again, I won't say that it's all a pack and it's all that kind of thing. And I know we could get into talk with the Epstein files and all kinds of blackmail and all kind of those things that we probably don't have time to unpack that that's a show of its own. And you could talk to my colleague Nolan Higdon about that because he's been keeping a file on the files for quite some time. But this is to the point of the fact that the condemnation of criticism of Israel has become an institutional staple in the United States, where members of Congress report, put on notice, professors will lose their jobs, teachers will be ostracized, you'll be ostracized from your community, all for saying things that dozens of international agencies have already weighed in on and unfortunately come to conclusions that the wanton slaughter and the targeting of people in Gaza is akin to historical genocide. And we should actually talk about what that means. Instead, we hear people just bandying about labels and talking about antisemitism, ad hominems, red herrings, straw person fallacy attacks, and they're all conversation stoppers. And that's the key. Bob and Scott, if we can scare people into not saying these things, they somehow don't exist. Remember, the Trump administration believes that if they can simply disappear something or ignore it, it's not real. If we ban trans people from everything, they don't exist. If we don't talk about systemic and institutional racism, it's not real. They live in a total fantasy land. We talked about Dunning Kruger. We also live in a culture with the ruling class of malignant narcissists. And if you go back to people like aldous Huxley in 1927 in a piece called Proper Studies, one of the great gems that came out of that was Huxley reminded us facts do not cease to exist simply because they're ignored. And that then comes full circle when we go back to the Bogdekians and the Postman's and the Hermans and Chomsky's. These are people that warned us about these consolidated powers in media, warned us about the trappings of propaganda, and said, if we don't bolster a free press, rather we weaken it, we're all going to end up in the kind of situation that we're in now, right? And here we are. And that's a really serious crisis, long time in the making. And it's going to take a minute to get out of it and rebuild public trust and things like the Fourth Estate. But that's impossible to do when billionaires buy it up like they're just slots on the monopoly board and then just get to pedal their narratives. Like back at CBS when CBS was contacted by the Nixon White House to tell Cronkite to tune down, turn down the Walt Watergate story. We now have people like Barry Weiss just stopping the story after it's already been through legal and it's ready to air the back channel communication between the Nixon White House and CBS wasn't known about for years. Bari Weiss was bragging about it in real time. We suppressed the story in real time. I know I'm getting away from your anti Semitic.
- [30:47]
Scott Parkin
And Trump. And Trump didn't say. And Trump didn't say. Trump came back and said it's not enough.
- [30:51]
Mickey Huff
Yeah, it's not enough censorship. And again, I think it's back to the antisemitism and the trope that is. And it's been used for a long time, but it also renders invisible the other Semitic peoples of the region, which include Palestinians. Right. And so I know that's a third rail topic, but we've created an environment of hostility around it. The degree to which that everything that's been done is to stop the conversations. And anybody that wants to push a conversation, even respectfully, to have a factual, constructive dialogue about it is called an anti Semite. And everything gets shut down. And those are hallmarks of authoritarianism, not a free society.
- [31:29]
Bob Bozanko
Well, 80 of Israel is European. So. Yeah, let me, let me follow up on that because we're talking about journalists and you mentioned how many journalists have been killed. And there's also scholastic going on. Professors.
- [31:41]
Mickey Huff
Absolutely. The designation of the entire school system.
- [31:43]
Bob Bozanko
And universities, over 200, I think, both.
- [31:46]
Mickey Huff
Which the American Historical association leadership refused to acknowledge even.
- [31:50]
Bob Bozanko
Exactly. And this is something I've noticed for 30 years. Right. And it's maddening. All these self proclaimed radicals. I study this and I do that and then. But if we're seeing this, I think with media too, where you would think if they saw 200 people from their own profession being slaughtered, people would speak out on. It's not the same, obviously. But when Trump looks at a woman on Air Force One and says, quiet, Piggy, or. And no one has their back. Why does this profession, why is it doing that?
- [32:14]
Mickey Huff
That's a journalist. Because you sound like me in my class the other day when I'm showing clips of these, of these things actually happening. And I'm just asking. And look, I'm talking to 20 year olds.
- [32:27]
Bob Bozanko
Yes.
- [32:27]
Mickey Huff
Who are smart. They're also younger. They haven't lived through the generations. They haven't seen a lot of that stuff. And again, I don't. I'm always of the opinion that people don't study history enough. But when I talk about that to them and I just ask them, I'm like, what if I came in here and talked to somebody that way? What if I picked out a female student and they asked a question and I said, shut up, piggy. Quiet.
- [32:49]
Bob Bozanko
You'd be fired tomorrow.
- [32:50]
Mickey Huff
Fired by the end of the day.
- [32:51]
Bob Bozanko
By the end of the day. Yeah.
- [32:53]
Mickey Huff
And that's. It was interesting that somebody actually brought that up the other day. They were just like, how does this ha. How is this happening? I tell you, every single person in the press course should do what they did at the Pentagon when they went and tried to control us. And by the way, we can get into all kind of criticism of the establishment press covering of the Pentagon. But what we saw in the solidarity when they tried to totally stack it with toadies and sycophants right, from the alt right media, those people picked up their stuff and vacated their offices and they said, this is a joke, we're not going to be part of it. Everybody in the White House press corps, everybody on Air Force One, next time he calls somebody little piggy, they should pick up their stuff and they should leave. Or every single reporter in the room should then ask, why did you do that? Why did you do that? Why do you think that's okay? How does that respect the fourth estate? How do you respect our institutions? As a leader, they should flip the script and relentlessly turn it around until those people run for cover. And you saw Pam Bondi. They are so thin skinned that it only takes a little bit of pushing and prodding and asking before they blow up like the full grown toddlers and arrested adolescents that they are. And this is part of what's going wrong with the country. I mentioned malignant narcissism before. Right. I mentioned Dunning Kruger before. We have a society that is cognitively unwell and unsophisticated. And again, that's just how the leadership likes it. We need to teach history, we need to teach critical thinking, and we need to teach people about the importance of the independence of the fourth estate so that people can actually begin to deconstruct the challenges that we face and re envision how we can get out of it.
- [34:41]
Scott Parkin
One, one, just to change, the topic shifted a little bit because my day job is. I'm an organizer at an environmental nonprofit. We're in the midst of a pretty horrendous climate crisis and we're seeing climate journalism under attack too. I have some bigger questions about the Washington Post, hopefully before we get off. But the Washington Post just gutted their news desks. They laid off like three fourths of their climate journalists and they were like one of the better corporate legacy media reporters on that.
- [35:10]
Mickey Huff
Absolutely.
- [35:11]
Scott Parkin
How do you see that? A lot of climate activists I know are also shifted more to anti fascist Little D democracy activists right now because they see that as a precondition for being able to do climate work. But how do you think the sort of gutting of climate desks and the rollback of climate journalism and then, you know, the assaults on people who have done climate work by the administration, everything from nonprofits which have advocated on climate to what he did with the EPA yesterday. How do you see that sort of playing out in this moment?
- [35:44]
Mickey Huff
This is just more of the same kind of authoritarian onslaught against the public's right to know and against the fourth estate right to report and tell people what's really going on. To paraphrase George SELDES in the 20th century, that's the role of journalists, not to objectively false balance truth and falsehoods, but to tell the public what's actually going on. And again, we're back to the mindset. AJ Liebling once quipped in 1960, Freedom of the press belongs those who own one. We have a billionaire class that owns the press. We have a billionaire class that controls big tech. It controls all of our media ecosystems. Seven of the wealthiest people in the world are media barons. That's not by accident, right? That's not a mistake. Look at what Bezos owns, for example, because you mentioned the Washington Post, right? Bezos has Amazon, Whole Foods. We could go down a litany of other things, but Bezos owns a lot of businesses that contribute to the climate crisis, from corporate farming, from big ag and big agrochemical companies to Amazon driving all the stuff that they do, the freight, all this. It doesn't behoove Bezos's newspaper to report on the facts of it because it flies directly into the interests of Bezos, the board, the shareholders, and all the lateral and then vertical companies that he also controls. So it's again, it's again, I don't mean to reduce it to this, but if you go back to the propaganda model, ownership, advertising elite, sourcing flack and ideological bias, that pretty much sums up the way that the climate has been reported. By the way, you won't be surprised if you go back and look at Project Censored. Some of the stories that are more likely to end up on the top list every year are about climate reporting, right? Decades, right?
- [37:26]
Scott Parkin
Partially why I asked this question.
- [37:27]
Mickey Huff
Exxon Mobil knew for 40 years that their product was destroying the planet. People that made asbestos knew for decades that it was going to kill workers. Fill in the blank down that. And they want to squeeze every last ounce of profit, no matter how many people are dead. And if the media just won't report on it, somehow people won't notice all the bodies piling up until we do. And then people turn around whipsawed and they're like, what happened? How could we not have known about this?
- [37:55]
Scott Parkin
I think it's also important to note that there's the media that's owned by the overt malevolent right wing billionaires, but then even the media, the corporate media that we, we still see is good because mostly because Trump shit talks them. But Exxon and Chevron and oil industry and oil and gas and coal all advertise on those, on those stations. Like CNN is one some of the.
- [38:15]
Mickey Huff
Biggest advertisers, along with Big Pharma, right, Which is one of the biggest criminal syndicates in the country. If you look at the largest fines levied for wrongdoing, it's usually pharma, it's fossil fuel industries, it's tobacco, it's companies that the major advertisers. Right, major advertisers. And so that connection is you don't want to offend the advertisers. So again, you see how Big Pharma, when they advertise something, they'll have three or four sentences talking about the product and then they have 2,000 words flying down the bottom of the screen at 80 miles an hour in two point font about how the product could kill you. That's the state that we're at. It would almost be comedic if we take it to the truest of idiocratic or idiocracy levels. I guess we're joking that people can actually even read anything, let alone two point font at 80 miles an hour at the bottom of a screen of a 30 second commercial during a Super Bowl. So you're right, this problem has been exacerbated by ownership. It's exacerbated by capitalism. That's why the subtitle of Herman's book with Chomsky is the Political Economy of the Mass Media. It works as a business, it doesn't work in the public interest. And this is why we champion the independent press. We champ in the independent outlets and nonprofits that report in the public interest transparently and factually in accordance with the Society Professional Journalist code of ethics. Because that is the core of the model of what makes a democratic republic work is access to accurate information where people can sift through it and understand the issues of the day to meaningfully participate in it. The current administration is attacking every single arm of our civic institutions from schools, non profits, universities, you name it, the media, anything that involves educational dissemination of information is under assault. And any organization that's trying to protect workers or protect the environment is under assault. That's by design. And you cannot reduce the profit motives from that equation because how else would you explain the hundreds and hundreds of stories that we've covered about the climate for years? And yet the corporate media is just. We're not really sure. We're not sure what's happening. Here's somebody from the Union of Concerned Scientists. They all seem to agree that there's a problem. Here's somebody from the Heartland Institute. Doesn't that sound lovely? Yeah. As you guys know, funded by Exxon. Right. It was a front companies set up as a, as a think tank. Right. To promote pro fossil fuel and cast doubt prop kind of propaganda about climate change. And so it's not a surprise that here we are. It is. And it's not a surprise the current administration now wants to go and have more coal. Right? They need more coal plants to fuel the data centers that are total. Not only are they polluting, they're polluting all these local areas where people say, oh, the data center is going to mean jobs. It's jobs for a minute. And then the whole thing is automated in the pollution and the noise and the degradation of the environment still remains for the data centers. Did I say data centers? The data centers that are being used to propagandize you, prevent you from understanding what's happening and ritually surveil you so you can live in the soft cage of the authoritarian oligarchs that run this country.
- [41:42]
Bob Bozanko
So we clearly have this corporatized media and there's this kind of consensus that they have. However, at the same time a lot of this stuff is, isn't working. I think we have a majority of Americans now have a negative view of Israel, which is utterly incomprehensible if you're as old as I am. Single digits among Democrats, people have turned against ice. More people want ICE abolished than not. How does that get through? Is that from social media? Is it like. Because that's a glimmer of hope within that. Right?
- [42:12]
Mickey Huff
Absolutely, Bob, and I'm so glad you brought it up. It is because there are independent outlets and citizen journalists and advocates that are going out there and telling these stories. There are people with these spy devices that are going around, however, and they're catching stuff that's happening and uploading it. So that as soon as. And again you saw this fall apart real quick in places like Minneapolis, the administration was starting with such absolutely bald faced lies about the kind of things that were happening, that the public is really put literally into an Orwellian kind of narrative situation where it was the party's last command not to believe your own eyes or your own ears. And that's the kind of stage of late case, that's the step of late stage capitalism. Where we are, the regime here is so desperate that they will just lie and their supporters will often de facto believe them before they even look for themselves. And that is the, that's the slip into authoritarianism that I think is the most dangerous is, that's the boiling frog stage, right? That's the stage of where we're wondering what's happening, how could people possibly believe this? Or Bob, like you said, there are also larger numbers of people now that are questioning what Israel's doing, that are questioning ICE and saying, this isn't the kind of community I want, this isn't what I want. Where are those voices in the legacy press? Where are those op eds? Where we're seeing more of them, right? We're seeing more. But there's a groundswell of this coming from more of the independent sector. And it's like a tsunami that's overwhelming the false narratives of the corporate media. Because when more and more people begin realizing that what they were watching in the corporate media is absolutely 180 degrees from what happened outside their front door, they no longer can trust it. And if those outlets want viewers back, they have to get back to reality. They have to stop their fealty to the ownership class and they have to remember that their job is to serve we the people and that the press is among the prep, among the people. Two of the contributors to our book this year in the media Democracy in Action chapter. Maya Shenwar of Truth Out. Laura Witt of Prism Reports are two of the co founders of something called the Movement Media Alliance, a nonprofit independent consortium of independent truth telling, muckraking journalism. They said, quote, there's no power for the people without journalism by and for the people. The corporate media in this country have lost all sight of that kind of reporting, which is why they have record low ratings. That's why people are looking to find other news on places like social media platforms. Because they can smell bullshit when they, they can, they know it. They know they are, they're being lied to, but they don't always know how. They know they're not being told everything, but they don't know where to find it.
- [44:56]
Bob Bozanko
Aha.
- [44:57]
Mickey Huff
Enter critical media literacy education. Enter the role of the independent press, right? What we do at Project Censored is we, we, we basically affirm and we lift up these independent reports to amplify their signal to say, hey, the media is not all bad and corrupt, it's not all dead. And neither is it at the New York Times or the Washington Post where we highlighted, here's a great report they did, here's a great story they did, here's a great series they did. Like the censored 60 Minutes piece, right? That was actually a good piece of journalism that CBS and Bari Weiss chose not to air because it offends those whom they serve. It was still quality journalism coming from cbs, right? So it's not that we don't see it anywhere, it's that the public is now cynical and exhausted from relentless distractions, a barrage of lies, and it's gotten caught up in all the moral panics around fake news and weaponization of outlets. And the public is really grasping at straws. Where do we go? And this is where we say, at Project Censored, find the media, democracy movement leaders and people that are doing the work in your community. Take a look at the list of stories we put out every year and find those outlets and start looking at them and following them and maybe support them if you're able to. And what we do at the park center for Independent Media is we give the Izzy Award out every year, named after the muckraker Eye of Stone. We highlight the most significant independent reporting like we'd have the list At Project Censored, we do this other thing over at the park center that's adjacent to it. It celebrates independent public interest journalism, which is the path to a more informed public. And increasingly, as we see the corporate media wane and jobs go down, young students are looking where to work and I'm trying to push them into the independent media sphere. You might not jump out into a six figure salary, but you might jump out into a job that really makes a difference, where you can make a living and go to sleep with yourself at night.
- [46:47]
Scott Parkin
Just a shout out, talking about some of these, like independent media alliances. We're actually part of the labor podcast radio network, which is actually very active. It's funded by, it's funded by labor. It's all a lot of independent operators with their own shows, community radio shows, podcasts, things like that.
- [47:01]
Mickey Huff
Steve Zeltzer over there, Radio, it just comes to mind, is one of the great labor programs that I've known of over the years.
- [47:07]
Scott Parkin
There's 200 members of the Network.
- [47:09]
Mickey Huff
That's great.
- [47:10]
Bob Bozanko
I think we're close to. Oh, sure, here. We'll have to have you back on sooner rather than later because.
- [47:15]
Mickey Huff
Yeah, anytime. It's great talking, you know, one of.
- [47:18]
Bob Bozanko
One of the. I think the best part of doing this, and we're going on six years now. In a couple weeks it'll be six years we've been doing this.
- [47:23]
Mickey Huff
Congrats.
- [47:23]
Bob Bozanko
Is talking to people who. They're not unknown, but they don't get the kind of attention that they should. And so it's really cool to be able to have people on and we're not Joe Rogan.
- [47:35]
Mickey Huff
That's very good. I'm glad that neither of you.
- [47:36]
Bob Bozanko
We don't have those kind of numbers, but it's really cool to. And there are, who knows, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, small kind of media like. Like us. And that's the best part of this, is the people we talk to who are doing stuff that's really important and yet for the most part they're doing anonymity or clearly they're underrepresented and underpaid. Goes back to, like I. I'm sure I told you before I discovered Project Censored, probably in the 80s, I think, from Alex Coburn maybe.
- [48:05]
Mickey Huff
Yeah, yeah. They would republish the list along with the Bay Guardian and the weeklies.
- [48:09]
Scott Parkin
Yeah.
- [48:10]
Bob Bozanko
And it's really been really one of the more important, I think, sources for all of us in that period. There's certain things that kind of showed us how to go forward and move on with this. And in a lot of ways, what we're doing now is really a testament to what you've been doing for a really long time.
- [48:26]
Mickey Huff
The more the merrier. Bob I am. It's a delight to be with you and Scott. You run a great program. You do exactly the kind of things that we in spirit share the importance of platforming and elevating and amplifying the voices that we think really need to be heard more. If we really had a press oven buying for the people, right. Those major corporate outlets would be public commodities, not for profit. They wouldn't be commercial. They would be. Their success and their efficacy would be measured on how well they serve, serve their diverse constituencies and the public and the good people that do live in this country. We forget that the corporate news media thrive on the negative news cycle and they like to keep people distracted and opposed to each other. Divide and conquer. One of the oldest games in the book. Part of what we do at Project Censored in the park center is we believe people need to come together. People need to find the commonalities. We're back to the bridges, not walls motif. And one way we do that is through critical media literacy education. We do that through storytelling, and we do that through empathetic and active listening to better understand people that might be different than we are. And media have, I think, in my view, a strong responsibility under the First Amendment to advocate for this kind of constructive dialogue and to help people not only become more accurately informed, not only become better citizens, but become better human beings. And it's a really powerful thing that we can do through storytelling. We do have the First Amendment. It does not protect itself. But this is exactly why we need outlets like this. This is exactly why we need to teach critical media literacy. This is why we need to be teaching it in K12 in all the states, not just 6. And as Project Censor has been around 50 years, I wish we would didn't need to be here after 50 years. But if I look around, it seems like we're needed maybe more than ever. And so I'm really looking forward to being a part of the next 50 years of Project Censored and working together with the people at the park center and other places that really work in common cause, really just to make the world a more informed and more humanitarian place. So, Bob and Scott, thanks so much for what you do, and thank you so much for thinking of us at Project Censored and thanks for having me on your program.
- [50:26]
Bob Bozanko
Anytime.
- [50:27]
Scott Parkin
Yeah, it's great to. It's great to have you. Hopefully we, hopefully we can have you back sooner than the 2027 book.
- [50:32]
Mickey Huff
Anytime. As you'll see, brevity is not a strong point of mine, and I have no shortage of things to say and share with you all. Project censored.org parkandymedia.org is where people can go and find out lots of free information, lesson plans, classroom activities, a bunch of stuff. If you want to contact us, you can contact me through there. If you want to check out some of our books or you want to use them in your class, get ahold of us. Let us know how we can help you and be part of the solutions you're seeking.
- [50:58]
Scott Parkin
Yep, folks, we've been talking with Mickey Huff with Project Censored. If you like what you're hearing, please check us out at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Bluesky. If you're watching this on YouTube, give us a subscribe at the bottom of the screen. If you're listening to us on the audio platforms give us a rating review. It helps us with the algorithms. If you really like us, go to greenandredpodcast.org and hit that support button or become a patron@patreon.com greenredpodcast Mickey it's been fun. Really enjoy talking with you. Everyone else out there make trouble and misbehave and we'll talk to you again soon.
- [51:30]
Mickey Huff
Rock on Bob and SC.
- [51:37]
Bob Bozanko
Sam.