The News That Didn’t Make The News
The tale of projectcensored.org
I recently stumbled across a website called projectcensored.org . It’s slogan is “The news that didn’t make the news”. And by the motto ‘what you see is what you get’ they give you news that didn’t make the cut, were censored or pushed out of the regular news programm. I went and did some backgruond research (on Wikipedia, naturally) and found out the following:
It is a project of Sonoma State University, California. It was started in 1976 by a Professor Jensen as a “media research program with a focus on student development of media literacy and critical thinking skills as applied to the news media censorship in the US” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Censored ). It started as a project rather simmilar to our course and now even has it’s own website. Over the years it was continued by other professors and students of the university and expaned gradually.
What they do is to educate university and high school students about the role of freedom of press and how this is still an issue in the western world, contrary to popular believe.
How they do it is not only by lectures, but they also have a radio show and an annualy printed book. The website I was talking about is part of the educational part and seems to be written and looked after by students and their professors.
I find this a really interesing project and a much needed one, on top of it. I mean, we read all about how the news get censored and that wasn’t really news to me, we tend to forget that fact. Even though I allways knew we don’t get all of the news, I never questioned it before. Whith eduacting a broader mass of people on the topic we may create some headwind to the censorers and raise the demand for a really free press in the western world.
The only thing I would have to criticize is that some articles (the minority, though) seemed a little exagerated to me and had the air of conspiracy theory. That my be because some seemed so unbelievable. But that could very well me a misconception on my part!
Overall I think this is an excelent project.
