In This Issue

EVERY YEAR SINCE 1976, researchers at Sonoma State University have been compiling and publishing a list of the top 10 big stories that the major news media failed to cover. Every year the alternative press around the country see Project Censored's list as big news – the story we prepare normally runs in at least half a dozen alt papers, sometimes more, and plenty of other papers do their own version. It's become sort of an alternative press staple – and it represents one of the major distinctions between weeklies like the Bay Guardian and the big dailies.

Because while the giant media corporations that own papers like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle are always desperately trying to steal ideas and writers from the alternative press (in a desperate and utterly failed effort to win younger readers), none of the big papers ever seem to find even a few inches of space for Project Censored.

The reason this story never gets into the major media: the Project Censored list is an embarrassment to the people who decide what Americans need to know. It's a reminder that there's a media scandal far bigger than Jayson Blair's fabrications, and it goes on every day: stories that ought to be on the front page of the big papers, leading the evening news, get little or no coverage.

As Camille T. Taiara reports on page 18, the folks at Project Censored aren't suggesting that the government somehow forces the major media to "censor" these stories. In the project's terminology, a censored story is one that, for whatever reason, doesn't get the attention it deserves. A lot of that is subtle: Reporters at big papers know very well that certain stories will never get printed, so they don't even try to investigate them. TV news shows take too many of their cues from the daily newspapers. Powerful public officials blackball reporters who don't play the game, making it hard for them to do their jobs. Besides, investigative reporting is expensive, and when the bean counters run the show (as they do at big media businesses), that's what gets cut.

And that's why the alternative press are so successful.

Tim Redmond