Smoke screen

Each year Project Censored's list of "censored" stories becomes more narrow-minded and silly, omitting vast acreage of news that doesn't fit P.C's prejudices ["Censored!," 9/1/04].

In the area of drug policy, for example, they missed a May report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that the fruit of 67 years of marijuana prohibition is that more U.S. teens are current smokers of marijuana than of cigarettes. This truly startling development was covered on AlterNet by my colleague Steve Fox, but nowhere else.

P.C. also missed the independent, federally funded University of Pennsylvania study released in January documenting that the government's antidrug ads – which have now cost taxpayers over $1 billion – don't work and may be counterproductive. The feds' response? Cancel the independent evaluations. This was reported in the trade journal Advertising Age, but even the alternative press missed it.

And what's up with Project Censored's story No. 3, "Bush Administration Manipulates Science and Censors Scientists"? In five minutes of Web searching, I found stories in the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times and a long, detailed AP story that got wide play. If this is a "censored" story, the term has lost all meaning. The part of that story everyone left out – including the Union of Concerned Scientists, which raised the issue in the first place – is the administration's flagrant misuse of science in the service of the war on drugs.
Bruce Mirken
San Francisco

It's even worse

Your summary on Project Censored's No. 1 story on the uneven distribution of wealth in the United States uses older figures and does not cover trends.

Our friends at the Federal Reserve Board more than a year ago provided us with even more current figures. According to them, as of 2001, Bill Gates and his buddies in the top 1 percent possessed close to one third of our wealth, which amounted to almost $14 trillion. The richest 10 percent held over two-thirds.

What is interesting about the fed's figures is that their 1992 numbers in comparison to 2001 show that the share of the nation's wealth held by the top 1 percent increased by 2.5 percent, from 30.2 percent to 32.7 percent. This increase alone is almost the total portion of the U.S. wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of the population, whose share declined by 0.5 percent during this period, from 3.3 percent to 2.8 percent.

This redistribution of wealth in favor of the rich did not occur when the Republicans ran the White House, but in the good old days under the Democratic leadership of Bill Clinton.
Rick Baum
Oakland

Censored duped?

For nearly 30 years, Project Censored at Sonoma State University has called attention to important stories underreported in the mainstream media. Sadly, the integrity of this project has eroded, and it now appears to be practicing self-censorship by ignoring serious flaws in the stories it promotes.

For 2005, Project Censored has picked "High Uranium Levels Found in Troops and Civilians" in Iraq as its No. 4 story. I am a Ph.D. student in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management program at UC Berkeley. I have researched the use and effects of depleted uranium weaponry for 10 years. After reading the stories cited by Project Censored, I went the extra step to contact the German scientist who tested the troops' urine. He informed me the levels were "low," and that he had broken off contact with the Canadian group because of their misrepresentation of his test results. I believe Project Censored provides a valuable public service, but it has also apparently become a forum for the promotion of inflated claims.
Dan Fahey
Berkeley

Were they 'censored'?

I just read your article ["Censored!"] reprinted in the Honolulu Weekly. I was expecting I might have read something I did not already know or at least to learn something new about something I have previously read about. It was a great disappointment to find neither. To me it was just a waste of several pages of newsprint. Every one of these "stories" you wrote about can be easily accessed online at any number of sites. I live here in Honolulu, not in what one might call a "news mecca" and not one of the 10 stories was "news" to me. When I saw the byline at the end of the article that said you were in San Francisco, it even more surprised me. I can't believe that you did not hear or read about these stories in your city.
Joe Sunderland
Honolulu

Camille T. Taiara responds: Yes, you can find these stories online if you know how to look for them. The point is that they didn't get nearly the amount of coverage in the mainstream media that they deserved. Most people don't take the time that you apparently do to seek out these stories. In fact, the vast majority get their news from TV. I'd be surprised if any of Project Censored's top 10 got so much as mentioned on ABC, NBC, et al's six o'clock news.

For the record

In last week's "Class of 2004" article about Scrabbel, the name of Stanley Lam was misstated.