Weapons of Mass Distraction

The latest crisis in Iraq brought some long-overdue media attention to the U.S. government’s dangerous habit of providing weapons of mass destruction to unstable, undemocratic regimes. For a few minutes.

As media outlets rushed off to cover more pressing threats to national security, such as welfare cheats, illegal immigrants and Linda Tripp, the Clinton administration continued to promote U.S. arms sales to undemocratic governments to the tune of $10 billion a year. America’s role as arms supermarket to the world was the number-one underreported news story of 1997, according to the 22nd annual survey by the media-watch program Project Censored. Based at Sonoma State University, the student-faculty program chooses the 25 most significant but underreported stories each year. One of the few outlets that did justice to the U.S. arms story was In These Times, the source of the top two censored stories this year. The magazine’s August 11 story, Martha Honey’s "Guns ‘R’ Us," reported that America’s share of the global arms market has grown from 16 percent to 63 percent in the last 10 years. "Arguing that arms exports are a boon to the U.S. economy, the president, along with the Defense, Commerce and State departments, is aggressively promoting the arms trade at every opportunity," Honey wrote. "Costly Giveaways," a story on the same topic by Lora Lumpe, appeared in the October 1996 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. U.S. arms sales threaten the safety of our troops abroad and drain money from Third World economies, Lumpe reported, and the Pentagon is giving away still-useful equipment to justify its requests for deadly new toys. "Every time I ask the media why they don’t run these stories, they say, ‘We give the public what it wants,’" says Carl Jensen, retired professor of communications at Sonoma State and Project Censored’s founder. "But journalism is the only business I know of where the public doesn’t know what it wants until it gets it." Other top underreported stories last year include evidence of carcinogens in cosmetics and personal-care products and the auctioning off of American academia to the highest big-business bidders. Project director Peter Phillips, who took over from Jensen last year, says that nearly 1,000 news stories were screened by Sonoma State students and faculty over the past year. The stories were nominated by project supporters from around the world, as well as from DataCenter in Oakland, which monitors more than 700 alternative and independent media sources. The final 25 stories were ranked in order of national significance by a panel of 22 national judges, including Jensen; Ben Bagdikian, professor emeritus and former dean, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley; Pulitzer Prize–winning author Susan Faludi; syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux; author Michael Parenti; Barbara Seaman, co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network; and Dr. George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Jensen, who ran the program for 20 years, says he had a sense of déjà vu when going through this year’s list. Variations on the U.S.-arms-dealing, carcinogenic-cosmetics and Norplant stories have all appeared on previous Proj-ect Censored lists. "It is absolutely necessary to keep pointing out these stories," Jensen says, adding that some stories take years to reach the surface. Take the article featured on the proj-ect’s 1986 list that revealed that the U.S. government had performed radiation tests on unwitting citizens. The issue finally caught fire in 1994 after Eileen Welsome of the Albuquerque Tribunewon a Pulitzer Prize for the story. A Word From Our Censors Phillips says the project defines censorship broadly. "Censorship to us is interference with the free flow of information in our society," he says. The top "censored" stories weren’t necessarily suppressed by any government agency — or even by the media itself. In some cases the stories even appeared in one or two major news outlets — but according to Phillips, they never got the ongoing attention they deserved. Still, some mainstream-media veterans take issue with the project’s title and with the implication that they intentionally suppress stories that are too controversial. "I don’t believe there is some grand conspiracy or plot," says Marshall Loeb, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. "I don’t believe that editors get together in some corner room with every issue and decide what’s ‘clean’ and what isn’t." Frank McCulloch, former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, says that the reason important stories get lost is not censorship but a combination of factors, including ownership of media by corporations that reward and promote those who focus on the bottom line. "That creates a climate in the newsroom where you don’t have anyone pushing for those big, difficult and sometimes dull stories," McCulloch says. "It’s a much more subtle, pervasive influence than something you would call censorship." Phillips agrees that censorship is not the result of some hidden conspiracy but, as McCulloch suggests, of the ownership structure of the news industry. The country’s 11 major media corporations — which control the majority of the news Americans see, hear and read — had 155 directors on their boards in 1996. Between them, those 155 people also hold 144 directorships on the boards of Fortune 1,000 corporations in the United States. "It’s not in any way a conspiracy theory to suggest that this small group of people decides what type of news most Americans see," Phillips says. "It’s verging on monopoly, a monopoly driven by self-interest and the pursuit of corporate profits." Loeb also says he wasn’t surprised by the revelation that the United States sells arms abroad. He pointed to a powerful three-part series on the subject by Rolling Stonewriter William Greider. But the fact that some aspects of a story have appeared in print somewhere, Bagdikian says, does not mean that it has been adequately reported. "It isn’t a question that [a story] never appeared in the major media," Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, told us. "It’s just that it appeared and quickly disappeared. And we all know that you don’t impact the political process or public opinion with a single story." Following are the Top 10 underreported stories of 1997: