"The Unbearable Lameness of Project Censored" is Unbearably Lame

Political contrarianism exists in a kind of double bind: you have to know when to deploy it, for it isn't universally applicable; but if you know when to deploy it, you may not need to. It can be a liberative strategy by allowing you to free yourself from the hegemonic ideologies of the elite. In other words, sometimes you can find the truth by thinking the opposite of what those around you think, but you can't always find the truth that way.

It's fashionable on the left these days to act the Contrarian Fool; you know, Mumia really deserves to be executed; the Seattle protesters were poseurs, since some of them were wearing Nikes while criticizing Nike; and now, courtesy of Brooke Biggs in Mother Jones, we learn that Project Censored is "unbearably lame".

All these things may in fact be true, but the problem with most left contrarian attacks on the left is that they are long on posturing and very short on argument, documentation, or critical analysis. (And why do left attacks on the left always end up as a kind of quasi-Republicanism? Can't someone attack the left, from the left, without sounding like Newt Gingrich on a good day?) And so it goes with Brooke Biggs's article on the Project Censored's 1999 report, an article which contains numerous name-callings and distortions but lacks any rigorous analysis or argument. The range of perjoratives she deploys alone is dizzying: "predictable and boring", "irrelevant, laughable, and cheesy".

How has Biggs survived with such a farcically simplistic notion of censorship? It is, she assures us, "a big, scary word," so scary, apparently, that she was too scared to think clearly about it. And, even worse, Biggs appeals to the most reactionary, conspiratorial, and parodic notion of censorship: Censorship, she assures us a bit too breathlessly, "implies that some covert cabal somewhere is conspiring to keep The Truth from The People." Yeah censorship "implies" that if you're a Republican, a media mogul, or otherwise insane. If you've read any left media analysis -- any of Norman Solomon, Robert McChesney, Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky -- then you can't fail to know that censorship and the suppression of dissent is a product of structural forces, and that the mainstream media often "covers" a story simply by parroting the official line of government sources.

Biggs is so desperate for an argument or evidence to support her claim that she even appeals to an obvious and ultimately trivial mistake in the Project Censored Web site -- where "Liberation" mistakenly appears as "Libertarian". And her defense of Clinton on the issue of Turkey's persecution of the Kurds takes us into some kind of Twilight Zone of Toadying For the Powerful; that Clinton admitted in 1995 that US arms were used by Turkish thugs to exterminate Kurds is no bar to it being a censored story in 1999 when the Turkish attacks on the Kurds hadn't stopped and may have escalated.

In order to actually validate her claims about Project Censored, Biggs would have needed to address some or all of these questions:

• Why aren't these stories as newsworthy as the others the mainstream media obsesses about? Every single story on Project Censored's list is less newsworthy than, say, the plight of Elian Gonzalez?
• What kinds of reasons could there be for the lack of mainstream attention to these stories?
• Why is appearing in print somewhere counter-evidence that the mainstream media has ignored these stories to such a degree as to constitute censorship?
• Why is the view that says censorship is often a subtle, yet important matter of perspective, issue-framing, and limits on what is thinkable so obviously wrong?

Biggs hints at none of these points. There may be valid criticisms of Project Censored's operative concept of censorship, though, having just finished the 1999 Project Censored book, I didn't see anything glaringly problematic. If it has flaws, you won't learn about them from Biggs, and they're dwarfed by the structual flaws in the corporate media system and in Biggs's foolishly contrarian attack.

Censorship is often a subtle, but no less real phenomenon. Subtle but important phenomena deserve a more discerning analysis than Mother Jones saw fit to give to Project Censored. And for that they should be ashamed.