Project Censored director Peter Phillips sent this emailed response to my June 14 essay:
.
I will post it here (uncensored, of course!) and then, a few minutes from now, post a reply as a comment...
Yes, Seven Stories is a private for profit business, but they are certainly not one of the big exploitive houses, and they publish a lot of good progressive material and they too barely get by. Project Censored raises money to keep our two employees paid and cover our overhead primarily by selling the annual yearbook through our website and direct mail. Seven stories provides the books at their cost. Over 100 students a year participate and yes they earn college credit for the effort and many of them go off into the world to do good work for human betterment and it is the experience of Project Censored that gives them a foundation. You are also correct in saying that the selling of 15,000 books in English, and 1000s more in Spanish, Arabic, and Italian is probably not reaching as many people as your website. However, the people who read the book are mostly people who would not have been likely to have seen your work in the first place. In addition, over 12 million people a year visit the Project Censored website, where your story would have been linked.
It is honorable that you live low income. My personal goal is to find income levels that meet minimum needs for everyone in the world and I fully support the UN declaration of human rights.
So what are you really mad with us about? Our national judges are listed in the yearbook, and we have been doing the same process for 31 years. It would be very cool if we could give $ awards to the journalists, but we barely have enough income to keep our doors open. We do believe in paying a living wage to our two employees with full fringe benefits.
We would be happy to have you review the synopsis of the four stories selected for the Mexico election story this year, all you need to do was ask. We are on a tight deadline as we get the book ready for the Fall Semester each year, and it is used in classrooms all over the county.
Yes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders sell our book. So does Working Assets, and hundreds of small independent bookstores like North Light Books here in Cotati. In fact I lead the anti Barnes and Noble effort when our university president sold off our state run bookstore last year.
I totally support the idea of building independent media, which is exactly what Project Censored has been doing for 31 years.
Our national judges represent a broad both academics and non-academics there names are listed below.
I can be reached directly at 707-664-2588
Sincerely,
Peter Phillips
PROJECT CENSORED 2007 NATIONAL JUDGES
ROBIN ANDERSEN, associate professor and chair, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University
LIANE CLORFENE-CASTEN, cofounder and president of Chicago Media Watch,.award-winning journalist with credits in national periodicals such as E Magzine, The Nation, Mother Jones, Ms., Environmental Health Perspectives, In These Times, and Business Ethics. She is the author of Breast Cancer: Poisons, Profits, and Prevention.
LENORE FOERSTEL, Women for Mutual Security, facilitator of the Progressive International Media Exchange (PRIME)
ROBERT HACKETT, professor, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University; Co-director of News Watch Canada since 1993..His most recent publications include Democratizing Global Media: One World, Many Struggles (Co-Edited With Yuezhi Zhao, 2005), And Remaking Media: The Struggle To Democratize Public Communication (With William K. Carroll, 2006)
CARL JENSEN, professor emeritus communication studies, Sonoma State University, founder and former director of Project Censored; author of Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News and Why (1990-1996) and 20 Years of Censored News (1997)
SUT JHALLY, professor of communications and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, University of Massachusetts
NICHOLAS JOHNSON*, professor, College of Law, University of Iowa; former FCC Commissioner (1966-1973); author of How to Talk Back to Your Television Set
RHODA H. KARPATKIN, president of Consumers Union, non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports
CHARLES L. KLOTZER, editor and publisher emeritus, St. Louis Journalism Review
NANCY KRANICH, past president of the American Library Association (ALA)
JUDITH KRUG, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association (ALA); editor of Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom; Freedom to Read Foundation News; and Intellectual Freedom Action News
MARTIN LEE, investigative journalist, media critic and author. He was an original founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting in New York and former editor of Extra Magazine.
DENNIS LOO, Associate professor of Sociology at California State University Polytechnic university, Pomona, Co-editor of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney, Seven Stories press, 2006
WILLIAM LUTZ, professor of English, Rutgers University; former editor of The Quarterly Review of Doublespeak; author of The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone’s Saying Anymore (1966)
JULIANNE MALVEAUX, PH.D., economist and columnist, King Features and Pacifica radio talk show host
MARK CRISPIN MILLER, professor of media Ecology, New York University; director of the Project on Media Ownership
BRIAN MURPHY, Associate Professor Communications Studies Niagara University specializing in Media Programming and Management, Investigation and Reporting, Media History and Theory and International Communication.
JACK L. NELSON,* professor emeritus, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University; author of 16 books, including Critical Issues in Education (1996), and more than 150 articles
MICHAEL PARENTI, political analyst, a lecturer, and author of numerous books, including The Culture Struggle, 2006. Superpatriotism, 2004. The Assassination of Julius Caesar, A People's History of Ancient Rome 2003. The Terrorism Trap, September 11 and Beyond, 2002. Democracy for the Few, 2001
BARBARA SEAMAN, lecturer; author of The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth (Hyperion 2003); The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill; Free and Female; Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones; and other books; cofounder of the National Women’s Health Network
NANCY SNOW, professor, author and writer; College of Communications, California State University-Fullerton; Senior Fellow, USC Center on Public Diplomacy; Adjunct Professor, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication; author, Propaganda, Inc. (Seven Stories, 2002), Information War (Seven Stories, 2004), co-editor with Yahya R. Kamalipour, War, Media and Propaganda (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
SHEILA RABB WEIDENFELD,* president of D.C. Productions, Ltd.; former press secretary to Betty Ford
*Indicates having been a Project Censored judge since our founding in 1976
No Thanks, Again
Submitted June 18, 2007 - 4:15 pm by Al GiordanoYou ask: "So what are you really mad with us about?"
There's nothing in my very politely worded rejection of the 2007 Project Censored award that expresses any such thing as being "mad with" you or your organization. This is not personal. It's about ethics and the struggle of my class of workers against abuse and over-mediation (in a word, censorship, a theme that after 31 years of running Project Censored I would think you might be more sympathetic and alert to the matter). In any case, I can't force careful reading of my words on you or anybody else. Your presumptions are your own.
I made my case, based on the facts, as to why I don't consider donating my work to Seven Stories Press to be any kind of "award," or to help my work as an investigative journalist in any way. I also stated, clearly, that the "award" doesn't forward our work here in ways consistent with our mission, and in fact would harm our credibility through association with a publishing house that belongs to a bottom-feeding and unethical publisher. That's not a reference to you, but to Dan Simon, the owner of Seven Stories Press.
Upon reading your explanation that Mr. Simon lets your organization sell books "at cost" I was briefly tempted to test that claim, and agree to allow my work be used in this year's Project Censored book on the condition that Seven Stories also donate to your organization the profits it makes through distributing those books (through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etcetera, its own website, and direct distribution to book stores). If 15,000 books are involved that would represent a considerable rise in your budget, and would allow you to better help the work of next year's journalists in the ways you tell me you can't do in 2007.
But after thinking about that idea a little more, I still would not be able to look at myself in the mirror, or into the eyes of those that rely on me to hold and keep certain principles high, knowing that I had lent my good name to a bad person for his for-profit business. Freedom of association includes the freedom to not associate.
But I really must ask: Is that really an "award" you offered me? Or is it a market product? You write:
Yes, I am aware that the Project Censored website has a comparable readership to that of Narco News, and that each site has some readers in common and many more that don't consult both sites. And you are always free to link to any story online that you or your student-faculty judges deem worthy. The way you state it, though, reveals that the merits of a story, and the labor of your 250 student and professor judges, are thrown overboard simply because a writer exercizes his right not to associate with a third party. It gives the strong impression that the journalists and the awards are merely secondary props for the market product of the book.
To wit: If your 250 judges deem a work worthy, nothing stops you from linking to it from your website. But, no, you've placed a condition on it: That the writer donate his work to the commercial aspect of the project. When you say "your story would have been linked" you establish the conditional nature of your award. So, it's not really about the merits of a work of journalism, is it? It's about a business deal: "Let us sell your work and we'll give you an 'award' in exchange, and we'll link to your work. But if you don't let us sell your work, we're not going to link to it."
When is an "award" not an award? When it is conditioned upon a third-party business deal.
Often people ask me what we mean by "authentic journalism" and why we don't use the term "alternative journalism" to describe what we do. This adventure in awards that are not awards provides one example of the line between the two. Here, there is never any "quid pro quo." On Narco News, we don't "trade links" or coverage in exchange for anything. If a story is worthwhile on its merits, we link to it, asking for nothing in return. But too often "alternative media" has become a cesspool of log-rolling and "you scratch my back if I scratch yours." And the entire genre has lost credibility with the public as a result.
If my investigations and reporting on the 2006 electoral fraud in Mexico are worthwhile as an example of the kind of journalism you and your judges want to promote, there is no permission needed to merely link to it. I can't stop you. And it's no skin of my back if you do or don't. I just think it's interesting that you condition said linking on my donation of my work to a third party commercial publishing house. Sure, he's washing your back, and you're washing his. But that doesn't remove the stain on anybody.
This is exactly how "alternative journalism" became corrupted. I certainly can't and won't tell you how to run your project. But I can respectfully suggest that if your commercial publisher was really so damn "progressive" (and not just pretending to be so in order to make money) and donated to Project Censored his profits on each year's book (that are separate and apart from whatever number of books he sells you at cost, and because none of the 25 authors get royalties, are in fact higher on that book than on others in his collection), then, voila!, you would have the resources to support the work of investigative journalists and you wouldn't have to plead poor mouth when your awardees can't even afford to attend your "award" ceremony, much less encounter the resources they need to investigate and write the next story.
If you consider a worker insisting on his dignity as a matter of "being mad with you," you miss the point entirely. Anger is not the operative emotion here. Pity, disappointment, and honor perhaps are.
But honor, in particular, is a little understood word when capital reaches its greedy hands into "alternative media" projects and begins to force them to operate by the same inhuman market rules as any other business.
From somewhere in a country called América,
Al Giordano