E-Mail This Article to a Friend How big media shortchange the public Ten key stories the press and broadcasters ignored BY CAMILLE T. TAIARA

NOT SINCE the late 1960s have so many threats to American ideals been front and center in daily events. In the past year, the rich have flourished at the expense of the poor and the middle class. Big business has gained unprecedented control over the American political system, even as citizens’ rights to redress injustice have been steadily eroded.

Yet the mainstream press glosses over the worst features of our times and gluts the national dialogue with endless servings of trivia and sensationalism. The increasing consolidation of the US media only enables this crisis.

In late July, more than 600 people showed up in Monterey, California, to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on ownership concentration in the news media. It was a diverse group — young and old, activists and workers — but they had a consistent message: the mainstream news media were doing a deplorable job of covering the day’s most important stories.

That’s no surprise: consolidation of the media in the hands of a few corporate Goliaths has resulted in fewer people creating more of the content we see, hear, and read. One effect has been a narrower range of perspectives. Another is the virtual disappearance of hard-hitting, original, investigative reporting.

"Corporate media has abdicated their responsibility to the First Amendment to keep the American electorate informed about important issues in society and instead serves up a pabulum of junk-food news," says Peter Phillips, head of Project Censored, a media-research initiative at Sonoma State University, in Northern California.

Every year, researchers at Project Censored pick through volumes of print and broadcast news to see which of the year’s most important stories, issues, and trends aren’t receiving the kind of attention they deserve. Phillips and his team acknowledge that many of these stories weren’t "censored" in the traditional sense of the word: no government agency blocked their publication. And some even appeared — briefly, and without follow-up — in mainstream journals.

But according to Project Censored, every one of this year’s topics merited prominent placement on the evening news and in daily newspapers. Instead, they went virtually ignored.

The following top-10 list is not a collection of isolated neglected scandals, but a far more troubling overview of larger issues that have been expunged from the national dialogue.

This year’s list speaks directly to the point FCC critics have raised: stories that address fundamental issues of wealth concentration and big-business dominance of the political agenda are almost entirely missing from the national debate. From the dramatic increase in wealth inequality in the United States and the wholesale giveaway of the nation’s natural resources to the Bush administration’s attack on corporate and political accountability, events and trends that ought to be dominating the presidential campaign and commanding our attention are missing from TV screens and front pages.

1) Wealth inequality in the 21st century threatens economy and democracy

As the mainstream news media recite the official line about the nation’s supposed economic recovery, a key point has been missing: wealth inequality in the United States has almost doubled over the past 30 years.

In fact, the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances supplement on high-income families shows that in 1998, the richest one percent of households owned 38 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top five percent owned almost 60 percent of the wealth.

"We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country," New York University economics professor Edward Wolff told Third World Traveler.

But that’s just part of the problem. "Most Americans believe we take from people at the top to benefit those below," Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston said in a BuzzFlash.com interview. But our tax system is actually set up so that "people who make $30,000 to $500,000 ... give relief to those who make millions or tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year."

The United States is not alone: today, almost one-sixth of the world’s population — 940 million people — "already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without water, sanitation, public services, or legal security," wrote John Vidal in the Guardian. A recent UN report predicted that, absent drastic change to reverse "a form of colonialism that is probably more stringent than the original," one in every three people worldwide will live in slums within 30 years. That’s a bigger threat to democracy and global stability than Al Qaeda and international terrorism.

2) Ashcroft versus the human-rights law that holds corporations accountable

For decades, the United States has trained right-wing insurgents and torturers, toppled democratically elected governments, and propped up brutal dictatorships abroad — all in the interest of corporate profits. But rarely are the agents of repression ever held accountable for the tens of thousands of deaths and the brutal cycles of poverty, subjugation, environmental destruction, and violence they leave in their wake. Indeed, many foreign tyrants go on to enjoy plush retirement right here in the United States.

But recently, lawyers have found a way to seek at least a modicum of justice for victims. The Alien Tort Claims Act, a 215-year-old law originally passed to prosecute pirates for crimes committed on the high seas, allows noncitizens to sue any individual or corporation present on US soil.

Human-rights lawyers have pursued 100 cases under ATCA since 1980. Defendants have included former high-ranking government and military officials from El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, the Philippines (including ex-president Ferdinand Marcos), Indonesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. And although the law can be used only to pursue monetary damages, not prison time, it has often resulted in victims being awarded millions — and perpetrators have sometimes fled the country rather than pay up.

Ten years ago, victims began using the act to go after corporate profiteers, too. It was thanks to ATCA, for example, that Nazi Holocaust survivors were able to seek redress from the Swiss banks and companies that profited from the slave labor of concentration-camp internees during World War II.

But Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department has set its sights on the act, claiming in a brief last year that the law threatens "important foreign policy interests" associated with the war on terrorism. Yet hardly a word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush administration’s attack on the one significant avenue of legal recourse left in the US for victims seeking redress for human-rights violations.