Censored 2012 (31 page)

Over fifteen years after Jensen compiled these Junk Food News categories, they sadly not only continue, but also intertwine: notice how there is significant overlap between the recent examples—political news overlaps with sex news, crazed news, brand name news, and so on. The Junk Food News matrix has grown out of control, with entertainment thriving and substantive news withering. And when real news
is
covered in the mass media, it is covered with a concerning lack of substance called News Abuse, the phenomenon where a story may have a newsworthy component to it, but the coverage of it veers off into the trivial and inconsequential, which includes framing and omission as a major part of media propaganda.

With the advent of round-the-clock news coverage of daily world events, the time to cover important stories has maxed out, but coverage has in fact dropped precipitously in terms of corporate media coverage of relevant stories. Several media scholars and journalists, along with Project Censored, have argued that the news has become more Junk-addled and Abused than ever. In 1994, Jensen said, “We’re suffering from news inflation—there seems to be more of it than ever before—and it isn’t worth as much as it used to be.”
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Sadly, that seems even truer today than ever. There is almost an inverse correlation between media time on the 24/7 news outlets and actual news coverage as much of the “news” is now more opinion journalism, News Abuse, or just Junk Food News, and much of it is simply repeated around the clock. Further, it is not just that there is a plethora of Junk Food News across the airwaves and cyber optic cables, it is that this steady diet of trash crowds out what independent journalists are covering (i.e. what’s really going on in the world yet is not widely broadcast to the public).

Our news cycle has become not unlike a 7-11: open for business 24/7, aisles overflowing with empty calories. Here are some of the low-lights of this past year’s Junk Food News alongside what the corporate media could have been serving viewers if they were exercising sound news judgment and providing the public with information necessary for a healthy democracy.

Given that Junk Food News is now more ubiquitous than ever, we at Project Censored no longer rank “The Top Ten Junk Food Stories of the Year.” The ranking, while amusing, is no longer a way to mark how far off course corporate news media have gone. Instead, we highlight some of the more egregious examples, oft in thematic fashion and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, to show our contempt for those in corporate media that still claim censorship doesn’t happen and rather that news judgment is what determines coverage. Given the proliferation of Junk Food News and the sheer escalation of its coverage, it is clear that news judgment has gone horribly awry. Below are some of the past year’s top stories Americans couldn’t ignore if they tried, despite their complete inanity, and what corporate media could have been covering instead.

America’s severance from reality is abetted by the corporate media’s inundation of sensationalized trivialities, which grossly distort the context and relevance of many issues in the mainstream political discourse. Here are a few significant examples from the past year that could be summed up under the headline “Vicarious Anger Mismanagement: Insane is the New Fame.”

During the first four days of the corporate media’s fanatical coverage of actor Charlie Sheen’s drug-addled, tiger-blooded neurosis, four more US soldiers were killed in combat in Afghanistan. Yet, CNN only took notice
⁷
after a Facebook campaign initiated by a fellow soldier went viral, which pitted the coverage of fallen heroes against the celebrity addict. The campaign galvanized tens of thousands of people to write the following on their Facebook pages:

In addition to nonstop updates about Charlie Sheen’s “winning” streak, ABC’s
20/20
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and CNN’s Piers Morgan
⁹
cleared hour-long time slots for Sheen to rant about his wild escapades and delusions of grandeur.
Good Morning America
also dedicated an entire show to broadcast live from Sheen’s Hollywood home for a revelation not to be missed: his urine drug test results. MSNBC ran and reran a “documentary” of Sheen over several weekends.
¹⁰

Showbiz veteran Charlie Sheen and his gaggle of euphemisms became quintessential brand name news, virally marketed by frothing media outlets worldwide. The public platform given to his breakdown resulted in his gaining a record-breaking 1 million Twitter followers in just one day, a feat which begat another onslaught of corporate news coverage.
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Meanwhile, less than two weeks later, the devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima caused a brief switch in coverage to focus on the tragedy. This was not to last long, though: once Donald Trump, billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star, announced his presidential run and reignited the distracting “Birther” controversy about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the corporate media unquestioningly followed suit, propelling the non-issue to the forefront of political discourse.
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There were few discussions about the global implications of Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown and the importance of pursuing sustainable energy alternatives. Instead of focusing on the dangers of the twenty-three nuclear reactors in the US designed almost identically to those in Fukushima,
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the corporate media irresponsibly dwelled on Trump’s crazed news “Birther” claims. Although the Fukushima crisis still loomed heavily, the media’s focus shifted again, along with the American public’s attention span.

As Charlie Sheen’s downward spiral and Trump’s “Birther” campaign reigned supreme in the corporate press, the US government continued its controversial bombing campaign against Libya unabated,
¹⁴
potentially in
violation of international law—something the nation’s media should likely address instead of the latest Sheen or Trump distractions. The obsession over such superficialities dilutes rational debate on American foreign policy, like the feasibility of spending forty million dollars a month in Libya
¹⁵
when our country is already racked with debt, or the sheer contradiction of bombing other countries for “humanitarian” reasons.

When the popular reality television show “Dancing With the Stars” approached its season finale, the airwaves became saturated with the devastating news that Bristol Palin’s winning streak on the show might have been rigged by Tea Party enthusiasts. This meaningless topic wasn’t just hot on
Entertainment Tonight
or TMZ, but was extensively covered in Time,
¹⁶
CNN,
¹⁷
the
Washington
Post,
¹⁸
NPR,
¹⁹
and a slew of other corporate media outlets, which seemed far more engrossed in the potential fraud than in the documented national election irregularities of the past decade. The cultural fixation on the Palin family’s crazy antics—from Sarah Palin’s misquotes of important facts of American history to Bristol’s plastic surgery and pregnancy out of wedlock—props up the notion in the mainstream that the more insane one acts, the more fame one is awarded.

Thanks to the corporate media’s crazed and yo-yo “news” coverage of everything Palin, she has turned into one of the most titillating household showbiz names in the US despite her potentially making a mockery of the political process in her quest for celebrity. Yet, her role in the establishment is an enigma—one day she’s a politician, the next she’s starring in a reality TV-show about her “down home” Alaskan lifestyle. The lines are blurred by the corporate news media, and the public becomes slack-jawed and Palinized as a result of this incessant matrix of Junk Food News and News Abuse.
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The week prior to the earth-shattering revelation that Bristol Palin might not be worthy of the “Dancing with the Stars” trophy, two important stories cycled through the corporate media with very little discussion about their political and societal repercussions. Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, met with Google and Facebook
²¹
to coordinate an intensified push to expand online government wiretapping.
These extensions of online surveillance could effectively create a “chilling effect” among internet users, who might suppress or monitor their speech more carefully in fear of being penalized by the government.

Another story overshadowed by Palin melodrama was that of US Army Sergeant Chuck Luther.
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Sergeant Luther gave heart-wrenching congressional testimony describing his experience of being tortured at the hands of fellow US Army officials. He was confined to a small closet and deprived of sleep for a month until he signed documents that made him ineligible to receive health benefits for wounds incurred during combat. This story could have exposed a systemic problem of abuse and censorship all the way up the military chain of command if it were properly covered and investigated.

The establishment press’s version of political news exploits the personal lives of political players like Trump and Palin, instead of dissecting their stances on domestic or foreign policy. By sensationalizing inane trivialities and underreporting the real news, Junk Food News coverage grossly distorts the context and relevance of important issues in the political discourse. Whatever topics the corporate press deems worthy enough to cover at length will invariably skew the public’s perception away from the issues that should be most relevant to their lives: food, water, shelter, jobs, and education in relation to so-called defense spending—not sex scandals, drug abuse, or “reality” television.

Before 2010, the word “junk” mostly referred to “trash,” or “something of little meaning, worth, or significance,” according to family-friendly dictionaries. After everyman Jon Tyner recorded his confrontation with agents of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at San Diego Airport over refusing to submit to a groin check, the word “junk” took on a new meaning, quite literally.
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“Touch my junk, and I’ll have you
arrested,” Tyner told TSA agents over a thirty-minute cell-phone recording which earned Tyner fifteen minutes of fame, as his story was featured on the
Huffington Post
and retold across the corporate media.
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Tyner became a celebrity known as “The Junk Man,” and was elevated by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer to the level of a “folk hero,” singing the “anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party Patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm-election voter,” one fighting against “Obamacare” and other big government impositions.
²⁶
While “The Junk Man” provoked a newsworthy discussion about the invasiveness of TSA’s security procedures, which included full-body scans and pat-downs for those who “opt-out,” the coverage quickly veered into a circus of double entendre highlighting the fad of the catchphrase.
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“So much for hiding your junk: now it’s out of the closet, and on mouse pads and panties,” reported CNN’s Jeanne Moo, referencing a segment devoted to the catchphrase, which highlighted products and parodies inspired by it.
²⁸
Moo’s narration—filled with puns playing on the new definition of junk—was itself a parody of news: the report focused not on the security procedures, but on the efforts to cash in on the catchphrase and turn it into panties and other mass-manufactured junk (literally).

While Tyner may have made “junk” a household word, quarterback Brett Favre and New York State Representative Anthony Weiner made news for purportedly texting theirs to women. Much like Tiger Woods the year before,
²⁹
superstar Favre found himself in hot water when the sports website
Deadspin
posted a video with recordings and an e-mail message which they claim were sent by Favre to model Jenn Sterger, culminating with an image of his penis. The post was viewed over five million times, shared on Facebook over thirty-two thousand times, and was covered in the corporate media by the Associated Press (AP),
USA Today
, and CNN, among others.
³⁰
The
Huffington Post
posted a poll asking readers if they believed it was really Favre’s “junk” (60 percent believed so).
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The incident not only made Sterger famous, much like the women in the Tiger Woods scandal, but also pushed MTV to run a Public Service Announcement to discourage “teens from sending naughty photos.”
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Apparently, New York Representative Anthony Weiner did not watch MTV’s PSAs on the dangers of sexting, as he was caught—like Favre—sharing illicit photos with women online.
“Weinergate” became the dubious title of the corporate news media’s fascination with Weiner’s exchange of messages and photos with various women online. According to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Weiner was “easily the top newsmaker” for the week of June 6 to 12, 2011, more than doubling the number of stories focused on President Barack Obama.
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Pew called it “the scandal that launched a thousand puns,” such as the
Philadelphia Daily News
front-page headline “Weiner Bares All.”
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Even Favre’s “sexting victim” Sterger believed the coverage of Weiner was excessive, calling it “overplayed.”