Redacted Tonight (Season 4, Episode #271): covering the most under-reported news stories of 2018 – 2019

Redacted Tonight (Season 4, Episode #271)” (RT America, 14 December 2019)

In this episode, Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp runs through several stories picked up by Project Censored’s annual Top 25 Censored Stories that were ignored by the United States news media in 2019 in his usual shouty and sarcastic style. Project Censored is a venture based at Sonoma State University in northern California that for over 40 years has been tracking down the most under-reported news stories in each 12-month period from July one year to June the next year and reporting them in book format. Astonishingly Camp’s voice is still strong and strident and the show’s style of presentation is brisk, mixing fact with barbs aimed at the US government (in particular, US President Donald Trump’s administration) and global corporations. This is one news / current affairs program that keeps viewers wide-eyed and on their toes, not least for the humour as well as actual news items that the mainstream corporate news media ignores if such stories don’t conform with a neoconservative political / economic / social agenda.

Among the more interesting and sobering stories include Facebook reinventing itself as a tool of United States foreign policy by partnering with US-based NATO think-tank The Atlantic Council and other US government or non-government organisations; the targeting and monitoring of journalists and their work by the US Justice Department; the health problems and issues raised by 5G technology; the spread of slavery throughout the world; the growth of programs connecting school children with farms in their communities which lead to the creation of jobs within those communities and the improved health of students; the influence of the Israeli lobby and its allies in US Federal politics as revealed by a suppressed Al Jazeera documentary; and the continued investment of US oil and gas corporations in projects that are forecast to release 120 billion tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere . Some of these stories are mentioned in passing by Camp and others get much more detail; one story on global pharmaceutical companies’ failure to develop two-thirds of urgently needed medical treatments in Third World companies gets a fuller development in a separate segment by Redacted Tonight regular reporter Natalie McGill.

Of course the half-hour format did not allow Camp to cover all 25 stories that Project Censored selected as the most neglected important stories (though halfway through the show Camp did go off on a tangent to woffle about something vaguely related to a previous issue) and perhaps the segment presented by Anders Lee on a climate change conference in Spain could have been tacked onto a different Redacted Tonight episode. A general theme running through most stories that Camp / Redacted Tonight chose to highlight was how they represent different aspects of the global trend towards corporatisation of global societies and natural environments for the benefit and self-interest of a few corporations and a few individuals. So even stories of a heartwarming nature, such as US public schools’ campaign to bring children and farms closer, or moves by indigenous organisations around the world to protect the Amazon tropical rainforest region are censored because they represent moves by communities to spurn the values and neoliberal agendas of globalisation and privatisation. Stories that did not get a mention were often those particular to the United States: stories such as police neglect of sexual assault cases in which immigrant children were the victims, or women in anti-abortion states facing criminal charges leading to imprisonment if they miscarried or gave birth to stillborn children; or stories that were similar to ones Camp had already mentioned.

In some respects, I was disappointed that Camp didn’t list all the top 25 censored stories found by Project Censored and that some that were mentioned were over and done with in less than one or two minutes. I’m sure the program could have easily expanded to an hour with more breaks if he had done so, though perhaps he’d have to sit down a bit and gulp some water throughout. The episode best serves as an introduction to the work that the Project Censored people do and to the censored stories themselves, the details of which can be found at the Project Censored website.