The best news stories of the year are often ones that no one knows about. And that’s where Project Censored comes in. Professor of History at Diablo Valley & Director of Project Censored, Mickey Huff joins me to discuss what Project Censored is, and how it works to bring attention to overlooked news stories.

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Mason Vera Paine and Mickey Huff Interview Transcription

Mason Paine:  Professor of History at Diablo Valley and Director of Project Censored Mickey Huff joins me to discuss what Project Censored is and how it works to bring attention to overlook news stories. Thanks for joining me, Mickey.

Mickey Huff: It's an honor to be here.

 Mason Paine: So tell me, how did Project Censored start?

Mickey Huff: Project Censored was founded in 1976 at Sonoma State University in Northern California, which is just outside at the San Francisco Bay Area, founded by Carl Jensen, who had a background in communications, journalism, sociology of media. And the project began as a research initiative based on his observations of the way that the establishment press covered the Watergate scandal, which had happened earlier and led to President Richard Nixon's resignation by 1974. By 1976, not only, of course, had a lot come out about Watergate, but a lot more came out about the many scandals that were happening during the Nixon administration and, of course, the Johnson administration, but particularly around the Nixon administration of Watergate. Jensen noted that it took a while for the legacy press to get these stories out to the public in a timely manner. And he figured he kind of fancied himself as a media savvy character. Now, look, this is the 70s, so it's not Internet. There's no cable. There's just networks and legacy papers and radio. So it's a different media ecosystem at the time. But what Jensen noted was that there were independent outlets or smaller outlets that weren't part of the corporate media or legacy media that actually were reporting on a lot of these kind of things that were happening in an administration.

Mickey Huff: And it led him to this question, that's the genesis of Project Censored. And that was, what else don't we know that some outlets cover and some independent or alternative outlets cover, but most people never hear about them unless they're amplified by the legacy press or the network news, et cetera. Now, I'll translate that into more contemporaneous terms with cable and the Internet and social media and everything else. But Jensen then led that question to students, and he said, I want to do a project where you research the independent and alternative press for factual stories of significance. And I want you to then comb through them and see where the corporate media actually cover these stories. And if they do, how do they cover them? But if they don't, why don't they cover them? And that was the genesis of Project Censored going back to 1976, which then culminated into an annual report on the top Censored stories. Jensen pulled together a group of expert journalists and media scholars to judge stories, but it was all in the guise of student research and what we now refer to as critical media literacy, pedagogy or education. And media literacy is a pretty big buzzword these days.

Mickey Huff: But back in the 70s, people didn't talk a lot about media literacy or critical media literacy in that way. Jensen was really pioneering. He really pioneered Project Centered as one of the first major news literacy organizations in the United States. We went on to publish a book a year. We've got three documentaries.