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Junk Food News
STORIES THE CORPORATE MEDIA FED YOU INSTEAD OF THE GOOD STUFF
By Terelle Jerricks
injury and long-term health issues suffered
by the American military personnel who
were attacked. Instead, Americans were
wrapped in a prolonged mourning ritual of
a sports hero with a history complicated by
sexual assault—a past muted by Bryant’s
celebrity.
The “Junk Food News” chapter authors
remarked upon the hyper-focus on the
death toll numbers on a daily basis during
a moment in which the Trump adminis
tration was actively refusing to provide
national guidance and coordination. In their
view, this lack of leadership by the Trump
administration led to the proliferation of
fake cures and scams being peddled by mod
ern-day snake oil salesmen and hucksters.
The other issue, the authors pointed out, is
that despite all the reporting on death tolls,
the reporting of corporate-owned media
still managed to overlook the toll the coro-
navirus and federal inaction is having on
the most vulnerable in the United States—
the indigenous communities.
“Poverty, limited access to health care,
densely populated households, and comor-
bid conditions all place this community at
greater risk than the vast majority of the
U.S. populace. Experts say that entire tribes
could be wiped out due to the pandemic,
as households in close proximity to one
another create an opportune environment
for the virus to spread quickly.”
Underlying the authors’ parallel analy
sis and critiques of the corporate media’s
reporting on the pandemic is the belief that
the market-based model of news produc
tion is toxic to a democracy and toxic to a
healthy body politic. Indeed, the conclusion
that remains after reading the rest of State
of the Free Press is that the market-based
model of news production and consump
tion renders a body-politic incapable of
fighting off the infectious diseases called
“fake news” and “truth decay.”
Fortunately, the writers of State of the
Free Press don’t just lay out the problem
without possible solutions. State of the Free
Press editors Andy Lee Roth and Mickey
Huff set the tone in the sixth chapter,
“Media Democracy in Action,” by quoting
Timothy Snyder from On Tyranny: “It is
your ability to discern facts that makes you
an individual, and our collective trust in
common knowledge that makes us a soci
ety. The individual who investigates is also
the citizen who builds.”
In this chapter, Roth and Huff preface
the ways State of the Free Press contributors
demonstrate how to build the capacity of
a people to discern facts and build a more
civil society. In the pages that follow, space
is made for reporting on the emergence of
new platforms and protections for whis
tleblowers who risk their reputations and
livelihoods to call out abuses of power and
educational settings in which young people
can question the politics of media repre
sentations and develop their identities as
conscientious community members and
global citizens.
After they’ve published it for nearly 45
years, it’s a wonder that the editors of State
of the Free Press have not become cynical
about their work. It’s not as if the prob
lems have grown more visible and easier to
address or as if this world’s power elite has
become less greedy and less
corrupt. Random Lengths News
asked the editing duo why it is
that after 45 years State of the
Free Press has not lost hope
and has continued this work.
The answers they provided
are two-fold when boiled
down to their essence: The
first reason is the fact that
there’s still quality work
being produced even now,
despite the rise of modern-day
authoritarianism and the
increase in censorship because
of it.
“Cynicism, while deserved,
needs to be put in context
and even put aside if we are
to work toward making a
more democratic, transparent
and diverse free press,” Huff
explained. “While State of
the Free Press calls out pro
paganda and censorship in
the corporate press, we also
highlight the important work
of intrepid independent jour
nalists in our Top 25 list each
year.
“What we hope people take away from
our efforts is to be critical observers of all
media while expanding news media diets,
that a free press does matter, and it already
exists. However, we need to grow and sup
port more of it in the public interest while
promoting critical media literacy education.
It’s in this education of the next genera
tions that gives me the most hope.”
It should be noted that Project Censored,
along with the Action Coalition for Media
Education, founded the Global Critical
Media Literacy Project to teach digital-me
dia literacy and critical-thinking skills.
The second reason is that unless civili
zation as we know it comes to an end, the
battle for the future is Project Censored’s
raison d’etre. Roth said he remains inspired
by the courageous work of the independent
journalists who break these important but
underreported stories, and by the project’s
student researchers, who flex their critical
media literacy muscles to help ensure that
those stories reach a wider public audience.
“Both groups give us good reasons to be
hopeful rather than cynical,” Roth said. ©
Terelle Jerricks has been managing editor of
Random Lengths News in Los Angeles since 2004.
T he release of Project Censored’s year
book State of the Free Press is predi
cated upon the belief that quality news is a
needed public good regardless of whether
there’s a hunger for it in the marketplace
dominated by the mainstream, corpo
rate-owned press. The journalists, analysts,
media professors and student interns who
put together the current edition of State of
the Free Press continue to do the work that
they do in hopes that mainstream media
outlets will cut back on “junk food news”
and cease abusing the news, instead devot
ing that space to stories in which informa
tion translates into a citizenry
that is more aware, better
informed and increasingly
empowered.
State of the Free Press
founder Carl Jensen coined
the term “Junk Food News” in
1983 to describe the corporate
media practice of profiteering
from headline-grabbing, sen
sationalist news stories at the
expense of traditional investi
gative journalism.
Izzy Snow and Susan
Rahman open the “Junk
Food News” chapter of State
of the Free Press with Kitty
O’Meara’s poem “In the Time
of Pandemic.” It envisions the
COVID-19 lockdown response
as a reset button to the worst
impulses of capitalism, con
sumerism and nihilism. Snow
and Rahman compare it to the
aftermath of 9/11, when polit
ical leaders told constituents
that the most effective way to
defeat terrorism and expand
freedom was to go shopping—
and buy American. Not in
recent memory has this planet experienced
a pandemic, let alone a moment like this
one, where our television screens were filled
with reports of empty store shelves of toilet
paper, water and canned goods, and fights
broke out over essential goods in crowded
store aisles.
“This buy-back-your-freedom model has
arisen again, now out of the desperation
of the coronavirus pandemic, in which
the lower and middle classes, those most
affected by the tragedies of the crisis, are
the most pressured to reopen and re-con-
form to the economic systems that oppress
them. While buying American was once pro
moted as the way to defeat the terrorists,
now, in the time of COVID-19, toilet paper
seems to be the new favored commodity in
wiping out the bad guys. Witness as the cor
porate media dare to ask the truly hard-hit
ting questions: If we hoard the Charmin,
does that make us good or bad Americans?”
With the snark of a Mean Girls cast of
protagonists, the “Junk Food News” chapter
authors explore the question “Who is con
sidered important and worthy of coverage
during this pandemic?” Snow, Rahman and
crew documented the weeks and months
following the first reports and identification
of the coronavirus until about May, when
most Americans were coping with lockdown
measures keeping them captive and anes
thetized with Netflix, TikTok videos and
Instagram feeds of celebrities living in spa
cious normality that isn’t really the norm to
most Americans.
“While celebrities spread messages that
‘we’re all getting through this together’
and that these are ‘uncertain times,’ their
only uncertainties lie in whether their local
Whole Foods will be restocked with vegan
toilet paper. In the meantime, Americans
reckon with how quarantine has impacted
their careers, home lives and finances. The
corporate media is actively and consistently
choosing to focus on the famed icons who
are still able to share their lived perfection
even during times of hardship.”
The authors do note the few stories that
highlighted the real struggles of everyday
Americans, such stories were too few and
far between and offered little exploration.
The authors of this chapter take note of
how coverage of the death of NBA Lakers
legend Kobe Bryant sucked the air out of
the media market in the months following
his helicopter crash in January 2020. One
major news story on Bryant’s death offered
distraction from the gratuitous drone
strike that killed 10 people, including the
intended target, Iranian general Qasem
Soleimani. In the days following the strike,
Iran retaliated by attacking two American
bases in Iraq. Donald Trump and his admin
istration, as this chapter’s authors noted,
never offered a rational explanation for the
strike. But coverage of the aftermath of
Iranian retaliation was relatively muted.
Though there were no American deaths
following the Iran’s missile strike, there was
little follow-up on the fallout of that strike,
which included widespread cases of brain
JANUARY 13, 2021 | FLAGPOLE.COM
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