Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)...from the corporate media, and from Project Censored. The team has delivered another volume of the most important stories of the year, which have been ignored or covered up by the mainstream media. In an insult to American traditions of a free press and an informed citizenry, the corporate news industry continues to suppress important stories about corporate hegemony; the errors and crimes of elected leaders (from the dominant party, that is); and most importantly, any story about the modern assault on participatory democracy from the wealthy elite. Uncovering these stories and describing their importance to regular citizens already makes the work of Project Censored incredibly important. However, I have been diligently reading these annual guides for nearly a decade, and this year's edition continues the tendency of the books to undermine the importance of the uncovered news stories.
The main problem is the large portion of this book that follows the year's top stories, in which the team attempts analyses of media behavior. With the exception of strong reports from FAIR and PR Watch, the media analyses here are at worst amateurish, or at best summaries of the type of work done by far stronger experts in the field of mass communications and political economy (such as Ben Bagdikian or Robert McChesney, as just two examples). Here we get only slight introductions to a rich field of knowledge that would be much better explored in books by the experts, rather than the term papers by students that are predominant here. (The more intricately researched, though sarcastic and hyperbolic, submissions from writers like Greg Palast aren't helping much either.)
This running weakness is compounded by absolutely atrocious technical editing. This book is damaged by severe typos on nearly every page – for example, "to reminder us all," "Depart of Defense," or "February 29, 2005." This volume is dedicated to the late investigative journalist Gary Webb, and they even misprinted his date of birth in the large introduction on the first page (he wasn't born in 1995). What we have here is an unprofessional lack of the most basic proofreading, evidenced by the fact that essays by some of the writers contain very few typos, but others are so poorly typed that entire sentences border on incomprehensibility. This is especially a problem in the section that follows up the top censored stories from previous years, with updates written by various students and interns in the project. Sure, typing is a chore and it's not contingent on the believability of one's writing. However, a project that has a few hundred people working on it should have at least one or two technical editors on staff. To avoid the perennial weaknesses of editing and analysis that might forever damage the annual books, it might be a good idea to just stick with the Project Censored website for what's really important – the censored stories themselves. [~doomsdayer520~]
Click Here to see more reviews about: Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories
The yearly volumes of Censored, in continuous publication since 1976 and since 1995 available through Seven Stories Press, is dedicated to the stories that ought to be top features on the nightly news, but that are missing because of media bias and self-censorship. The top stories are listed democratically in order of importance according to students, faculty, and a national panel of judges. Each of the top stories is presented at length, alongside updates from the investigative reporters who broke the stories.
Click here for more information about Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories
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