Reply #1: A snip from the Preface of the newly released Censored 2011. [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

Over the past decade, security and liberty have not prospered together in America. As a society, we have become more insecure and have seen our liberties disappear. Further, the income gap has widened more than at any time in our history, the economy has imploded, our ecosystems are under siege, and we are fighting two endless wars of occupation under the nebulous guise of a “war on terror.” The US now spends more on its military-related programs than does the entire world combined, and has spent further trillions bailing out corrupt banks that destroyed the financial system leading to soaring foreclosures and unemployment. All this, and America still boasts among the most passive and controlled populations in the world in the midst of the country’s longest war and worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What populist angst there is seems to have been co-opted by the corporate media and elite political interests so that the causes of national frustration are blurred when not outright manufactured.

snip

In America, unsubstantiated opinions, rumors, and gossip surrounding important issues masquerade as real news. This is what captivates the masses in the subjects of major press conferences with America’s leaders, and this is in large part what the corporate news itself entails: the creation of what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called a hyper- reality, and similar to what historian Daniel J. Boorstin called “pseudo-events” (a troubling phenomenon on the horizon of America’s media landscape noted in his 1962 work,The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America). We live in a propaganda culture where factual information is routinely censored by degree. This is the basis of our current Truth Emergency—a lack of purity in news.

Simply put, what threatens us most is our ignorance about what is going on in the world around us. In large part, it is the corporate media, especially in the news departments, that continues to distract, misinform, disinform, and propagandize the public into misguided rages against the wrong enemies, compounding the state of our decaying republic, furthering public ignorance and apathy about things that should matter the most: the true state of the union, the causes for said state, and what we can do about it.

Project Censored has made the first 20 pages of their new book available for reading online at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/37158573/Censored-2011-Excerpt