October Blog

Reading regularly, as we do, a Swedish daily and a lot of other Nordic publications, we often find ourselves having a different take on world news than the people around us. There are so many important news stories that never seem to make it to the North American continent. Or the take is so different that you wonder if you are reading about the same thing. Recently I have understood that this is not just a perception. A group at the Sonoma State University in California monitor media in the US and each year document important stories that are not written up in the mainstream media. Most of the unreported stories in 2008 in www.projectcensored.org have been about the Iraq occupation. Unreported in the US corporate media is, how over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths resulting from the US led invasion, and a United Nations High Commission for Refugees study that has concluded that five million Iraqis have been displaced by violence in their country. The mainstream media also ignored a report by three hundred Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans about the brutal impact of the ongoing occupations. Neither did mainstream media report that $9 billion in US currency went missing when the United States Federal Reserve shipped $12 billion to Iraq at the beginning of the war. Also not reported in the US news is how the leaders of Canada, the US, and Mexico have been secretly meeting to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to form a militarized tri-national Homeland Security force and how more than 23 000 representatives of US private industry are working with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect information on fellow Americans. Unreported news also includes the stories that the Justice Department believes it is legal for the president to secretly ignore previous executive orders anytime he wants to. Among the twenty-five most important uncovered news stories of 2007, selected by the more than 200 academics involved in the study, was one about the more than twenty-seven million slaves in existence in the world today, the radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production sites that are being dumped into public landfills in the US, and the FDA being complicit in allowing drug companies to make false, unsubstantiated, and misleading advertising claims.