Censored 2001: 25 Years of Censored News and the Top Censored Stories of the Year

by Peter Phillips

Book Overview

Introduction by Noam Chomsky New edition of this highly influential annual collection of news stories that have been censored or ignored by the mainstream media as part of their dumbing down of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158322064X
• ISBN13: 9781583220641
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

missing the mainstream of interests

I have been picking up these books for the last eight years. It is amazing what the mainstream media considers news and what they miss and ignore as news, thus they are missing the mainstream of interests of the American public or what should be the interests of the public. Instead, the mainstream goes after fluff and disasters news that is inoffensive to the corporate/business interest of this nation and does not reflect reality of public interest. If CENSORED ever published a nation-wide newspaper, along the lines of USA Today, I would subcribe to it, for relevant, news without spin and news with meaning to the mainstream public.

The importance of alternative news outlets

This book is more important now than ever. As we sit with our eyes glued to the coverage of the "War" in Afghanistan, it is crucial that we observe the mainstream media with the awareness of how many years they have manipulated, lied, and deceived the American people. We cannot have a true democracy, we cannot make informed choices, we cannot live authentic lives when so much crucial information is kept from us because we don't, for whatever reason, "deserve" to know. Now, more than ever, it's important to realize the importance of alternative news outlets, and the most important part of this book is that it lists them -- all of them -- so you can find them all. Don't limit yourself to the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, The Enquirer, and ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN. There's a whole world out there that so far has not entirely been kept from us -- but you have to work to access it. It's well worth the effort, and the rest of us out here digging stuff up could really use your help! Welcome aboard!

A very complicated hodge podge...

This one is really hard to review. Kind of like trying to write a review of a newspaper combined with a news magazine combined with some essays combined with a rulebook... And it doesn't really fit clearly into any of those categories. Many of the articles were written in the style of newspaper articles, though with longer term perspectives. Others were clearly more like you'd see in a magazine, except for the lack of illustrations. The essays wandered through various venues and styles, but I'm not even sure where to fit things there. There was a very interesting interview with Walter Cronkite, but what category was it? The 'rulebook' part was spread through several sections, describing the mechanics of preparing the book, but including some comments from judges.The content was quite interesting, actually. Lots of stories that you'd think would be worth coverage in the main newspapers, but which were ignored. Something of interest to almost everyone. The reasons the stories were ignored are mostly pretty obvious. Some are just negative stories, but in other cases apparently just not interesting enough to compete with the 'junk food news' that draws the ratings... Not so much active censorship as selective filtering.Actually, I had a pretty profound reaction to this book. The news is NOT 'free'--someone is paying for it. The obvious conclusion is that advertising-funded 'free' news is a very bad thing. Advertising is fundamentally NOT about facts and reason. Effective advertising is about creating irrational needs, and though this was only tangentially discussed in the book, it becomes quite obvious when you think about it. That lack of focus on the bigger problems and some production glitches are the main reasons the book couldn't earn that tough fifth star.

Great introduction

If you're new to this kind of stuff, this book would definitely serve as a great introduction.