That if the world is going to be a better place, were going to have to be the leaders to make it happen. I ve it. All right. Well, eddie, brother eddie, this was a real pleasure. A pleasure to read your latest book. And it was wonderful to have this conversation. And im hopeful that those watching this conversation will pick it up, learn for themselves and pass it on. Ithanks for coming, everyone ths is my pleasure to welcome mickey huff for the second time. To the avid reader, we had him last year for the previous day, the free press, you know, 2023. And today im going to be discussing the free press 2020 before we have. Hell be discussing the book good discussing i think media and that of thing and then ron opened it up to questions afterwards so please welcome mickey one of the others thanks so much know thanks to everybody here at the avid and broadway in sacramento its always delight to be here and its been a really great place since i since i moved over here from sonoma county, where project centered was founded almost 50 years ago. Project has been around for a while and so im going to probably start just by telling you a little bit about what projects answered is what we do just real quickly show of hands how many people here already know about project censored. Two. Three. Yeah ive got so fewer than half, but so for those dont i will just start i will start there. And as you heard in the introduction, i was going to talk a little bit about Media Literacy. And the interesting thing is that when project censored was founded by carl jensen in 1976 as part of a class a College Class researching the media and what they did and didnt cover. Now this was in the seventies and. This was spurred by the watergate. So a lot of things came coming out of the seventies were spurred by that. Of course, we know that that eventually obviously it led the resignation of richard nixon. It created tumult in the two major parties we had. Well, we had some certainly interesting developments coming out of the seventies politically. But another thing we got out of that was, something called the Church Committee hearings and the pike Committee Hearings in congress that were looking at a lot of scandals and secrecy and a lot of things going on with the cia and secret covert and political assassinations and oh my is that a fun list . But thats know that tempest is where project censored was born and it was born of the idea that we the belief that we need truly free press. We need to protect freedoms, but we also need to have constructive, critical mechanisms to be sure that the press is doing the best job it can in the public. And carl carl took that to because he came from ad and media and he a midlife career shift into communication and sociology of media really and. So when carl started the project there was no real term critical Media Literacy or Media Literacy education wasnt something that people talked about that. Doesnt mean that people didnt understand the importance of it. We press criticism and goes, we go back easy 100 years and we maybe we will hear today well a little bit about the fighting. Bob lafollette, the progressive magazine, 1909, a full before Upton Sinclair of the brass that skewered the press at the time you know was being increasingly controlled by robber barons and you know, the wealthy. I might get confused. Im not sure if im talking about 21st century, if im talking about the late 20th century, if im talking about twenties, you see where thats going. But thats fun. Thing is, is part of my my day job as an historian i chair the journalism department, the apple Valley College and teach social science. Im very fascinated by the history. Journalism in history, to me really matters a lot and the history of project censored, i think is very significant because im biased the third director, but im biased because i believe that that Historical Context is very important. And so giving you the context of from from where the project is born i think maybe helps people understand what weve been doing that many years and maybe even why were doing it and. Why are we still doing it . You know, about 20 some years ago, some some of the folks now the right press is often, you know, theyve either ignored us or attacked us. The left press has done some of the same, believe it or not, the establishment press or the Corporate Media generally ignores us altogether because we tend to be critical of them, albeit constructively right. Which i think is significant to point out. Again, well come more back to that, some of that later and some of that history later. But back to where the project formed out of watergate, carl looks back and says, well feel like im a pretty informed news consumer and i feel like i read the papers and i Pay Attention to whats happening. But why why did we watergate . He went back, started looking at what was referred to as the alternate or alternative or independent press, and they were covering a lot of the nixon scandals, including watergate, before the other major news outlets and certainly before the washington, which gets all the credit, you know, but and bernstein and all that jazz and they go to hollywood and celebrates and the media does a great and democracy wins again. You know thats thats thats true hollywood ending true meaning false but thats where where carl gets this idea that if hes paying attention hes missing these stories and he knows other people in the in the establishment press are missing them. What else is missing. Right. So he took the watergate and he turned it into a reason to really study and evaluate press and not just critically, you know, the the failures of the established press. But to highlight the intrepid reporting of the independence of the people who languishing often in obscurity are people who often arent really making a lot of money, or maybe theyre barely making a living from being a Public Interest journalist and. So thats where the project gets its start. And he and carl thinks that if we were able to teach another generation of, of students, of young people the importance of the free, the importance of how it informs people for meaningful Civic Engagement, that this is something that isnt just a skill set, that people in society in general should have. But carl also thought, you know, journalists can actually benefit from learning about these things, too, because, you know, we it for granted and we make assumptions that journalists are going to understand all these things because theyre living them or they can them up close. And again, the irony is, well, sometimes too close and, sometimes the pressures are too great. And even reporters that have an ethical, you know, sort of conscious or moral compass when it to media issues, they succumb to the pressures of the industry and then we can pile on challenges right that come into the increased ownership and consolidation the reliance on the private for profit model from reliance on what or who is newsworthy from elite sources. And then the general ideological biases of our Corporate Media in the United States, which are of course procapitalist, neoliberal oil, prowestern Foreign Policy, pro naito i mean, again, a few years ago when the editor of the New York Times was being interviewed about the bias of the New York Times, in one sentence, he was claiming how they were the beacon of objective journalism, and the next sentence he was talking about, how great it was. They cheerlead neo liberalism and, you know, other other, you know, sort of and western strategies and and you didnt see any disconnect whatsoever because it was there. It was sort of the the the neutrality of his bias right, as it were, is like its the fish in the water. Its like what . What water . Like, no, no. The whole ecosystem, um, of the news about which you seem be inherently unaware, yet youre a leading. Leading beacon of it. Youre, youre the New York Times is historically referred to as the paper of record in the United States. And carl and others and peter phillips. And what weve been saying for a long time at project censored is that like places like the New York Times, in fact be the paper of record, but if so, what is record . Theyre setting . And are there other things were leaving out of the record . Is the record accurate . You get where were going here. And that was carls main question was what else are they not covering . Why . And he thought the adjective portion was the key to moving the needle on these issues. And almost every and if you go back to that period, that same period of the seventies, ill try to get out of historian mode here eventually. But one one of the fcc commissioners at the time, nicholas johnson, i dont know how many folks know him, but i bring this up. Author nick johnson has been a project center judge since our inception. He still with us judges stories every year. He wrote a great book that more people need to know about called your second priority a number of years and what johnson was getting at was regardless of what your primary concern interest is in living, when you live in a society like, the United States, whether youre interested in the climate or Climate Change or electoral or, you know, immigration or Foreign Policy or fill in the blanks, any number of things, racism, etc. Right. You are likely to gain very little in your primary area of interest. Unless your second priority has something to do with media democracy. Media reform supporting a free freedom of information, right . So in other words, what johnson was saying it really rang true people like jensen and for us at carl at project censored. Right it meant that we all to be media literate. We all have a stake in this and we all benefit. Were all a little bit better read and we have diverse news and Information Sources at us right . So thats the genesis, the project out of watergate. Hey, by the way just as a quick aside for that and ill get of that decade i promise we we all want to get out of the seventies the only anyway i dont how many people know this but the nixon white actually contacted the the main the head of cbs news and squelched some of cronkites on watergate. Right. I mean so thats a direct violation of the First Amendment right. But again, these are the kind of things that later go on to inform what we do at project censored is. And thats literally a prior restraint matter. Now, what carl was getting at and what spent a lot of time are the other kinds of censorship, news, abuse and that we also look at censorship by proxy. So were going to get into some of that here in bit. And i think i was as i was mentioning before we got started, i might read a passage or two from the book because novel idea, its a bookstore and its a book talk and i never read out of our own books. So i saw it today. Ill do that and well how a little bit of that goes but theres some i think theres some interesting ideas in here. And i to sort of tease out some ideas because in a little while, believe it or not, i want to i really do want to hear from you and have a sort of a robust conversation and dialog about some of these issues. So anyway, carl starts project censored before there even is a term critical Media Literacy, right . So you know, getting out of the seventies getting closer to today, what are the kind of challenges in our socalled and what is the socalled what is the state of our socalled free press. Well we we if ask, you know, average americans about the state of the socalled free press. We know a few things. We know that the trust in the establishment press has been declining extraordinarily right over the last couple of decades. In fact, over half of people in the United States say that they they honestly believe that the United States in u. S. , the press routinely lies and manufactures information to bolster or support certain ideological interests. Now, where do you imagine that people would get that kind an idea . Well, if you happen to be a consumer of the media and these press outlets, you start to find out. And in fact this is at least part of where maybe, maybe we can do a little bit of highlighting of some sections here. But i think its important to note just a couple a couple of things things. Distrust high. This is unfortunate, right . Americans often see media through a highly partizan lens. Audiences are hyper polarized. 93 of fox news viewers are lean republican, while 91 of New York Times readers and 95 of msnbc audiences skew democrat right. And so this is were calling this out. Allan mcleod in our forward in the book this year says this leads to a shallow understanding and scrutiny of the corporate press. Our media is honest. There is is propaganda and fake news. Does that sound like a conversation or something that youve heard or been part of even in your own life or your own social circles . Youve heard that right. I mean, again, we cover a lot of diverse stories and so we get it from all angles. Weve weve managed to annoy and irritate people from across the political spectrum. Its a magic act. Its taken a long time to do it. But by golly, weve done it. And its something that i actually am proud of because. I believe that if we if we adhere things like the society of professional code of ethics and, we use that as that sort of moral compass of what what free press can do in the Public Interest. I think that we i think that we can start to see media that is more responsible in the Public Interest and we can begin to see media propaganda too, meaning we can even see it when its propaganda we like or we agree with right there. Our confirmation biases are very strong. Someone says something we say that cant be true because i think something i go out and find something that, you know, reinforces what i think about it. I go see im right. And then they do the same thing in reverse. And then we keep talking and walking past each other without ever really engaging in the dialog and one of the significant things that that journalism can do is can provide a space for that dialog. It can provide a space for meaningful discourse. Yes, that isnt just im right. Youre wrong. No matter, what . But it is based on the interest in the ideas and the things that are happening within communities. Right. And so journalism, i keep saying in the Public Interest can do these things when it reports on things that matter most to the people that live in these news areas. Now hold on because im going to get into a few other of the challenges as coming out of this sort of what is this the state of the so free press today . Alan mcleod in our forward simply comes out and says it. The first sentence of the book is we are swimming in an ocean of propaganda, not that we usually call it that we like to think of propaganda, something that exists largely in enemy nations like china, north korea, russia. But what else to call the thousands of misleading advertise myths, news snippets or politicized messages we every day. And this is why we get into this. This issue of half of americans believing that news organizations intentionally deceive them and they retreat to their team. Red team blue, kind of interpretations. Well, again, this is problematic and its compounded by the fact only a handful of corporations control vast majority of what people our country see read or hear on a daily basis state media in the us of course, thats what we would call pbs, npr or community radio, which is different. That actually is Community Media can very different than that, more grassroots than that. But much of that here is also by private for profit corporations. Right. But when we hear it talk state media, Many Americans immediately jump to, you know, r. T. Wright and his the evil propaganda arm or press tv from iran right, but, but, but they seem fine with the bbc and of course npr and pbs are the Gold Standard of journalism in the United States. Im curiously enough, if we apply critical Media Literacy sort of critiques across the spectrum to all these Media Outlets, we probably will discover that they all have issues. They all have biases. They have problems. Right . Some of them may be more obvious than others, but theyre still there and living in this hyper polarized, hyper partizan, polarized sort of media ecosystem, the Team Red Team blue kind of dynamic, we all the gray area and we consequently lose the gray matter. Right. We lose out on the significant debates, significant facts around, controversial issues, because many people afraid to go there or theyre afraid challenge their own belief system. And we all know that this is really its rooted in its tentacles into our community. Its very hard to change ones mind about certain things, particularly when theyre rooted in, maybe family or community or ethnic city history place. So many different things, identity, so many. Right. Thats why, again, go back to the teaching of critical Media Literacy. Education is, because it gives us tools where can begin to assess and analyze our own biases and shortcomings and to be able understand and see them in others when we people about what ethical journalism like again we talk about seek and report it. Thats what ethical does. It minimizes it doesnt cause more, right . We act independent. We think journalists should act independently, meaning they shouldnt be doing the bidding of their owners right. And we there are there is example after example, we see owners putting their thumbs. The scale, whether its Sinclair Broadcasting or putting a thumb on a