‘Project Censored’ watchdog was told that nothing about 9/11 will be published
Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Wednesday, Sept 21st, 2010
The director of a prominent investigative journalism group has told reporters that the organisation’s work is being censored because it continues to highlight stories surrounding questions over the official explanation of events on the 11th of September 2001.
Project Censored is a long running non-profit national media watchdog group that was founded in 1976 by journalism professor Carl Jensen.
It is operated out of the School of Social Sciences at Sonoma State University, with both faculty and students involved in its preparation.
The project’s core directive is to highlight newsworthy stories that have been overlooked, ignored or actively censored by the corporate mainstream media.
The organisation publishes a volume of what it believes are the 25 most significant of these stories every year. The stories often originate from alternative media researchers and independent sources. The results are published in some major newspapers and journals.
In 2004 Infowars’ own Alex Jones was awarded second place at the Project Censored Awards for his unparalleled analysis of Patriot Act II, the freedom stripping follow up legislation to the first Patriot Act, passed after 9/11. The commentary subsequently appeared in hundreds of newspapers and other online media resources thanks to the diligence of Project Censored in shining a light on the issue.
According to its directors, the group’s work is being made more difficult now, however, due to censorship of Project Censored because of its ongoing commitment to cover 9/11 Truth stories.
9/11 Truth issues have made the top 25 Project Censored awards frequently over the past nine years.
Last week, Project Censored directors Dr. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff explained the difficulties to KPFA’s Guns and Butter broadcast, a favourite “progressive” talk radio show in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They noted that for the first time, pieces they had submitted to publication outlet Minuteman Media on the evidence for a cover up of the truth surrounding the 9/11 attacks had been actively rejected. Huff explained that since Minuteman media had been taken over by a left leaning Washington Think Tank called The Institute for Policy Studies, the subject has been blackballed:
“We’ve never had an op-ed piece that we were contracted to do rejected, outright rejected, and it wasn’t just rejected because of some contractual issue or violation,” Huff said. “We were actually told specifically from people at IPS that it was because we mentioned 9/11 as part of a piece on state crimes against democracy.”
“What we’re suggesting is that the events of September 11th have all the trappings of a potential state crime against democracy.” Huff continued. “So we mentioned the scientific studies done by Stephen Jones and the open chemical physics journal, and we included Richard Gage and the Architects and Engineers group, 1200 experts now saying that the official science just doesn’t make sense and just doesn’t add up, I mean it defies everything we know about scientific methodology and so forth.”
“They literally told us that they were not going to publish anything that talked about 9/11.”
“We were dumbfounded, at first we were waiting for the laughter tracks to come up and be like ‘Oh we’re censoring Project Censored’, but they were deadly serious.” Huff stated.
But that is not where the matter ended. Huff then explained that after being informed by IPS that their pieces on 9/11 were “too divisive” and could “alienate readers in the heartland”, they discovered, upon attending the IPS annual conference, that IPS staff had no knowledge of these developments and after reading the piece, were of the opinion that it should have run.
Eventually, the Project Censored team were informed by IPS heads that they were no longer welcome to write for IPS or Minuteman Media.
“And here we are with ‘the good lefties’,” Huff continued, it’s a story of the power elite, of potential mass deception and propaganda that gets us into two illegal wars, eviscerates constitutional liberties, bankrupts society both economically and morally the world over, you’d think that it’d be a huge thing to debate on the merits of science and fact.”
“If you have a free press structure, there is no subject that cannot be discussed.” Huff added.
Listen to the interview below (The 9/11 information begins at around 10 mins):
This is not the first time Project Censored has run into resistance owing to its refusal to back down on 9/11 Truth.
In 2007 Judges Robert Jensen, a journalism professor, and Norman Solomon, a syndicated columnist, severed their ties with the national media watchdog group over its decision to highlight the work of physics professor Steven Jones, who has provided analysis that suggests the explosive thermate was present in debris from the collapsed twin towers.
At the time Peter Phillips told the Illinois Times that he believed Jones’ work warranted the recognition:
“It’s a valid news story,” Phillips said. “It deserves to be covered. We cover stories that people don’t like. Our job is to talk about stories that don’t get talked about.”
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor at Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and regular contributor to Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.
