Media reform/completeness

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Examples of important or meaningful information which the media fails, inappropriately, to report.

Project Censored publishes annual lists of the top 25 censored (under-reported) stories of the year.

In a review of the March 2003 Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate, sponsored by ABC, Doug Ireland notes: [1]

  • Take nine presidential candidates, stick them in a 90 minute format, subtract time for the moderators' intros and questions, for the commercials and station-breaks -- and you're left with a forum in which no one could have time to make a serious intellectual argument. Under such conditions, a "debate" becomes a sound-bite contest and the political equivalent of a beauty pageant - which is exactly what happened at Saturday night's ABC-sponsored cattle-call for the Democratic presidential field.
  • Only Dennis Kucinich, the anti-war Ohio congressman -- noticeably ignored by his competitors -- managed to squeeze sharply defined programmatic alternatives into his few allotted minutes. He called for flatout "cancellation" of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, for repeal of the civil-liberties-shredding Patriot Act, and painted himself as the anti-monopoly, anti-corporate candidate. But the press paid little attention -- for example, The New York Times' Adam Nagourney didn't even mention Kucinich in his post-debate report for "the paper of record."

Media control: Sinclair Broadcast Group details the April 2004 refusal to broadcast Ted Koppel's Nightline recitation of names of soldiers killed in the Bush regime's 2003 invasion of Iraq