Fire on the left

A dispute over Project Censored illuminates
the fissures within the alternative press

by Dan Kennedy

In November 1998, the newsletter of Women Against Military Madness (WAMM), an obscure organization of peace activists based in Minneapolis, published an odd little commentary. Written by Diana Johnstone, the former European editor of the leftist magazine In These Times, the piece argued that the Kosovo crisis -- it was not yet a war -- had been manufactured by NATO in order to build a pipeline to carry oil from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans.

The article was short -- shorter than a typical op-ed column -- and consisted mainly of quotes from the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune. Johnstone made no attempt to prove her remarkable allegation. For her, apparently, it was enough to assert that because a) NATO was expanding its responsibilities and b) corporate interests have been unable to build a Caspian oil pipeline through Iran or Turkey, therefore c) Western pressure on Serbia must be aimed at colonizing the Balkans on behalf of international oil companies.

Johnstone, of course, committed elementary errors of logic, not to mention egregiously bad journalism. Yet, inexplicably, her piece recently won an award from Sonoma State University's Project Censored, a 24-year-old effort to shine a light on important stories that get little or no play in the mainstream media. (The Phoenix reported on this year's Project Censored winners in its March 31 editions.)

Johnstone's screed set off a chain reaction that has led various factions within the alternative press to wax indignant and point fingers at one another, about which more in a moment. First, though, let's take a closer look at the mindset that informed Johnstone's piece, because it says something important about why much of the progressive press does, indeed, find itself marginalized, unable to get its message out into the mainstream. And the ensuing battle over Project Censored itself says a lot about the differences between the liberal left, which remains optimistic about the possibility of transforming the culture, and the radical left, which has grown as paranoid and conspiratorial as, say, Pat Buchanan or Alan Keyes.

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It turns out that Johnstone's piece for WAMM is just the tip of a rather horrifying iceberg. Johnstone, whom a Web search reveals to be a prolific writer, is a former press attaché for the Green Party in the European Parliament and has spent time in Serbia. More to the point, she is a thoroughgoing partisan for Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. The NATO campaign against Serbia may well have been misbegotten. Certainly the result -- a ruined country, and Albanian Muslims' taking vicious revenge against their former tormentors -- is nothing for the West to take much pride in. But it's one thing to criticize NATO for its bungled response to a human-rights disaster; it's quite another to portray it as the enemy.

Johnstone lays out her full case, such as it is, in a lengthy essay written during the NATO bombing in the spring of 1999 and published on the Web site of Covert Action Quarterly. Johnstone argues that NATO's actions against Serbia were akin to those of Hitler's Nazis, that the ethnic cleansing and mass rapes carried out by Serb thugs never took place, and that reports of them were nothing more than propaganda put forth by Western forces to justify their actions.

"Hitler . . . marched into Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, setting off World War II, in order to rescue allegedly abused German ethnic minorities," she writes, dismissing NATO claims that its mission was humanitarian. And Johnstone says this of Milosevic: "If using criminals for dirty tasks makes him a criminal, then he is no doubt a criminal -- as are President Tudjman of Croatia and President Izetbegovic of Bosnia. But then, so are a whole line of US Presidents." Indeed, she demands that President Bill Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair be tried as war criminals. And, by the way, her theory that NATO wants the Balkans in order to blast an oil pipeline through the region turns out to be based on a speculative 1997 book by Carter-era national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is not exactly a hot commodity in Washington these days.

Johnstone's methodology is most clearly on display in her attempt to dismiss reports of mass rapes carried out by Serb forces to terrorize the Albanian Muslim population. She chooses, weirdly, to support this dismissal by referring to an article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on May 24, 1999 -- a short op-ed by a Wheaton College student and one of the student's professors that asserts, without documentation, "Milosevic has raised the use of rape as a weapon to hitherto unknown levels." Sneers Johnstone: "A general accusation which does not have to be proved can never be disproved, and can be safely repeated forever."

True, but, as Johnstone surely knows, there have been scores of accounts of mass rapes that she could not so easily refute. The State Department and human-rights organizations have reported numerous instances of mass rape perpetrated by the Serbs. In Bosnia, another Yugoslav battleground, Serb irregulars reportedly set up "rape camps" where Muslim women were repeatedly attacked. And lest those reports be dismissed as mere NATO propaganda, there have been plenty of on-the-ground reports, too -- such as a harrowing article in the New York Times of May 1, 1999, on six young ethnic Albanian women who were taken away by Serb officers and sexually assaulted.

Presumably, the Sonoma State faculty and students voted to include Johnstone's WAMM piece without having seen her longer diatribe for Covert Action Quarterly. But it was bad enough that they included Johnstone's fantastical, undocumented charges at all. And this is where the piss fight on the left comes in.

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Project Censored has a long track record of good work, and its annual list of the 25 most overlooked stories is a staple of alternative newspapers. But this year's report on the Project Censored winners, produced by AlterNet, the wire service of the alternative press, was unusual in that it trashed Johnstone's piece as essentially unworthy of the honor bestowed upon it. AlterNet found that Johnstone "had provided no evidence for her analysis" and concluded that "her argument remains interesting but weak and unsubstantiated."

AlterNet head Don Hazen followed up by writing a commentary criticizing Project Censored for allowing Sonoma State's faculty and students, rather than the project's "excellent panel of judges," to select the 25 stories; for deliberately celebrating the obscure while ignoring important work that succeeded in breaking into the mainstream; and for honoring stories regardless of whether they were professionally executed or even credible. "We need new awards," Hazen wrote. "Let's call them the Project Big Audience Awards -- recognition for stories dug out, documented, brilliantly rendered, and expertly promoted so that they got through the corporate media haze and became part of the public knowledge. That's worth a celebration."

Not surprisingly, Hazen's column set off shock waves within the alternative press. He was immediately attacked by Dan Simon and Greg Ruggiero, the publisher and the editor, respectively, of Seven Stories Press, which publishes Project Censored's annual book. "Getting a message or a story into the mainstream is a tactic, not a goal for independent media," Simon and Ruggiero wrote. "We are not trying to move our message from left to center, but trying to build our own audience on the left. That's what makes us independent." Hazen's retort: "Part of the reason we lack a significant constituency of advocates and activists is that there is a feeling that nothing can be done; that the system is locked up. I feel that Project Censored adds to this despair, reinforcing the negative expectations of the system, without providing solutions to overcome or creatively work around the problem."

The point/counterpoint/counter-counterpoint was run on AlterNet's Web site, as well as on the Media Channel. It's also become an issue in a long-standing row between Hazen and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, whose publisher and editor, Bruce Brugmann, thinks Hazen has abandoned AlterNet's mission in return for foundation money. Each year the Bay Guardian produces its own report on the Project Censored awards that it makes available to other alternative newspapers, giving them a choice between AlterNet's version and the Bay Guardian's. (Some years -- including this year -- the Phoenix has run AlterNet's, and some years it has run the Bay Guardian's.) It is notable that this year's Bay Guardian account of the Project Censored awards uncritically accepts the selection of Johnstone's piece.

It's tempting to paraphrase the old Henry Kissinger line about academic politics: the infighting is so fierce because the stakes are so small. But, as Hazen suggests, the stakes don't have to be small. Good independent reporting deserves a wider audience, and efforts such as Project Censored can help them get that audience. This year's list, for instance, includes such worthy items as a piece by Peter Arnett in the American Journalism Review, documenting the decline of foreign coverage in the American press (presumably he wrote it, right down to the last comma); a Mother Jones investigation into domestic sweatshops where US military uniforms are manufactured; and a report in the Nation on the warped economic incentives that lead pharmaceutical companies to invest in "lifestyle" drugs such as Viagra while ignoring crises such as the tuberculosis epidemic sweeping the Third World.

Hazen's essentially hopeful vision is that average people will respond to such work if it can be put before them in a compelling way. Hazen's ideas for reform -- and his call for progressive journalists to make better use of the Internet to get the word out -- are right on target.

Project Censored, by singling out garbage such as Diana Johnstone's ugly little screed, does more than bring dishonor upon itself. It perpetuates the very marginalization it is supposedly trying to fight.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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