DESPITE THE PROMISE OF BOUNDLESS ACCESS TO INFORMATION, SILICON VALLEY MIRRORS LEGACY MEDIA IN ITS CONSOLIDATED OWNERSHIP AND PRIVILEGING OF ELITE NARRATIVES. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google (Alphabet) and Twitter.
“In pursuit of their own interests and investments, media tycoons past and present, again and again, appear to be conveniently oblivious to the main frame through which they filter news – that of class, including class structure and class interests,” write Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth in Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, from which this story is adapted. “Consequently, they often overlook (or ignore) conflicts of interest that implicate media owners, funders, investors, and advertisers, not to mention their business clients on Wall Street and in Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the military-industrial complex.”
This observation perfectly frames Project Censored’s Top 10 list of under-reported stories, which this year, mostly deal with corporate consolidation and exploitation.
Every year, there are patterns to be found in this list. This year, it shows how profoundly the concentration of corporate wealth and power in the hands of so few distorts everything we see (or don’t) in the world around us every day.
1. The fossil fuel industry is subsidized at a rate of $11 million per minute.
Globally, the fossil fuel industry receives subsidies of $11 million per minute, primarily from lack of liability for the externalized health costs of deadly air pollution (42 percent), damages caused by extreme weather events (29 percent), and costs from traffic collisions and congestion (15 percent). And two-thirds of those subsidies come from just five countries – the U.S., Russia, India, China and Japan. These are key findings from a study of 191 nations published by the International Monetary Fund in September 2021, that were reported in The Guardian and Treehugger, but have been ignored by the corporate media.
No national government currently prices fossil fuels at what the IMF calls their “efficient price,” covering both their supply and environmental costs. “Efficient fuel pricing in 2025 would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions 36-percent below baseline levels, which is in line with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees,” the report stated.
“It’s critical that governments stop propping up an industry that is in decline,” Mike Coffin, a senior analyst at Carbon Tracker, told The Guardian.
2. Wage theft: U.S. businesses suffer few consequences for minimum wage violations.
In 2017, the FBI reported the cost of street crime at about $13.8 billion, the same year that the Economic Policy Institute released a study saying that one form of wage theft – minimum wage violations – costs U.S. workers even more: an estimated $15 billion annually, impacting an estimated 17 percent of low-wage workers.
One reason it’s so rampant is that companies are seldom punished, as Alexia Fernández Campbell and Joe Yerardi reported for the Center for Public Integrity in May 2021, drawing on 15 years of data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. “The agency fined only about 1 in 4 repeat offenders during that period. And it ordered those companies to pay workers cash damages – penalty money in addition to back wages – in just 14 percent of those cases,” they wrote. “In all, the agency has let more than 16,000 employers get away with not paying $20.3 million in back wages since 2005.”
We’re talking about some major companies. Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle K Stores – were among “the worst offenders,” they reported.
That report kicked off the center’s “Cheated at Work’’ series, which showed that “U.S. employers that illegally underpaid workers face few repercussions, even when they do so repeatedly. This widespread practice perpetuates income inequality, hitting lowest-paid workers hardest.”
Since May 2021, a handful of corporate news outlets, including CBS News, covered or republished the Center for Public Integrity’s report on wage theft, but coverage tends to focus on specific instances involving individual employers while ignoring it as a systemic social problem.
3. The EPA withheld reports on dangerous chemicals.
In January 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency stopped releasing legally required disclosures about chemicals that present a “substantial risk of injury to health or the environment.” They had previously been posted in a searchable public database called ChemView.
In November 2021, as part of The Intercept’s “EPA Exposed” investigative series, Sharon Lerner reported that EPA had received “at least 1,240 substantial risk reports since January 2019, but only one was publicly available. The suppressed reports documented “the risk of chemicals’ serious harms, including eye corrosion, damage to the brain and nervous system, chronic toxicity to honeybees, and cancer in both people and animals,” Lerner wrote.
The reports include notifications about highly toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, chemical compounds that are known as “forever chemicals.”It wasn’t just the public that was kept in the dark, Lerner reported. “The substantial risk reports have not been uploaded to the databases used most often by risk assessors searching for information about chemicals, according [to] one of the EPA scientists… They have been entered only into an internal database that is difficult to access and search. As a result, little – and perhaps none – of the information about these serious risks to health and the environment has been incorporated into the chemical assessments completed during this period.”
Apart from the Intercept, only a handful of niche publications reported on the matter.
However, in January 2022, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a lawsuit to compel EPA to disclose the reports, based on The Intercept’s report. Just weeks later, the EPA announced it would resume posting the reports in ChemView.
4. At Least 128 members of Congress invested in the fossil fuel industry.
At least 100 U.S. representatives and 28 U.S. senators have financial interests in the fossil fuel industry – a major conflict when it comes to reaching climate change goals that’s gone virtually unmentioned by the corporate media, despite detailed reporting in a series of Sludge articles written by David Moore in November and December of 2021.
Moore found that 74 Republicans, 59 Democrats, and one Independent have fossil fuel industry investments, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats in both chambers. The top 10 House investors are all Republicans. In the Senate, two of the top three investors are Democrats, and Democrats’ total investments – $8.6 million – are more than double the Senate Republicans’ total of $4 million. Topping the list is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, with up to $5.5 million of fossil fuel industry assets, while John Hickenlooper of Colorado is third, with up to $1 million. (Most reporting is in ranges.) Many top investors are Texas Republicans, including Rep. Van Taylor, with up to $12.4 million worth of investments.
Manchin notably cut the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would phase out coal, from President Joe Biden’s climate bill.
Meanwhile oil and gas lobbying totaled $119.3 million according to OpenSecrets, while 2020 election spending topped $40 million for congressional candidates – $8.7 million to Democrats and $30.8 million to Republicans.
5. Dark money interference in U.S. politics undermines democracy.
The same group of conservative dark money organizations that opposed Biden’s Supreme Court nomination – Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), The 85 Fund and their affiliated groups – also funded entities that played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to a report by the watchdog group Accountable.US. They’re closely linked to Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society, with funds coming from Donors Trust (a dark-money group backed by the Koch network) and the Bradley Foundation.
“These dark money groups not only funded Leo’s network of organizations to the sum of over $52 million in 2020, but also funded entities in 2020 that played a role in the insurrection to the sum of over $37 million,” Accountable.US reported.
While there has been coverage of dark money spending on Supreme Court nominations, Igor Derysh at Salon was alone in reporting the related involvement in Jan. 6.
Just one group, JCN, spent $2.5 million “before Biden even named his nominee” Ketanji Brown Jackson, Derysh reported, “accusing Biden of caving in to leftists by promising a ‘Supreme Court nominee who will be a liberal activist.’” On the other hand, “JCN spent tens of millions helping to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, according to Open Secrets, and launched a $25 million effort to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 election,” he reported.
Beyond that, “Donors Trust has funneled more than $28 million to groups that pushed election lies or in some way funded the rally ahead of the Capitol riot,” while “members of the Federalist Society played key roles in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.” They include attorney John Eastman, architect of Trump’s plan to get Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election; senators Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led the objections to the certification of Trump’s loss after the riot; and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed a lawsuit to throw out election results in key states, effectively overturning Biden’s victory. In addition, 13 of the 17 other Republican attorneys general who joined Paxton’s suit were also Federalist Society members.
“It should worry us all that the groups leading the fight against Biden’s historic nomination of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court are tied to the Jan. 6 insurrection and efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told Salon.
Right-wing dark money’s role in fighting Judge Jackson’s nomination and confirmation process was highlighted by Business Insider in February 2022, and op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post covered the discussion of dark money during Jackson’s confirmation hearings. However, none of those articles covered dark money supporting Trump’s Big Lie or the ramifications of how such dark money spending erodes public trust in government.
6. Corporate consolidation is causing record inflation in food prices.
Corporate consolidation is a main driver of record inflation in food prices. As Huff and Roth write in Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023, “The establishment press has covered the current wave of inflation exhaustively, but only rarely will discuss the market power of giant firms as a possible cause, and then usually only to reject it,” as they did when the Biden administration cited meat industry consolidation as a cause of price increases in September 2021.
But as Food and Water Watch reported in November 2021, “while the cost of meat shot up, prices paid to farmers actually declined, spurring a federal investigation.” That investigation is ongoing, but meat conglomerates Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Smithfield Foods and JBS have paid just over $225 million to settle related civil suits in the poultry, beef and pork markets.
That’s just part of the problem. A July 2021 joint investigation by Food and Water Watch and The Guardian “reported that a handful of ‘food giants’ – including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever and Del Monte – control an average of 64 percent of sales of 61 popular grocery items,” Huff and Roth note. Three companies own 93 percent of carbonated soft drink brands. Another three produce 73 percent of cereals, and a single company, PepsiCo, owns five of the most popular dip brands, accounting for 88 percent of the market. Altogether, “four firms or fewer controlled at least 50 percent of the market for 79 percent of the groceries,” The Guardian reported.
As for grocers, Kroger cited rising inflation as the reason for hiking prices in their stores – even as they cut worker pay by 8 percent. Kroger’s CEO earned 909 times what the median worker earned, while worker pay decreased by 8 percent in 2020, and “the company spent $1.5 billion on stock buybacks between April 2020 and July 2021 to enrich its shareholders,” the Groundwork Collaborative reported. Kroger was one of just four companies that took in an estimated two-thirds of all grocery sales in 2019, according to Food and Water Watch.
More broadly, “A report for the American Prospect by Rakeem Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, and David Dayen revealed that one of the most common inflation scapegoats, supply chain problems, is itself a consequence of consolidation,” Project Censored noted. “Just three global alliances of ocean shippers are responsible for 80 percent of all cargo… These shippers raked in nearly $80 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, twice as much as in the entire 10-year period from 2010 to 2020,” by increasing their rates as much as ten-fold.
Supply chain consolidation reflects a broader shift in the global economy, the Prospect argued: “In 1970, Milton Friedman argued in The New York Times that ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.’ Manufacturers used that to rationalize a financial imperative to benefit shareholders by seeking the lowest-cost labor possible.” This led to a surge in outsourcing to East Asia, and eventually China. “This added new costs for shipping, but deregulating all the industries in the supply chain could more than compensate.”
Occasionally, articles touched on the issue of consolidation (mostly to debunk it), though there are a couple of opinion pieces to the contrary. “But these isolated opinion pieces were far out-numbered by the hundreds, even thousands, of reports and analyses by commercial media outlets that blamed everything but oligopolistic price gouging for the rising cost of groceries,” Huff and Roth concluded.
7. Concerns rise for journalistic independence as Gates Foundation gives $319 million to news outlets.
The list of billionaires with media empires includes familiar names like Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and, most recently, Elon Musk. But, “While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which [Microsoft co-founder Bill] Gates’ cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not,” Alan MacLeod wrote for MintPress News in November 2021.
MacLeod examined more than 30,000 individual grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and found it had donated more than $319 million to fund news outlets and training programs, raising questions about conflicts of interest and journalistic independence.
“Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates,” MacLeod wrote. “Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors influential foreign organizations including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.”Direct awards often targeted specific issues. For example, CNN received $3.6 million to support “journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world.” Another grant earmarked $2.3 million for the Texas Tribune “to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.” (Of note: Bill Gates is an advocate for the charter school movement.)No major corporate news outlets appear to have covered this issue, although as far back as 2011, the Seattle Times published an article investigating how the Gates Foundation’s “growing support of media organizations blurs the line between journalism and advocacy.”
8. The CIA discussed plans to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The CIA seriously considered plans to kidnap or assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in late 2017, according to a September 2021 Yahoo News investigation, based on interviews with more than 30 former U.S. officials, eight of whom detailed U.S. plans to abduct Assange and three of whom described the development of plans to kill him. If it had been up to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, they almost certainly would have been acted on, after WikiLeaks announced it had obtained a massive tranche of files – dubbed “Vault 7” – from the CIA’s ultra-secret hacking division, and posted some of them online.
“WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo’s,” a former Trump administration national security official told Yahoo News. “After Vault 7, Pompeo and [Deputy CIA Director Gina] Haspel wanted vengeance on Assange.” It went so far, Yahoo News reported, that “Pompeo and others at the agency proposed abducting Assange from the embassy and surreptitiously bringing him back to the United States via a third country.”As Huff and Roth summarize, “Potential scenarios proposed by the CIA and Trump administration officials included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through the streets of London. Senior CIA officials went so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ detailing methods to kill Assange.
“U.S. plans to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange have received little to no establishment news coverage in the United States, other than scant summaries by Business Insider and The Verge, and tangential coverage by Reuters, each based on the original Yahoo News report.”
9. New laws preventing dark money disclosures sweep the nation.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling relaxing campaign finance regulations, dark money spending has exploded. Now, Republican lawmakers across the U.S. are pushing legislation to make it illegal to compel nonprofit organizations to disclose who the dark money donors are. Recently-passed laws in Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia are based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brings together corporate lobbyists and conservative lawmakers to advance special-interest, business-friendly legislation.
“ALEC is deeply enmeshed with the sprawling political influence networks tied to billionaire families like the Kochs and the Bradleys, both of which use non-disclosing nonprofits that help to conceal how money is funneled,” Donald Shaw reported for Sludge on June 15, 2021. “Penalties for violating the laws vary between the states, but in some states could include prison sentences.”
These bills create a loophole allowing wealthy individuals and groups to pass “dark money” anonymously to 501(c) organizations, which in turn can make independent expenditures. “These bills are about making dark money darker,” Aaron McKean, legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, told Shaw.
The South Dakota law was overwhelmingly passed by the GOP-dominated legislature despite the fact that voters passed a 2016 ballot measure requiring disclosure of “the identity of donors who give more than $100 to organizations for the purpose of political expenditures,” a requirement the legislature repealed a year later, Shaw reported in February 2021.
There’s a federal impact as well. “In a March 2022 article for Sludge, Shaw documented that the federal omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2022 contained a rider exempting political groups that declare themselves “social welfare organizations” from reporting their donors, and another preventing the Securities and Exchange Commission from ‘requiring corporations to publicly disclose more of their political and lobbying spending,’” Huff and Roth note.
While there’s been some coverage of some aspects of this story, there has been little acknowledgment of the stream of these ALEC-inspired bills passing through state legislatures.
10. Major media outlets lobby against regulation of “surveillance advertising.”
“Surveillance advertising” – collecting users’ data to target them with tailored advertising – has become a ubiquitous, extremely profitable practice on the world’s most popular social media platforms. But now, as Lee Fang reported for The Intercept in February 2022, the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking to regulate user data collection. Lobbyists for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are pushing back.
“In a letter, IAB called for the FTC to oppose a ban on data-driven advertising networks, claiming the modern media cannot exist without mass data collection,” Fang reported.
“The IAB represents both data brokers and online media outlets that depend on digital advertising, such as CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, Time, U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, Vox, the Orlando Sentinel, Fox News, and dozens of other media companies… The privacy push has largely been framed as a showdown between technology companies and the administration, [but] the lobbying reveals a tension that is rarely a center of the discourse around online privacy: Major media corporations increasingly rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy violations, even as the public relies on them to report on it.”As a result, “Major news outlets have remained mostly silent on the FTC’s current push and a parallel effort to ban surveillance advertising by the House and Senate by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey.”
The IAB argues that targeted advertising has become necessary due to declining revenues from print sales and subscriptions. Non-digital advertising revenue decreased from $124.8 billion in 2011 to $89.8 billion in 2020, while digital advertising revenue rose from $31.9 billion to $152.2 billion in the same period, according to Pew Research.