Customer Reviews

20 Years of Censored News

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Never heard of East Timor until a few weeks ago? Well, you would have if the other news stories about East Timor over that past few years had made it into the mainstream news!

This book made me realize just how bad the situation is out there in the media. How controlled by corporate PR and government intervention our supposedly "free" media is. How could this happen in the United States of America?

I highly recommend this book to citizens who want to be better informed.

The news stories suppressed by Ronald Reagan (and his "administration") alone tell a horrifying story of how a politician tried to ram his agenda down our throats, without our knowing about it, so that we couldn't dissent or have opinions. And how he tried to censor everything he could, so the American public couldn't get any information about anything the government was doing.(Read Ch. 7, 1982, #6 "Ronald Reagan: America's Chief Censor".) There are also a multitude of stories censored by trans-global corporations what will scare you to death when you read them. What corporations will perpetrate on the public's health, just to continue making a buck, will shock you.

The orignial news stories are covered in summary form, the sources are cited, and there is usually an Update on what has happened since. Sometimes the update is more harrowing than the original!

It is your civic duty to read this book.

You ever wonder if you are reading every news story or if some of the stories never make it to the paper? Do you ever wonder what you might be missing? Grab a copy of 20 Years of censored news and you'll be in for a surprise.

Carl Jensen takes you down the last twenty years with major headlines that were never seen. I was surprised and a little scared to think of what is held back from the public. I was amazed to see what was never told.

Proving the old adage "It's the media that control the people's thinking." This book certainly should wake you up to the fact that what you see isn't really what you get, because you get very little from the press.

I took just over two hours to complete the reading and I am very excited to read Censored 1999, to find out what I missed for the year. Overall this book will make a great gift for just about everyone - well done!

This is a great read. There are a great variety of stories (discounting the author's obsession with nuclear power) that should pique anyone's interest. Each of the year's stories provides interesting insights on what really happened that year (I found particularly enlightening the stories on the corporations, rich elite, and media empires that really rule American). This is a rare book that should be read by anyone who wants to be informed on current events. Rarely does such an important book come cloaked in such a simple cover.

There is nothing more important to Freedom than a free, unbiased exchange of ideas. I now have a better idea of how "un-free" I am. Through reading this book, several layers of ignorance have been stripped away from my consciousness.

This is a scholarly, thoughtful dissertation encompassing not only issues of monopolization of the American press by huge multinational corporations, but many other issues ignored by mainstream media: environmentalism, nuclear power, government surveillance and other infringements on the civil rights of the world's citizens. This book is an essential collection of modern history so carefully hidden from the vast majority of Americans.

If, like me, you read the above review by The Economist, you'll know why you need this book.

20 Years of Censored News recaps the stories reported by Project Censored during its history, and provides updates, for those of us who wondered, "Gee, how did that ever turn out?".

For those of you who have only recently come to Project Censored, this book will bring you up to date on what you've missed.

I give it a ten, simply because few causes are more important.

I thought this book was pretty good, although I didn't learn as much as I thought I would. What I did learn was all very frightening indeed.

The reason I didn't give this 5 stars isn't because I didn't learn something from every censored story, but rather that I felt there was a strong bias in this book. Clinton and Carter get off very easily, when compared to Reagan and Bush, who are attacked for verything they do. It's not that I believe they did nothing wrong, but I'm sure that Clinton and Carter weren't nearly as honest and forthright as this book makes them seem (in comparison to the Republican presidents).

A frightening book that everyone should read. I checked a few of the references and the book is legit. The governance of the people of the United States belongs to the wealthy and corporations.

This book is indeed a damning indictment of the US national news media for their consistent failure to inform the public on critical issues regarding their lives and US international policies.
As the editor Carl Jensen states: `more than three quarters of the 200 censored issues are still overlooked or censored by the mainstream press.'

Media landscape
Through media mergers only a handful conglomerates dominate the entire US information landscape. Those conglomerates have joined the ruling capitalist class with its main goals of market share and profit maximizing. They are part of the system and defend it. Their news broadcasting is biased, favoring management over labor, corporations over their critics, the wealthy over the poor, officialdom over protesters, free markets over the public sector, conservatives over progressive people or dominance of the Third World over social change.
In fact their employee-journalists are stenographers of power.

Dominant themes
Nationally, the dominant or very important issues are the attacks on civil liberties and personal privacy, the media mergers creating mammoth conglomerates and concomitantly reducing seriously the information spectrum, the freedom of the press, using innocent human beings as guinea pigs for radiation testing and the murky businesses of a presidential family.
Internationally, the omissions to report on the genocides by the Red Khmer in Cambodia and by Indonesia in East Timor are not less than a scandal.

This book contains very useful updates on the 200 issues involved as well as an excellent index.
It is an outstanding handbook for all those interested in US and world history.

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