 for Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. We are pleased to have with us today, Dr. Steve Masek, Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Steve received his PhD at the University of Minnesota in Cultural Studies with a focus on film and media studies. He's the author of Urban Nightmares, the media, the right, and the moral panic over the city. A critical analysis of media representations of American cities and the urban poor in the 1980s and 90s. He's also a member of Project Censored, a media watchdog group, and co-editor of their 2022 volume, State of the Free Press, an annual publication that discusses their research and findings on the most censored stories of the year. And some of our viewers, listeners, may already know that we previously had three of Steve's colleagues from Project Censored on this show to discuss their work. Welcome to the show, Steve. Thanks so much for having me, Michael. You're welcome. Ellis, dive right in here. Now, as many of our viewers and listeners may already know, representatives from many countries around the world, as well as from corporations and non-governmental organizations, NGOs, are meeting right now at the Global Climate Change Conference in Charmel-Shake, Egypt. One of the major topics they're discussing is the vast disparity in carbon or CO2 emissions between the nations of the so-called Global North and the Global South. And this is in the context of the growing heating of the Earth's oceans and atmosphere due to human-caused climate change. Now, Project Censored has been engaged in very important research on this critical issue. Steve, could you please briefly summarize Project Censored's research on this and talk specifically about why the corporate mass media are underreporting this story? Sure. So every year, and your viewers may remember this, every year Project Censored assembles a list of the top 25 underreported or overlooked stories of the year. And we publish this list as part of a book, a yearbook that's published by Seven Stories Press and The Censored Press. We now have an imprint, a unique imprint, Censored Press within Seven Stories Press. And over the past few years, many of the stories that have made it onto the list of most crucial underreported or ignored stories ignored or underreported by the corporate media have had to do with global climate change. And in last year's book, State of the Free Press 2022, the number four story on the list had to do with the fact that climate debtor nations have colonized the atmosphere. And this related to a study that was published in the Lancet Journal Planetary Health by an economic anthropologist who looked at which countries are most responsible for the carbon that's made its way into the atmosphere and that is responsible for global climate change. And he concluded that 98% of the carbon that is responsible for changes in global climate emanated from the advanced industrialized countries of Europe, the United States, Canada, and then parts of Asia. And these would be the countries of the global north, right? The countries of the global north. And then- Could you just please tell us what climate debtor nations are for our viewers? So he came up with the idea of climate debtor nations because he sort of started with the premise that all the nations of the atmosphere is the property of all the nations in the earth, all the people on the earth, right? Of every country on the planet. But that some countries have polluted that atmosphere disproportionately more than others. And so climate debtor nations are nations that have under-polluted or under-contributed carbon to the atmosphere. And so the nations of the global south are overwhelmingly the climate debtor nations, the nations who have under-polluted. And the countries of the global north are the ones who have contributed disproportionately to global climate change. So the United States, according to his calculations, was sort of contributed 40% in excess of what it was entitled to in terms of our population and so on to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere, whereas countries like India and China had dramatically under-contributed to, especially India, had dramatically under-contributed to the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Now, this is a pretty sensational story. There are lots of discussions of what's been responsible for the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. We all know it's human activity, whether agriculture or industrial. But this is the first effort to really parse out responsibility on a national basis for global climate change. And it went completely under-reported in the corporate media. It was independent media outlets like in these times, which is, I'm happy to say, an investigative journalism magazine that's published out of Chicago that really drew attention to this. There were some occasional mentions of it in the scientific press, but not really a lot of coverage by the big corporate media. Now, I want to ask you, if you don't mind my interrupting, why do you and or project censored think this is the case based on your research? So this is a great question, and it's one of the things that puzzles us at Project Censored. We know that meteorologists, environmental, climate scientists, other kinds of scientists have known about the phenomenon of global climate change and have known that human activity has been responsible for bringing about this global climate change for quite some time. But the question is, why hasn't the corporate media reported on it and reported on it adequately? And I think any explanation has to start with an acknowledgement of the institutional organization of the corporate media. The corporate media are in business by and large, not to serve the public interest, but to serve the fiduciary interests of their shareholders. They're in business to make money. They are profit making media for the most part. Like any private business, they have a board of directors whose job it is to make sure that the company makes money. And like a lot of giant corporations, big media conglomates have board of directors that include people who also sit on the boards of other companies. And just to give you an example, these are what are called interlocking directorates. And just to give you a quick example, a company like Comcast, which is parent company of NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, so it owns a lot of news outlets, has on its board of directors people who also serve on the board of directors of Dow DuPont, which is a major manufacturer of petrochemicals, agricultural chemicals, and so on, that has ties to the fossil fuel industry. Deloitte, which is a major accounting company that does work with all of the major big, big oil and fossil fuel companies, various banks, including Bank of New York, that lend money to fossil fuel companies. So their interests are directly connected to companies that are involved in fossil fuels. And so it makes perfect sense to me that they would not maybe want reporters working for, say, NBC or CNBC paying too close attention to this issue. Beyond that, it's not simply, and of course, people on the board of directors do not get on the phone and talk to editors and say, why did you cover that story? That doesn't happen very often. But they hire the right people as producers, for example, or who know which stories are acceptable and which ones might get them in trouble. And those producers or senior producers or directors then hire the reporters who cover the stories. And so beyond that, the fact is that all the commercial media in this country, virtually all of it is advertising subsidized. They depend on advertisements as a major source of revenue. So most newspapers, any place you go in the country, 70, 80% of their revenue come directly from advertisements. Broadcast over the air, terrestrial television and radio depends on 100%. On advertising to pay the bills, 100% of the revenues come from advertising. Cable, it's like 90%. And fossil fuel companies, companies like BP and Exxon, are major advertisers. And no company that owns several different news networks like Comcast can afford to alienate this powerful constituency that is taking out the ads and paying for the commercial spots that pay the bills for their company. Now, I'd like to segue to a related issue. Project Sensors Research, as I understand it, also talks about the millions of dollars that are being spent on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry itself and who is responsible for this funding. Can you say more about this? Yeah. So this is a really striking story that's going to be in the, I can't tell you where it's going to be in the, in the upcoming top 25 list, but in December, December 6th, I believe is the official publication date. And could we please show the cover of that book? Sure. Yeah. Thank you. You can keep going, Steve. Yeah. So in December, I think of, you know, in about a month or so, this book, State of the Free Press 2023 will be published and the new top 25 list of underreported stories will be included in that. And I helped to co-edit that particular chapter of the book. And one of the stories that is very high up, I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is, has to do with a report that was issued by the IMF about the sheer amount of money that governments spend subsidizing fossil fuels. And their fossil fuels, fossil fuel industry is subsidized to the tune of $11 million, right, like a minute, right, which is, which is stunning. And who is, who is paying all subsidies? Can you give us a couple of examples? It's, it's, I mean, the, the report, you know, referenced the tax breaks that, that, you know, companies that engage in new drilling get from, get from governments, the, you know, the, the, the free rights to drill on public land, that all amounts to a kind of subsidy for fossil fuels. You know, anyone who, and there are other people who are sort of more expert on this, but, you know, here in the United States, we are still, even though Joe Biden says he's committed to making a conversion to a green economy, we are still, you know, subsidizing fossil fuel companies in various ways through tax breaks, through, you know, giving, giving, you know, oil companies the right to drill on public lands, et cetera, et cetera, and not charging them the, you know, the, the appropriate amount for that, et cetera, et cetera. And, and this report was issued by like one of the major economic organizations in the world's, and yet it was not covered by any of the corporate media. What organization was that? The IMF. The International Monetary Fund, right? Is it issued by, you know, is it issued by the IMF and it wasn't reported by any, you know, major corporate media. Instead, it was reported by this tiny little, you know, online environmental news site, Treehugger. So, yeah, Treehugger.com is the, is, is the site that reported on it. And that's just stunning, right? Because this is a story that was there for any reporter working for any kind of news organization to report on and they didn't. Well, so let, yeah, the IMF reports, you know, said $11 million a minute. They, was amounted to $59, $5.9 trillion in subsidies in the year prior to the report coming out. And this is the IMF saying this. This isn't some group of radical, you know, environmentalists making this claim. This is the IMF. And yet it still wasn't covered. Right, right. Well, let's move ahead. We can always come back to some of these issues because they're all related. Yes, they are. Project Sensors Research also talks about the increasing presence of microplastics worldwide, especially in the environment and in our bodies. And the implications of this for human and planetary health. So first, could you tell us what, what are microplastics? Where do they come from? And why do they pose a danger to the environment and our health? Okay, these are all great questions. So microplastics are tiny little, you know, bits of plastic that are found in the environment, in the environment that are created from the breakdown of all the plastic bags that we use, all the plastic containers we use, they are, you know, less than many cases, less than a millimeter in length or, you know, or millimeter square. So they're not, in some cases, even really visible or that visible to the naked eye. And they, you know, one of the stories that we spotlighted back in the list for 2021, 2022, that was published in State of the Free Press 2022, had to do with this really sensational study that was done by some researchers in Australia that found that like 80% of the seafood that was available in a particular, particular group of supermarkets contained, right, certain amounts of microplastics, that there were little, you know, tiny microscopic bits of plastic in the clams that people were eating, the fish that were people were eating, you know, and other, other forms of seafood, which, you know, the researchers said, you know, was an indication that these, that microplastics are much more, you know, prevalent in our food chain than previously had been thought, right, that people, I mean, they probably have been there for a long time, but people didn't, didn't try to look for them. And there are concerns that microplastics might be linked to various kinds of health problems and diseases, including cancer, that they're, you know, that there might be, that they might be carcinogenic, or they might cause certain kinds of cancer. And after we put this on the list in, in for the, you know, the state of the Free Press 2022, the 2021, 2022, top 25 list, almost immediately after we published this book, there was a spate of stories that, that were even more alarming about the omnipresence of microplastics. And I know that they were reported on by the Guardian, and some of them were so stunning that they actually got significant corporate media coverage as well. So one of them was a finding that in the tissue, in living tissue of cancer patients, patients who were being treated for lung cancer, they had found microplastics in people's lung tissue. And they were more common in the tissue, in the tissue that was cancerous than in the tissue, than in the, in the healthy tissue that the, that the researchers were looking at from people who were being treated for lung cancer. And then the other one that got headline coverage, even in USA Today and another, another corporate news outlets was that researchers had found microplastics in human blood that they were studying human blood. They looked at, you know, some random samples of human blood and found a significant amount of microplastics in a significant number of subjects. So this kind of indicates that the, you know, the product of the decomposition of the Coke bottles and the plastic bags and so forth that are, that we all use every day are now in our bodies. And we are not, and the scary thing is, I think, is that there hasn't been a huge amount of research about what the possible health effects of this are, but there are grounds for believing that it's, that it's a cause for concern. And why don't we hear more about this on the corporate? Well, I mean, so that's a great question. I'm going to go back to my example of Comcast, one of the people who sits on the, on the board of directors for Comcast also sits on the board of directors for the parent company of Pepsi, which is, you know, a major bottling company for Pepsi Cola. They're involved in producing, you know, drinks and packaged foods. I think the parent company of Pepsi is also involved in the packaged food and fast food industry. They use extensively plastic bottles and plastic packaging and so on. And, and you can imagine how terrifying it would be to advertisers, how alienating and frightening it would be to advertisers if the corporate news media were consistently covering this because many of the, many of the advertisements you see, like for example on television, are for these fast moving consumer goods, right? Like fast food and soft drinks and beers and so on. They don't want to draw attention to the fact that these products are also contributing to the, to the epidemic of microplastics in the environment. And there are many advertisers who actually have written, you know, policies in the contracts that they sign with, with, you know, with the companies, the outlets where they advertise saying like, I, you cannot, you know, for example, it's very common for car advertisers to say they do not want their ads to run before, after, or during like a piece about car accidents, which you can understand, right? They don't want to be, they don't want to be associated with it. Well, you could see if there were more coverage of microplastics, you probably see soft drinks companies saying don't run my ad anywhere near a story about microplastics. So Steve, we're going to have to start wrapping up, but I want to try and tie this together in a couple of ways. First of all, a listener, a viewer could be listening and watching what you're saying, you know, even be concerned, but also wonder like, number one, what can I do about it? And number two, we're living in a democracy. Many people now, in light of the January 6th interaction and other, you know, election denying spokespeople, I mean, what's the relationship between the media and living in a democracy? And so why should we all care about all this and what could we even do about it? Okay, so those are really great questions and it probably would be a topic for an entire another show to really thoroughly answer them. But let me just say, I think, you know, first of all, democracies are only as good as their sources of political information. A democracy without reliable sources of information about issues of public concern is a farce, right? And in fact, the founding fathers, right, saw it that way. That's why they created the First Amendment to protect the press, because they believe that the best guardian of a democracy and of the public interest was a really vibrant and robust media system and news media that would tell people the truth and inform people because democratic debate is only as good as the information that feeds it, right, that it's based on. So it is a real crisis for a democracy that our media, which is dominated by private corporations and big conglomerates who have all sorts of conflicts of interest, are the ones that we have to rely on for information. So I think the first thing that people can do is to seek out alternative sources of information, especially public interest media, like your show here, that don't depend extensively on advertisements that are produced by people on a non-for-profit basis. More and more media is going non-profit. So here in Chicago, one of the major newspapers, the Chicago Sun Times, has now become part of Chicago Public Media, the public broadcasting company, the public radio company in Chicago. That's, I think, a good model. So we should be seeking out public service media and not-for-profit media because they're often more reliable. And we should also be contributing our money to organizations like yours, organizations like Chicago Public Media and Chicago ProPublica, subscribing to independent non-corporate investigative journalism magazines and newspapers. So that's one thing. I think that we should be pressuring our representatives to fund a larger public service media sector because our public television and public radio system in the United States is dramatically, is woefully underfunded compared to, say, Europe or Asia. I have to mention here that even so-called public media such as NPR and PBS, they are not, they are funded largely by the same corporations that we've been talking about. Thank you for saying that. So that in itself could deserve the whole show. No, thank you for saying that because, yes, BP and Exxon and Mobile are the ones who fund a lot of, like, the programs that you see on public television. Right. So in closing, I would like it if the engineer could show the project-censored URL and website once again, and also Steve Masek's email address. I'm mainly interested, apropos of the project-censored website right now, is to how can people find some of these underreported stories. Of course, they're in the project-censored annual report, but I'm just wondering where else they could find those. Just briefly, Steve. If you go to the project-censored website, project-censored.org, there is a link there to a number of independent news sources that we maintain a list of where we get a lot of the stories from that end up on the top 25. And then there's also something called the Validated Independent News Story blog, the VINS blog, where in real-time stories that have been nominated, that will end up on, you know, or have a chance to end up on next year's top 25 list will be posted short summaries of the stories with links to the original reporting. So I encourage your viewers to go to project-censored.org. Wonderful. Well, Steve, that's all the time we have for today, but we'd love to have you back. We've been speaking with Dr. Steve Masek, Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. We've been discussing project-censored's research on media coverage of global carbon emissions, as well as on coverage of the impact of microplastics on the global environment and human health and much else. Again, you can reach Steve at, again, the email is s-h-m-a-c-e-k at n-o-c-t-r-l.edu. And you can reach project-censored at project-censored.org. Thanks so much for joining us today, Steve. We'd love to have you back again. Oh, it was a real, real pleasure. Thanks so much. You're welcome. This has been Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times. I'm Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Please do contact me with your comments, suggestions, and criticisms at my email address. Again, if you could show it on the screen, it's HawaiiIsCalling at gmail.com. In other words, three words, Hawaii with two eyes, then the word is, and the word calling at gmail.com. And please do join us again two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. Mahalo.