 Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Today, I'm honored to have with us, Andy Lee Roth, Associate Director of Project Censored. And we're going to be discussing Bias Censorship and the Mass Media. Welcome to the show, Andy. Thanks so much, Michael. It's a pleasure to join you. Same here. And as we just said, you are the Associate Director of Project Censored, a nonprofit media watchdog organization, where you coordinate the Project's campus affiliates program, news media research network of several hundred students and faculty at two dozen colleges and universities across North America. Your research and writing have been published in a variety of places, including the Index on Censorship in These Times Magazine, Yes Magazine, the Journal of Media, Culture, and Society, and the International Journal of Press Politics. You earned your PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology at Haverford College. And in the interest of full disclosure, this host was a co-host on the Project Censored radio show in Berkeley, California from 2016 to 2018. So, Andy, is there anything you'd like to add briefly about your background and interests? No, that's a great introduction, Michael. Thank you. Okay. So, Andy, as we've mentioned on this show previously, in fact, it was in our discussion with your former Project Censored colleague, Peter Phillips, on our previous show. Thinking things through this show seeks to help our viewers and listeners learn to think critically about important issues in the world today, particularly by showing them ways of looking at and thinking about issues from deeper, more critical perspectives. This includes learning how to question the ways in which these issues often are presented to us by the mainstream largely corporate-owned mass media. So, Andy, let's just begin by defining some terms here, if you don't mind. Your organization, Project Censored, has as one of its primary goals, as I understand it, to encourage people to develop what you call critical media literacy. Now, that's a mouthful. Could you please unpack for our listeners and viewers exactly what the term critical media literacy means and why it is important? Yeah, let's go back and kind of almost unpack that term word by word. If we talk about literacy, most people are thinking, of course, of the ability to read and write and to make sense of the written word. And that term, of course, in education has been expanded significantly in the past couple of decades to include mathematical literacy. And also media literacy, the idea that it's important to not only to be able to read what's in the magazine or the book or the newspaper that you're looking at, kind of basic form of literacy, but also understanding some of the social factors and social forces that shape the production and distribution of that media content. Then if you add in, so we expand the term of literacy to include other kinds of skills. And when we talk about critical media literacy, we're really talking about being multi-literate. It's the ability to interpret and make sense of and also produce audio materials, video materials, written materials that are distributed, say online. And the other critical, the other, I shouldn't say critical, the other important dimension of talking about critical media literacy is that critical media literacy takes into account differences and inequalities and the balance of power in the society or the societies where that media is being produced, distributed and consumed. So as a sociologist, this makes a lot of sense to me. Sociology, my home discipline, I believe we share that background as fellow sociologists. Of course, sociologists are always interested in issues of power and its distribution and the consequences of those. And so critical media literacy really says, when we're thinking about media content and how it's produced and how it's interpreted, we have to be taking into account these other real-world issues that shape the production and interpretation of media. And let me just hone in for a second because as you know, the subtitle of the show is critical thinking for critical times. Of course, the word critical has at least two different meanings, but in the way we're using it here on this show and I believe in the way you're using it, critical means number one, not just to accept what we see or read or hear as a fact, but it means stepping back in a metaphorical sense from what we're hearing and asking some questions about what we're hearing, asking some deeper questions and more contextual questions. Now I need to unpack that. Look at the larger framework within which whatever is being told to us is being presented and then we have the issues that aren't right in front of our faces regarding the power issues, like who's deciding how to present a certain issue and we're gonna get into framing in a minute. And critical to me also means going deeper. Yeah. And by going deeper, I'm meaning exactly what I just said or asking questions and not just accepting things at face value. Anyway, I just wanted to say that for a moment for the, yeah. And I think if you think about critical thinking skills as a foundation for critical media literacy, so the idea that we're making claims but we're supporting those claims with evidence, right? And that's how we can adjudicate. That's how we can decide when you and I have a difference of opinion. Some things may be truly matters of opinion. Is vanilla ice cream tastier than chocolate? Yeah. We probably can't resolve that as an empirical question but there are other things where if we agree that we're gonna accept certain standards of evidence we can then say, well, let's test that claim that chocolate is a better flavor than vanilla. Right. So here's a problem I see. Not to get too much off topic. I wanna get back to critical media literacy and some of the other terms you use but let's say I'm sitting watching MSNBC and a host is saying something to me. Now, it's a whole other issue of how these so-called news organizations present themselves as being news organizations but let's leave that aside for the moment. Let's say a news host is saying, well, today X reported that X number of boxes of classified materials were taken by the FBI out of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. Okay. So just that statement that could be just factual because it's either true or false perhaps but a lot of other statements get made in the course of these so-called news broadcasts that are not simply facts, they're interpretations. So anyway, to get back to critical media literacy I'd like you to drill down a little bit more. Okay, so media, there are different forms of media, right? We've talked about that or maybe you wanna say more about that but then I'd like to get the issue of what is news? Yeah. Well, just to pick up one last thread of that topic and then address that very profound question, what is news? But just on the question of interpretation, right? New that we aren't gonna avoid news that is interpretive because our social life as human beings is fundamentally interpretive, right? I could please unpack the term interpretive for us. The example I would like to use with students in my introduction to sociology classes is we need to know the difference. This is an everyday life. The difference between a wink and a blink. If I get a speck of dust in my eye and I blink to get it out to make my eye tear to clear the speck of dust, we don't necessarily attach any meaning to that but if I'm winking at you, that means something like get a load of that or I'm flirting. And you and I need to be able to interpret the differences between blinks and winks and if it's a wink, what kind of wink it is to be able to do what we're doing. Right. If that's true in everyday life, there's no time out for journalists and other news professionals from that interpretive process. That's part and parcel of being social and interactive in the world. So I think it's not so much the question of whether news is interpretive or not, but by what standards the interpretation is being made and whether those standards are kind of public and open for debate and inspection or not. And so I think when we talk about, for instance, news bias, something we'll get into later. Yes. One of the issues is that the interpretive standards are not, the cards aren't on the table, right? But let's turn, because you asked this very challenging and provocative question, what is news that as a sociologist I love, this is the kind of thing I would wanna ask students in a sociology course of mind if we were talking about the news, like instead of taking that term for granted, like we all know what it is, let's start by unpacking that. So I'm gonna give a kind of sociological answer to what is news and then maybe try to, as you say, go deeper with it. News is what news professionals treat as news, right? So it's news if people in the news business say it so. So let's unpack that. What that then encourages us to think about is definitions of news and in particular news values, right? What are the values that shape news as a profession and particular news workers as individuals to think of this as being newsworthy and that as being un-newsworthy, right? And so we know from extensive research and literature and anecdotal accounts by famous news workers, we know that things become more suitable as news when they're timely, when they are deemed as being important, when they're deemed to be novel, right? And so those aren't the only kind of criteria for does it count as news from the point of view of a news professional, be it a reporter or an editor, the producer of the television program, the webmaster of the what news site online. But those kind of questions, the answers to those questions are all shaped by things like history, culture, and of course the kind of organizational values of the organization that those news workers are part of. So that's all kind of abstract, I realized. So let me kind of wrap at least a first response to what is news with an observation from one of the most famous sociological studies of the news, a pioneering work by a sociologist named Gay Tuckman who published a book in 1978 called Making News. And one of Gay Tuckman's critical observations was that most news, what many people think of as the mainstream media, what we at Project Censored would call the corporate news media, most news focuses on events. And by events, I mean discrete occasions that have clear kind of beginning, middles, and ends. And there are clearly defined actors who are engaged in the actions that are making that event take place, right? They're the players in effect. Right. Tuckman's observation was news and news professionals are very good at covering events. They have a lot more trouble and they're not nearly as good at covering issues. And Tuckman was key to this because writing in the late 70s, she was interested in the women's movement and the topic of sexism and how sexism and the women's movement had been covered in US news media. And what she noticed was that the coverage didn't tend to be very good. It never seemed to address the issues that the people who were advocating feminism and challenging sexism were talking about. The news always boiled down their cause, their values, their interests, their campaigns in effect to news events. And so if they didn't stage a protest in public somewhere, they wouldn't get covered, right? But you can only stage so many protests before your protests are no longer novel and therefore not newsworthy. And so Tuckman as a sociologist studying the news from I think a critical vantage point was concerned that these definitions of what counts as news often work to preserve the status quo and to create barriers or hurdles for social movements on behalf of progressive politics, advocating for expansion of civil rights and so forth. I'm just gonna stop you for one second. What do you mean by status quo? What is status quo? The powers that be, the existing social order, right? The kind of the how is this society organized who holds power, who's marginal to power, who's subject to it. Thank you. And so if you think of the news as serving a kind of a social ordering function, the kind of observation that Tuckman is making about the difference between news coverage of events, the emphasis in news on events over issues shows how a social order might be reproduced, right? Or reinforced, thank you. By that kind of definition of social order, why that kind of definition of what things are important? Let me, if I may just comment on that. Just from my own recent experience, I've been watching a lot of MSNBC, just for certain reasons I won't go into. And yes, they're covering events, they keep repeating, it's like a headline. Here's what happened today, who said what to whom and how many boxes. But when they go to the actual so-called analysis or when the talking heads are on where they're discussing over and over again, what happened, what does it mean? There's something more going on there than just reporting events. There's a certain kind of, I don't know, would you call it framing? No, that's it. I think that's what we were talking about earlier is interpretation. What we can say this many boxes of evidence were taken from Mar-a-Lago today. But quickly, everyone wants to know or talk about, well, what does that mean? What's the significance of that, right? But yeah, that does go to framing. I mean, if we talk about framing, I think the simplest way to think about framing is the idea of a picture or a window frame, right? So this is a concept that developed in sociology the work of a great pioneering sociologist, Irvin Goffman, was the first to talk about framing as a way of explaining how people make sense of their everyday lives. We frame things to be able to make sense of them. And as that applies to news, as that's been applied to thinking about journalism and media more generally, a number of really foundational studies have talked about, have used that metaphor, which is so powerful because of course, a frame focuses our attention on some things, right? But it also, the key thing about framing, from my point of view as a sociologist who's interested in thinking about news critically is what's outside the frame? What does the frame not show us, right? And that goes back to the idea you mentioned earlier of context, right? Action out of context will often seem non-rational or maybe even irrational, but when the action is put into some context, perhaps now it makes more sense to us. And so, I think in some ways, this is another way of coming at the insights of Gay Tuckman that I was talking about a moment ago. In some ways that's a framing issue, right? So social movements for greater inclusion or social movements attempting to address systemic wrongs in a society often- Such as, such as the Me Too movement? Me Too movement, I think right now, if you think about a contemporary issue where framing is crucial, I would say, and I'm talking about this now as an issue in Tuckman's terms, gun violence in our society. Yes, yes. Right? The corporate news media do a fantastic job in some ways of covering gun violence as isolated events, but you'll have to look a lot further and longer to find deep kind of investigative reporting about gun violence as an issue, right? As something, and we'll get analysis like that occasionally tied to particular crises such as the Evaldi shooting, for instance. Right, exactly. That will occasion some reporting along the lines of what I'm describing as the issues-oriented reporting, but that's a rarity, more often than not, if we're talking about kind of day-to-day gun violence in US cities, first of all, it probably doesn't make the news because it's not considered novel, it's not considered that important, but second, if it does make the news, it makes the news as an isolated event rather than as something tied to a larger set of social issues. Yeah. The argument would be that that kind of reporting does a disservice to us as members of the public because we don't get the full picture, right? Something's left out of the frame. And what's left out of the frame is? I would say, I'll speak as a sociologist for a minute, some of the conditions that truly give rise to the extent of gun violence in our culture. Yes. Right? First of the time we spend in kind of partisan debates, partisan defined in terms of the political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, right? Right. Partisan debates over to what extent there should be background checks, to what extent this is a product of violent video games or music that encourages and glorifies gun violence. And none of those necessarily, each of those might be a piece of the puzzle. Yes. But if the reporting doesn't address kind of the larger cultural and societal issues, again, I think things are left outside of the frame in a way that we are left with a partial in both senses of that word view. Yeah, right. Partial in the sense that it's incomplete and partial also in the sense of that it may be slanted in one direction or another. Right. And to just add to what you said, it's also partial in the sense that the deeper questions about why are all these mass shootings happening? Why is there so much violence in the United States as compared to other so-called civilized countries or Western so-called democracies? You know, I haven't done any systematic research on this, but just in the course of my own work and watching the news, there is almost a complete lack of anybody in the news media broadly defined who's asking those kinds of deeper critical questions. Why? I mean, that kind of reporting, I think first of all, there are not easy answers to those questions, right? We can't kind of point fingers to those questions. Kind of point fingers and say, oh, they're skipping something that they really ought to just nail down once and for all and we can move on. Right, right, right. These are complex, multifaceted issues. Absolutely. But the other component that does go to kind of how news is organized in the United States is that these are issues that require in-depth investigative reporting and the kind of time and investment in the investigation that many newspapers now can't afford to undertake anymore. Yes. The economics of news, even before the COVID pandemic, news organizations were in an economic crisis because huge amounts of advertising revenue are being siphoned off by social media giants. Right, right. And, you know, most news outlets even before the pandemic hit hard by those realities, the pandemic, like so many things, has exposed those structural weaknesses and made them worse. So we've seen many more closures of news outlets. So one bottom line is that, for instance, the paper I grew up reading, The Los Angeles Times, used to have an extensive team of investigative reporters. And every week or two, the Times would run in the left-hand column of the front page an in-depth investigative report. And you just don't see that anymore. And I don't necessarily fault the LA Times for not doing that. They're adapting to new economic realities. And one way they and other news outlets have done so is to reduce the number of reporters they keep on staff as investigative reporters who have a time release to do detailed reporting. Right. Now, before we go any further and we're fast running out of time, you and Project Censored are doing very important work. And I'd like to highlight the yearly volume that Project Censored with your editorial assistant puts out. Could you please say the name of it, say briefly what it does, and we can show the picture on the screen if our engineer would be so kind. Yeah, Project Censored every year publishes an annual yearbook. It's called The State of the Free Press. The current edition is The State of the Free Press 2022. And that book does a bunch of things. The cornerstone of the book is a chapter where we identify and examine in detail the top 25 most important but under-reported stories of the previous year. We also have analyses of what happened to previous year's top 25 stories. We talk about that as deja vu news. Yes. What after the project has drawn attention to them, what's happened, how have they developed. We analyze two things that you might think of, two phenomena that you might think of as news propaganda. We talk about junk food news. The metaphor here is of junk food like the bag of chips where you finish eating it. And when you're done, you have a stomach ache but you're still hungry. These are frivolous news stories that don't necessarily provide any nutrition to us as citizens, as engaged community members, but where we seem to be drawn to them anyway. And the counterpart of junk food news is news abuse. These are truly important stories, but they're stories that are covered in such a way that the significance of them is spun or obscured. And all that's kind of a heavy trip. So the final chapter of the State of the Free Press yearbook every year is a chapter we call media democracy in action. And that chapter highlights exemplary people and organizations that provide kind of shining examples of our independent news media at their best. Champions of freedom of expression and freedom of information. So we end on a positive. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. We are literally almost out of time and I wanna make sure if at the end of the show, if our engineer would be so kind as to show the picture of the other forthcoming book that you along with others are coming out with, there it is now media and media guide to critical media literacy. And I just wanna end, which we didn't really get to and I would definitely love to have you back on is two things. One, how important, just to highlight this, how important you seem to believe and I would agree with you. It's important to give consumers and we didn't even get the term into the term consumers of news, which is a model that can be critically evaluated. What is the importance of bringing the global perspective to whatever we're watching or listening to? And finally, maybe you could say a sentence or two of what can citizens do given these problems that you've only touched on here to empower themselves because if we truly do live in a democratic society, it would seem to me that these kind of critical media skills would be absolutely essential to a democracy. They are and that's the reason that I and several of my authors who are listed on the media and me as the media revolution collective, we decided to write a book for young people about critical media literacy. Wonderful. And so we're really hopeful that that book is gonna have a big impact when it comes out this October. In terms of what people can do right away, I think supporting independent journalism, booking beyond what is the obvious and largest news sources and then truly supporting those organizations, whether it be subscribing to a print version of a magazine, talking about the news you find in that outlet with your friends so that those audiences might grow. We need to build what my colleague Peter Phillips calls a culture of validation and support for the wonderful independent news media that we do have available. We just often don't know about it. And finally, I would say two more points in terms of what we can do. One is to advocate for greater protections for journalists who often are risking their lives or facing imprisonment or harassment to raise the news. I have a new article out called The Deadly Business of Reporting the Truth. That's on the project censored website at projectcensored.org. Yeah, if we could show that. And finally, I think to seek out news that inspires you. My students a few years ago, I would ask them what news do you look at? And they would always say, oh, I don't watch the news, it's too depressing. And I would say, well, maybe you're looking at the wrong kind of news. And so there's a great movement in independent journalism towards solutions journalism. We have a pioneer of that right here in my state of Washington, Yes Magazine. Oh, yes. You can check out and the Solutions Journalism Network. These are both sources of news that is hard hitting and powerful, but not depressing because the focus of solutions journalism is how and how communities are coming together to solve systemic problems. And I think one important way forward in terms of championing a better society and more robust media is to have news that emphasizes how powerful we can be when we work together. Right. Well, thank you so much, Andy. And I just want to mention, if you go to the Project Censored website, you can get a lot more information about the project itself, the issues they're dealing with, things you can do and also ways to contact Andy through Project Censored. So that's all the time we have for today. We've been speaking with Andy Leroth, Associate Director of Project Censored. Thanks so much for joining us today, Andy. We'd love to have you back on the show sometime soon to at least do a part two. And just as a note to our listeners and viewers next time in two weeks on this show, as part two of our Project Censored special, we'll be speaking with Mickey Huff, current Director of Project Censored to continue discussing some of these important issues. Please join us. This has been Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Thanks as always to our engineer, to Haley Akeda and to the rest of the studio staff and a special shout out to Jay Fidel. And again, thank you so much, Andy. Thank you, Michael. Please do join us again two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. Mahalo and Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.