The Most Underreported Stories of 2021
"More than 1.1 million seniors in the federal government’s Medicare program could die prematurely over the next decade because they will be unable to afford the high prices of their prescription medications..."
By Jim Miller
Toward the end of every year since 1976, Project Censored has issued its list of the 25 most underreported stories of the year, a crucial guide to the kinds of information that the corporate media underemphasizes or allows to fall through the cracks entirely. For the folks at Project Censored, censorship in our society is not simply the product of government coercion but rather part of our market system:
We define “modern censorship” to include the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality by news media. This includes not only the exclusion of newsworthy stories and topics from coverage, but also the manipulation of coverage based on political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from corporate entities, advertisers, and funders), and legal pressure (e.g., the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).
Thus, censorship is not limited to overt, intentional omission, but also includes anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that purports to have a free press system. In this wider view, censorship is best understood as a specific form of propaganda—deceptive communication intended to influence public opinion in order to benefit a special interest.
At their website, you can survey years of their reports, which include many of the stories they reported on that later came to have a critical impact on our society. Hence, for anyone who is looking to see what gets missed in the corporate news landscape, Project Censored’s systematic, scholarly analysis is an essential resource that, in a saner world, would serve as the antidote to your crazy uncle’s Facebook conspiracy posts.
This year’s top 25 list includes a wide range of important stories from the deadly impact of increasing prescription drug prices to factory farming’s role in fostering the next pandemic. While all of the stories in this year’s edition are important, three stood out to me as key.
#1 Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Workers’ Rights
While it is true that the drive to organize Amazon in Alabama had a moment in the national press, there were hundreds of other strikes across the United States that received little attention or were completely ignored. As Project Censored explains:
After the United States went into lockdown in spring 2020, millions of people were designated ‘essential workers’—individuals who were expected to continue laboring at their jobs as meatpackers, teachers, janitors, delivery drivers, nurses, or grocery store clerks, at the potential cost of their lives. In response, thousands of wildcat strikes erupted to challenge dangerous working conditions and confront chronically low wages for these essential positions. This wave of wildcat strikes has continued and reached remarkable levels in the United States, as documented by Mike Elk from the labor news website Payday Report. Elk created a continuously updated COVID-19 Strike Wave Interactive Map, which had identified 1,100 wildcat strikes as of March 24, 2021, many of which the corporate media have chosen to ignore.
Traditionally, workers who strike belong to unions and only go on strike after discussing the possibility within their local (and sometimes national) unions and then taking a vote. Wildcat strikes are a different matter; they occur when workers without unions, or without explicit approval by the unions that do represent them, collectively stop working. Most wildcat strikes last for only a few days, though they often result in employers making some concessions to workers’ demands.
The reason why this story matters is that it illustrates that the wave of worker unrest in the United States was and is deeper than a handful of isolated campaigns. The corporate media coverage of strikes has missed the larger picture.
Hence Project Censored notes, “Corporate media have largely avoided reporting on the burgeoning wildcat protests in the United States. While local and regional newspapers and broadcast news outlets have reported on particular local actions, corporate news coverage has failed to report the strike wave as a wave, at no time connecting the dots of all the individual, seemingly isolated work stoppages and walkouts to create a picture of the overarching trend.”
Thus, what is clearly one of the most hopeful stories in the nation has been underreported or ignored. Instead of angry workers rebelling in large numbers across the country, we have seen angry anti-vaxxers instead on a far more regular basis. This framing paints a distinctly different picture of where the populist energy is in the American body politic.
#2 Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
The debate in Congress over how to address rising prescription drug costs received plenty of coverage but missed this crucially important bit of context. Project Censored’s number one underreported story of 2021 shows just what the likely failure to address this problem will do:
More than 1.1 million seniors in the federal government’s Medicare program could die prematurely over the next decade because they will be unable to afford the high prices of their prescription medications, according to a November 2020 study issued by the West Health Policy Center, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy research group, and Xcenda, the research arm of AmerisourceBergen, a drug distributor. As Kenny Stancil reported for Common Dreams, West Health projects that, with the continuation of current drug pricing trends, “cost-related nonadherence” will become “a leading cause of death in the U.S., ahead of diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and kidney disease” by 2030.
According to the West Health/Xcenda study, the rising cost of prescription medicines will lead to an estimated 112,000 premature deaths annually, due to elderly Americans being unable to afford necessary medications, a situation referred to as “cost-related nonadherence.” Explaining that “medication adherence” is a term used to describe how well patients follow healthcare professionals’ instructions for taking medications, the study stated, “unaffordable drug prices can significantly impair medication adherence.” As medicines become increasingly expensive, patients skip doses, ration prescriptions, or quit treatment altogether. According to the president of the West Health Policy Center, Timothy Lash, “One of the biggest contributors to poor health, hospital admissions, higher healthcare costs and preventable death is patients failing to take their medications as prescribed.”
If the public understood these grim repercussions, perhaps there might have been enough outcry to move the corporate Democrats more concerned with the profits and political contributions of Big Pharma than the lives of their fellow Americans.
#3 “Climate Debtor” Nations Have “Colonized” the Atmosphere
The failure of the United States to take bold climate action in Congress to arm President Biden at the Climate Summit in Glasgow was shameful and will have dire consequences, but the debate should not be framed in a fashion that somehow puts the US in a leading role on climate when, in reality, precisely the opposite is true. As Project Censored illustrates, most reporting missed the fact that our country is a leading part of the problem:
In April 2021, President Joe Biden’s “Leaders Summit on Climate” brought together more than forty national leaders to address global carbon emissions. At the virtual summit, Biden outlined his administration’s goals to reduce US carbon emissions by 50–52 percent of the nation’s 2005 levels by 2030, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who introduced Biden, told summit attendees, “As a global community, it is imperative that we act quickly and together to confront this crisis.” The president’s summit was widely reported by corporate news media, including CNN, and coverage frequently included the vice president’s call for global responsibility.
By contrast, a September 2020 study, which examined long-term carbon dioxide emissions data to assess national responsibilities for the climate crisis, contradicted Harris’s sunny thoughts about a global community but received scant news coverage from establishment outlets.
As Sarah Lazare reported for In These Times, “An analysis published in the September issue of The Lancet Planetary Health shines new light on the outsized role of the United States, European Union and the Global North in creating a climate crisis that, while felt everywhere, is disproportionately harming the Global South.” The Lancet study, conducted by Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, found that the world’s richest, most industrialized nations—including the United States, Canada, members of the European Union, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—are responsible for 92 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, while the Global South is responsible for only 8 percent.
Thus, as America and the global north fiddles, the world is burning, and the catastrophic externalities caused by our lack of responsibility will continue to create dystopian realities in the global south. Left unchecked, this will intensify climate migration, increase global inequality, pave the way for conflict, and decimate the ecosystem in a myriad of ways. By any reasonable calculation this should be the story not just of the year but of the next decade. Nevertheless, it is continually forced to the margins by far less important matters.
Bike lane debate anyone?
These and the other stories that Project Censored outlines illustrate how the distortion of our media landscape is not just the product of the conservative media like Fox, but rather of a corporate media system that serves elite interests.
The bottom-line lesson is that, in the midst of ever-increasing information chaos, informed citizens in our imperiled democracy need more tools like Project Censored to understand how the news shapes their view of reality and what is possible. It is a daunting task but one that has never been more important.
NOTE: I’ll be off my soapbox until January 10th. Happy holidays dear readers.