• Submitted by: admin
• International
• North America
• 09 / 12 / 2007

Project Censored is a progressive research group located at Sonoma State University in Northern California. The backbone of this project is made up primarily of students who are interested in doing investigative research of news stories that have been censored and buried by the U.S. corporate media.

Every year Project Censored publishes a book that includes a number of chapters of topics that have been unreported and the 25 top ignored stories during the previous year before the publication of the book. Due to the fact that the case of the Cuban Five has been practically ignored for the past nine years, the importance of the case merited a chapter in the 2008 book that is being released at the beginning of September.

Project Censored started in 1976 under the direction of Dr. Carl Jensen, professor emeritus of Communication Studies at Sonoma State University. After Jensen retired, Dr. Peter Phillips, A sociology professor at the university assumed the direction of the project that continues to train critical thinking students in the field of journalism.

Hundreds of stories of the most diverse themes are sent annually to Project Censored where they are reviewed by students and professors connected to the project. Among the personalities that have been in charge of selecting the stories for publication are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Norman Solomon, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally, Frances Moore Lappe, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, and Mike Wallace.

Under the title "Corporate Media Bias in the Case of the Cuban Five" a 9 page, 4000 words comprehensive chapter on the case details the history of the Cuban Five.

The author of the piece is Jeffrey Huling, a Sonoma State University student. Prior to being randomly assigned by Professor Phillips to research the case, Huling had never heard about the Cuban Five.

According to Huling, working on the story opened his eyes to the deception and hypocrisy of the US government beyond what he thought they were capable of. "It was extremely frustrating to see through the evidence of this case how powerless justice can be in the face of political corruption" Huling said.

Project Censored 2008 is being translated into several languages including Arabic, Spanish and Italian. In the United States alone between 15 and 20 thousand copies are being printed. Project Censored web page, www.projectcensored.org, receives between 25 and 30 thousand visitors a day.

Project Censoreds wide international reach is one more educational tool in the struggle to work the truth about the Case of the Cuban Five to the surface. It also reveals the complicity of the corporate media to silent a story about heroism, justice, sacrifice and the rights of a country to defend itself when it does not line up with the policies of the U.S. government.

Source: Granma