Episode 263 – State of the Not So Free Press with Mickey Huff

Macro N Cheese – Episode 263
State of the Not So Free Press with Mickey Huff
February 10, 2024

 

[00:00:00] Mickey Huff [Intro/Music]: What the corporate media deems significant and important, is based on American exceptionalism, and a raft of other unquestionable mythologies that are rooted in our history. But curiously, they’re rooted in ways that clearly illustrate that they were efforts of propaganda.

There are many independent local outlets, and I’m not suggesting there aren’t. In Project Censored our top censored stories every year is culled from the best of the independent alternative media. There are great intrepid, independent, truth telling journalists out there in our country and in our society.

You just generally don’t see them in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, on CNN or Fox News.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: Alright this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We are going to be talking about something that I think every macroeconomic activist out there should be worried about. And quite frankly, that is the state of the free press. And we’re going to be covering a book from Project Censored called State of the Free Press 2024.

I have one of the co-editors joining me today. His name is Mickey Huff, and he’s a director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation. I think this is really important. And even though we’re not necessarily going to be talking about macroeconomics, I want you to consider the level of disinformation or lack of coverage on the important key issues that we frequently focus on that gets shoved underneath of the floor mat. Let me bring on my guest, Mickey. How are you, sir?

[00:02:36] Mickey Huff: Steve, I’m well, thanks so much for having me on the program. It’s great to be here with you.

[00:02:40] Grumbine: Absolutely. So a little talk beforehand, this book, I was able to go through it and read it. There’s so many things that never make it to the light of day and the state of the free press is very much a joke. There is no free press. Tell me about this book before we talk about specifically 2024. Why don’t we talk about Project Censored and the state of free press in general.

Tell us a little bit about the org and why you put these books out.

[00:03:09] Huff: Yeah, great. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it. Project Censored is a non profit media watchdog in a lot of ways, but that takes on certain connotations for some people. For some, they start to see that as gotcha journalism or someone under the guise of promoting free press principles, someone somehow wielding some other nefarious ideological principles or something.

And, That’s really not what we are about. We’re pretty transparent and on the face of it. Project Censored was founded in 1976 as a first amendment and free press advocacy organization, pretty plain and simple, but it was done so in an educational setting. It was founded by a communications and sociology professor, Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University in Northern California, who wanted to teach his students about the importance, not just of news media in general, but wanted to focus on the legacy or establishment press and what their frames and their interests and coverages happen to be. But then he looked at a lot of the so called independent and alternative media. And look, in the 1970s, Steve, we’re talking a lot about newspapers. We’re talking about radio and community radio.

As far as television goes, though, a lot of folks either don’t know or don’t remember, or even if they do it’s only abstractly, there were only three stations or four on TV that this is pre-cable. So Jensen actually decided that this project would begin with him by asking a question that he then extended to students for 20 years and it was basically after Watergate, Jensen thought he was pretty well read person; educated, paid very close attention to the press, came from the industry; but the Watergate and Vietnam issues really start exposed to him the shortcomings of the press or the news media.

In terms of how long it may have taken them to report something. So looking at the 72 election and Nixon’s landslide win, Jensen goes back and says, how is it that he won so handily when there were reports in the alternative independent press about a lot of his misdeeds and his corruption? But it took the establishment press, the legacy media, it took them much longer to catch up with it.

And that basically is the genesis of Project Censored. Jensen asked, A couple of questions as well. Why is the independent press maybe more attuned to some of these issues in the public interest than these other media outlets and what explains the lag? And then he asked, of course, a question that I’m sure you think about and talk about, not abstractly, is that’s well, what happens if the corporate media or what people refer to as the mainstream media. There’s nothing mainstream about six corporations controlling everything people hear, read, and see, but we’ll talk about that later, maybe.

But that misnomer is commonly used by people. And Jensen said, well, what happens if they don’t cover it at all? In other words, if the tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If independent journalists or people aren’t there to get stories and to platform them and to help amplify voices, particularly in marginalized communities where a lot of the legacy press didn’t go or report, who will? And that’s the genesis of Project Censored. It was taken over by a sociologist 20 years later. We expanded in many ways, the curriculum. So again, we’re an educational project as well. That was the differentiation. I guess that’s a big windup because I was telling you a little about the history of the project.

But the pitch there is that Project Censored is a media watchdog, but we’re also a critical media literacy education organization. And we strongly believe that teaching people how to navigate the news and how to think critically about what’s happening is much more important, long range and instrumental in helping people become more well rounded and capable of engaging in meaningful civic engagement.

And so we don’t tell people what to think, but we try to help people understand how media function. We try to help them understand what kinds of censorship occur in a society like ours where people believe we have a free press. And we do to a certain degree, relatively speaking to other places and systems around the world.

But on the global press freedom index, the United States hovers around 42nd to 45th in the last few years. And that’s not a we’re number one moment, Steve. So we’ve been dealing with this problem of shortcomings in the free press. We can clearly see how ignorance in the public or worse a mis and disinformed public can be led to make catastrophic decisions.

And so we think that the project, unfortunately, I suppose, is perhaps as needed, if not more needed now today, because the media landscape is far more complicated than it was almost 50 years ago. It’s far more complicated than it was even 20 to 30 years ago. And for many, the last 10 to 15 years has been a real crazy ride with social media.

Basically filling a lot of these gaps and now over half of Americans get news from these non journalistic platforms. So anyway, Steve, that’s probably a longer introduction than you all or your audience wanted. But I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to help your folks understand what it is we do.

And then as we get into this more specifically, I’m sure they’re going to understand why.

[00:08:16] Grumbine: Yeah, you’re the star of the show, my friend. This is exactly why you’re here. I want to bring up two things here before we go too deep into the other part of this. One of them is that there’s the very transactional day to day current events, flash in the pan kind of news that pops up one minute and then is gone the next.

And then there’s the long and consistent theme. And there are various outlets that you listen to, and they speak as if certain things are just truisms. There’s not a question behind it. It’s almost like brainwashing as you listen to radio. Whatever form of media that is producing said information. And when I think of very transactional stuff, it really is not that big a deal.

It keeps people distracted, perhaps. But the long-term narrative, the overarching stories, most people don’t even question the debt ceiling. They don’t even question what is the debt ceiling, I don’t wanna use the word fake news, but there’s no Mm-Hmm. benchmark from which to derive. And so you have this kind of social agency that is lost because people just assume they’re listening to truth when they’re hearing this and they just let it in and then at the water cooler, they repeat it.

And then it becomes the narrative in society as a whole. What do you think a real true free press might do in this vein? How do we combat that? Or is that part of being part of a society is that norms are created?

[00:09:49] Huff: Well, Steve, you’re exactly accurate in my view about the agenda setting that takes place. It’s the long term assumptions that never get challenged. And then we can wildly debate within a narrowed myopic kind of focus. This side, that side, team red, team blue. But there’s so much outside of that legacy media frame, if you will, what the corporate media deemed significant and important is based on American exceptionalism and a raft of other unquestionable mythologies that are rooted in our history, but curiously, they’re rooted in ways that clearly illustrate that they were efforts of propaganda.

You use the term brainwashing, which I don’t disagree with. It of course comes with other connotations and some other kinds of baggage. Some people think brainwashing sounds too nefarious or insidious or what have you. But I would at least suggest that the concept of persuasion, that’s a polite way of saying what you did, but it’s not a fair persuasion when the purveyor of information is knowingly not sharing information with the public.

And that opens up another can of worms because people that work in journalism don’t know everything, just like anyone else. And it’s not the case that people are always intentionally withholding information or misinforming the public. So, being critically media literate, understanding how to ask the questions and look behind the headlines at the ownership of the press, the shareholders interests, the marketplace issues, the advertising revenue, the focus on elite sourcing and establishment media.

The ideological biases of a private for profit press, those are the invisible things though, Steve, that are taken for granted, but it’s those very things that we at Project Censored focus on, and that’s where we begin our interrogation. And I know that word also strikes people connotatively off-putting in some ways, because it’s often seen when law enforcement is interrogating you for crimes and these kind of things.

Well, we could get into that later, Steve. We could say that the media has committed things that have certainly allowed there to be massive crimes or coverups of crimes. But I think metaphorically the biggest crime is that we have an education crisis in our country. We have a crisis of multiple literacies in this country, whether they be economic, whether they be media, whether they be civic, whether they be historical.

So for us at Project Censored, we do keep coming back to education because there’s no truth.com, and if there is, we start asking who’s running it and funding it. And who’s not being included in the discussion.

[00:12:38] Grumbine: Yep.

[00:12:39] Huff: One of the other books I did with a colleague of mine, Nolan Higdon, Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy really outlines all of these issues and strategies.

And it dovetails clearly with the kind of things we do at Project Censored with media analysis and replatforming significant underreported stories that are in the independent press that either the legacy establishment or corporate media won’t or don’t cover. Or if they do, back to your point, they do it in a way that is skewed, slanted, spun. And the best kind of propaganda and the best kind of, this kind of way to manipulate public opinion is simply by using facts, but not in context. Or using facts, but not all of them.

And particularly another thing that you mentioned that I want to repeat it, the cherry picking of these kinds of facts on the back or within the frame of those accepted American mythologies. That America is exceptional. America doesn’t go to war unless it’s attacked. America is a just and prosperous nation.

America takes care of its people, of its borders. You’re familiar with all of these kinds of things. And of course, myths serve many purposes. And many myths have kernels of truth in them as well. So it’s not a black and white affair. But by assuming these, you mentioned that people just accept something and they repeat it at the water cooler, right?

Social media is that new water cooler, Steve. Well, and Jonathan Swift said in 1710, so this isn’t a new problem. Falsehoods fly, and the truth comes limping after. Except now, falsehoods fly around the world in nanoseconds, and the truth never seems to catch up. And study after study show, that regardless of how well we may believe we are attuned to critical thinking, and questioning, and analysis, and logical argumentation.

Once we come to hear something and believe it, and it’s repeated, we have an incredibly difficult time as human beings reversing that idea in our minds. And that is why there’s a couple of things here. One is individually, we need to train ourselves to think critically and independently and remind ourselves to challenge our own biases, especially those confirmation biases, and more particularly our implicit biases, the ones we have that we don’t know until others point them out.

And that’s what we see a lot happening in the media landscape is journalism. Should be, as George Seldy said in the middle of the 20th century, Journalism shouldn’t be just objective and hear both sides of a story even if one’s completely factless or wrong. Journalism’s job is to tell the public what’s really going on, with facts and evidence that let the public navigate, let the public better decide, and participate meaningfully in the civil sphere, and be civically engaged with our democratic institutions.

But the press isn’t really free. And as AJ Liebling, a prominent press critic in the mid 20th century wrote in New Yorker in 1961 said, freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one.

[00:15:46] Grumbine: Right.

[00:15:47] Huff: So now we’re kind of back full circle to who controls those narratives, who controls the media. Can it really be in the public interest if it’s owned mostly by six private for profit companies or five big tech companies called Fang, right?

That’s the Facebook. Go ahead, Steve.

[00:16:03] Grumbine: No, they can’t be.

[00:16:05] Huff: No, you’re right. They can’t. So that was a quick answer. So that was very good.

[00:16:11] Grumbine: So one of the things that I want to bring up as well. Do you remember when Roseanne came back on the air?

[00:16:17] Huff: I do. And historically that was one of the very few working class TV programs. If you go back in the history of it,

[00:16:24] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:16:25] Huff: the history, not the reboot.

[00:16:27] Grumbine: Well, yes. The thing about the reboot that was interesting is the very first episode Roseanne and her sister are fighting because her sister voted for Jill Stein. And Roseanne, the problem with you people is eventually you run out of other people’s money. Now, 13 million people watched that episode and in that framework, 13 million people heard Roseanne win the battle against her sister, basically saying the only problem with you having Medicare for all is other people’s money.

Well, you’re not going there to get a political lesson. You’re going there to be entertained, but slipping through that medium, you just got hosed with an austerity lie. Denying the concept of a government for, and by, and we, the people for a country that, by the way, wrote a law and created a patent for its own dollar, its own unit of account, like every other country in the world, and it spends its own money.

It doesn’t need its own money back as a tax, but you didn’t get that long winded version of it. You just got Roseanne and her quick bumper sticker. And that’s it.

[00:17:37] Huff: Steve, the only problem with hedge funders is they never seem to run out of other people’s money. So yeah, there’s your pull quote, but thanks for setting it up, man. That was a nice softball because what you’re talking about is the fact that the corporate media along with the political class, and this goes for R and D, red and blue.

These are part of these exceptional myths that both parties agree on. They don’t agree on much, but they do agree with the old George Carlin quip that it’s a big club and we ain’t in it. So more to that point, and I really appreciate that you brought up the Roseanne issue is that look, the reality, Steve, is that more Americans will watch these kinds of allegedly innocuous entertainment programs and films than will read long form investigative journalism or even bother skimming the nightly news or they’ll just go to their favorite cable outlet that’s their favorite flavor.

If they like team red, they watch Fox. If they like team blue, they watch MSNBC, self selecting around confirmation bias. But the other grift that’s going on here that’s so easily telegraphed through Roseanne is the consequence of a decades long campaign by the right to co-opt populist working class movements and bamboozle them into thinking that it’s the government that is the problem and keeping them down going back to Reagan. The government is the problem. Grover Norquist and the Nixon years. Notice that’s right around when Project Censored was coming to be. That’s no accident. Project Censored in many ways was a counter to a lot of this fiercely pro market, free market, even “free marketplace of ideas” mantra and ideology was wildly spreading through the United States. And through Reaganism in the eighties, then it eventually launches the great takeover of the public airwaves and AM radio, the rise of Rush Limbaugh, the creation of Fox news and the 1996 telecom act that relaxed ownership rules, all in favor of wealthy corporations, all in favor of more control at the top, less control at the bottom. All under the guise of allegedly more choice. But that choice is about how many shampoos we have or which games we buy, not which candidates we get to vote for. And that’s the big bamboozle, is that the popular culture along with the right have astroturfed in many ways, a lot of real anger, real frustration, and real austerity that many working class Americans experience. Especially in the Rust Belt where I was born, I grew up in the shadows of the abandoned steel mills and mines of Western Pennsylvania, Steve, in the 1970s,

[00:20:24] Grumbine: Hey, I’m here. I’m in central PA.

[00:20:26] Huff: I’m out of Pittsburgh and I went to Youngstown state. So, you know, my story,

[00:20:31] Grumbine: Yes, I do.

[00:20:32] Huff: My dad worked at the mill. My dad eventually died from illnesses that he contracted working in power plants and so forth. And that’s the story for a lot of people. And another story that goes underreported for years. The asbestos crisis, just like the opioid crisis.

It goes underreported for years because it affects poor people, Steve. If it was affecting CEOs and it was affecting billionaires, they would have changed it ages ago. But this is back to that bamboozle and that grift and the necessary propaganda campaign. The owners of the press and the media don’t just do news.

They do Roseanne. They do the TV shows. The movie studios do the movies. They have movies come out mysteriously when the public needs to be reminded about certain issues. Whether it’s Oppenheimer or fill in the blank. Years ago, you’ll remember Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. Around the time when Americans needed to stiffen their resolve against terrorism and remember that there were bad people around the world, Hollywood was there to deliver.

By the way, if your audience is interested in Hollywood propaganda, Theaters of War is a great documentary by Roger Stahl. It goes into great detail about the connections between Hollywood, the movie studios, corporate media owners, and eventually you guessed it, Steve, the press. Not so free sounding, is it? And again, I’m sure you can whip out more examples, but I couldn’t help but thinking about that whole list of things that we just are supposed to accept and believe on the surface. That Biden is the best candidate for the Democrats.

Trump is the best candidate. He’s the people’s choice. Look, that’s all based on the ruse that these are the only people really with the means to be put up and anybody that challenges them is outside the frame and is immediately cast as a stooge of Putin or a wannabe Trump. It just insults the intelligence of the entire nation, Steve, but that’s the world in which we inhabit.

[00:22:31] Grumbine: Let me jump in there. I have grown so cynical about elections. I would love nothing more than a democracy. I’d love to know that I can wake up in the morning, go down to the poll, vote, put the sticker on my forehead and walk out with a thumbs up and say, I did my civic duty and it really did something. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, who couldn’t even get 1 percent of the vote in her own district. No, this is somebody who is hated universally, but she’s our vice president. This isn’t democracy. This is the oligarch Olympics.

[00:23:05] Huff: Well, I’m glad you called it the oligarch olympics because that’s what’s happening across the spectrum from the political establishment. Through the news media, it’s again, oligarch Olympics, it’s hard to watch. It’s like this, this slavish adulation, this pedestalling of the CEO culture that we saw in the eighties.

We saw in the early two thousands with “Kenny Boy” Lay and Enron until all that house of cards went down and all of a sudden we need to watch out for Wall Street and the banks and the CEOs until they’re lionized again after they wrecked the economy in the mortgage crisis. And they were the only ones to fix it because they’re too big to fail.

So the oligarch olympics is what we see in the media landscape, Steve, in the last year in our book, we wrote about big tech, big brother, billionaire spelling big trouble for free press principles. And we couldn’t help but talk about big pharma, big tech, the military industrial complex, and how much they have their tentacles into big media.

And whether we look at Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, or of course, people love to look at Elon Musk and Twitter or X, what have you. Jeff Bezos and Amazon, The Washington Post. We have a billionaire press problem, Steve. There are many independent local outlets, and I’m not suggesting there aren’t, and Project Censored, our top censored stories every year, is culled from the best of the independent alternative media.

There are great intrepid independent truth telling journalists out there in our country and in our society, Steve. You just generally don’t see them in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, on CNN, or Fox News. That’s not to suggest that they’re never there, or those outlets never do any decent reporting, because often they do.

Now we’re introducing another challenge for us. It’s that of nuance. And even though you and I can talk about you used the word cynical a while ago, which I appreciate. But rather than cynical, I wanted to try to substitute the word skeptical. And there’s a reason for that, and that’s the educator in me coming out.

And when I talk to young people and I have the privilege of teaching, I’ve been a professor at a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost 25 years now, it’s a really eye opening experience and it really keeps you grounded in the real world. You’re dealing with such diverse people and students, and they’re not shy about telling you when they think you’re wrong, and they’re not shy about telling you what their experiences are.

And I just think about how to frame some of the challenging things that you and I are talking about in a way that does get them to the poll to vote because the person that’s on the local school board or the city council might really actually have a significantly different approach to something that’s happening in the direct community that could change people’s lives one way or the other.

And it gets a little bit more abstracted when we go to the state and the federal level. All the challenges we’re talking about are real on every level. But what we try to do at the project is we try to reinvigorate a sense of civic virtue, the idea that these are concepts that are worth fighting for, and democracy is not a spectator sport.

If we the people don’t go out and exercise and practice it and do it, even against all odds, and agitate for even reforms, if not, we need revolutionary changes, let’s be clear. But our country has a long history of reforms. Many of those reforms come with baggage and lead to other problems. And sometimes they’re only band aids, but often those band aids and reforms accumulate over decades to create real meaningful change.

That doesn’t mean that we live in a perfect world or a utopia, but women didn’t get the right to vote overnight. African American chattel slavery didn’t end overnight. It took decades for the corporate media to finally acknowledge climate crisis exists. It takes decades for the media to eventually go back and say, Hey, we really didn’t cover these key issues really well, the Iraq war, the WMDs that didn’t exist.

And those aren’t high points in our history, but I like to try to go back and pretend at least if possible. And I can do this in the classroom because I have an audience of people that I want them to go out of that classroom and see the world as a classroom where they can explore it, investigate it, and they can take these ideas and they can really see.

If they don’t work, how do they make them work? And part of living in a democratic society, a democratic Republic, even a deeply flawed one is ours. It’s absolutely integral that we have a free unfettered press. It was protected from the beginning and it might even have been protected for very partisan reasons.

Partisan rancor at the early part of the Republic. The early newspapers were very partisan kind of come full circle in a lot of ways in that front. But it was so important to the founders of the country with all of their deep flaws that they didn’t think the government should be interfering with the free flow of information.

Now, I just said something really significant for your audience, which leads to prior restraint issues. The government is not permitted to censor or prohibit publication of works. We know that’s nonsense. They do it. We know from WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. We know from whistleblowers. We know from the late, great Daniel Ellsberg.

There’s lots of times we’ve seen the government lie about these things. But at Project Censored, Steve, we focus on, I think, a more pernicious, insidious form of censorship, which is censorship by proxy. Where corporations that technically are owning or leasing the public airwaves claim they have the right to publish whatever it is they want because it is a private for profit enterprise. That extended to social media, who get to do the same types of things with Section 213 immunity, where they’re not held liable or responsible for anything they publish, including falsehoods.

So I just opened up another huge can of worms for us, Steve, and that’s censorship by proxy. Most of the censorship that we see now, or don’t see because it’s not reported on and we don’t find out about it until later, is the kind of stuff we saw either in the Twitter files or the disinformation governance board.

This is all under the Biden administration. This is all more recent stuff. Obviously under the Trump administration, there’s example after example of him trying to silence people. He tried to get Jimmy Kimmel fired. We could go on and on. But this is a bipartisan problem, and it’s really a problem for we the people.

And I think people need to wrap their heads around the fact that censorship happens in places like the United States, and it doesn’t have to look like Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill, which is a crazy overt problem, but a lot of the censorship that’s occurring happens, again, I’ll say the word of the hour, insidiously, often under the cover of good intention.

[00:30:00] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rockfin, and Instagram.

[00:30:51] Grumbine: We have two parties that have a similar agreed upon script. They have shared values and it always seems to protect capital.

[00:31:01] Huff: Isn’t that strange

[00:31:02] Grumbine: There’s a nice little gulf between us and them. As your Carlin explanation went, I don’t want to put an exclamation point on something because I’m a big believer in the public space and the public purpose.

And you made quite a few mentions about private. People have this idea in their head because our government is so absolutely horrific these days that it just run by the worst of society with the worst impulses and intentions. So they just assume that government as a whole is bad. So they instinctively think, well, then we should privatize it.

Right. And so it’s that word you use nuance. They don’t understand nuance or they don’t have time to think of nuance.

[00:31:43] Huff: they haven’t encountered nuance in a way that is an acceptable means to explore a topic,

[00:31:48] Grumbine: Exactly. The private corporation known as the Democratic party, a court hearing in Florida that was brought forward to say Democratic party is not honoring the voices of democratic voters. It’s commitment to running a free and fair primary to which the democratic party boldly said in Florida court:

we’re a private corporation. We’ll do what we want. And this is because we’re a private corporation and this is the result of private media, whenever the needs and desires of a private select group of people are used to govern the masses. That’s not democracy. That is corporatocracy, that is fascism.

That’s definitely not what we thought we were. Party really is private and it doesn’t have to honor you because it’s bylaws say it can do whatever the hell it wants to do.

[00:32:41] Huff: WHich we wrote about Steve, when it was happening, that was actually one of our underreported censored stories in the book from several years ago, after the 2016 election. Where Americans were just, again, led to believe that they should just shut up and pull the lever for the not worst guy or not worst woman, or whatever you want to say, our elections really rarely turn on substantive issues.

Candidates tend to either be long term entrenched political operatives that have clearly established connections to the private sector. How else do career public political figures become millionaires and billionaires? When they weren’t, when they went in. And then of course the other side is people coming from the private sector that think they’re going to come to the public sector to fix everything by ruining it all.

And who’s stuck in the middle? That’s us, Steve.

[00:33:32] Grumbine: Yes. And I’m glad you’re bringing it back there because I’m just reading the back cover, the middle paragraph, the bottom of the back cover State of the Free Press 2024 shows how independent journalism can promote civic engagement and reconnect people who otherwise lost interest in sensational news that distracts and polarizes us. For this to matter to me, I’ve got to be able to have agency. I need to feel like being a citizen, a consumer of news, matters that there’s a reason why I’m reading it and that there’s something I can productively do with it. And it seems like your work directly seeks to tie us back to agency.

[00:34:18] Huff: Yet, I think that agency is it. And I think that a lot of folks, when they become more cynical, agency seems to be futile. Which is why I go back to the term skeptical in a classroom sense. Is I say, yes, it’s not that people are wrong to suspect things are off kilter. It’s not off for people to suspect that things aren’t the way the media often presents them.

And in fact, Steve, part of the crisis of confidence in the epistemological crisis we face now is the direct result of the corporate press failing to report accurately and factually in the public interest going back decades. This isn’t just happening. The political narrative would love us to believe that it all happened in 2016 and it’s fake news and it’s Trump and it’s Putin and it’s Russiagate and it’s all these other issues.

And that’s of course a small part of it, believe it or not small. And the Russiagate stuff is basically as much pablum and nonsense as the notion that billionaires pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They pull themselves up by the bootstraps of the workers that they exploit, but that’s never something that’s polite to talk about in mixed company in the corporate media or Congress that it seems.

But I like to harness that when people understand that there’s a grift afoot and that they’re getting the shaft, channeling that experience into something that is less than cynical, meaning that, hey, this doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe this is the way that it is. But it’s not always the way that it’s been because there have always been people that have tried to change it and make it different or make it more responsive.

And it’s up to us in our generation where we’re here now, we’re the ones that have the opportunity, however limited they may be. And I’m well aware of the limitations built into our system regarding agency. Super quick aside that’s not a quick aside, but I’m not going to get into the weeds. I just want your listeners to maybe have the opportunity to look at this issue if they want.

But the very issue of media ownership of the public airwaves and the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, perfect example of a regulatory body that has been regulatory captured by the industry to allow it to get away with the very things that the regulators originally were supposed to prevent them from doing, thus normalizing the entire process while pretending that we have safeguards in place to protect the public interest.

That’s been the decades long ruse and grift that has gone on between the FCC and the corporate media. Do you know that you can get licensed to control the public airwaves and it now lasts for eight years? It’s basically a rubber stamp approval or reapproval and the process by which to challenge the major corporations and their ownership of the public airwaves is so onerous and so detailed that you have to be an attorney working pro bono, basically to get any traction. That takes years while the FCC will let your case languish while Sinclair or Fox or whomever will go on and on owning more and more shares in local communities, violating the FCC’s own rules, and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. Now there’s something to be cynical about, Steve.

However, you go to ProjectCensored. org, our latest dispatch and op ed talks all about people tilting against that windmill. We are using the system and the democratic means in place for we, the people to safeguard our public airways and demand that regulatory agencies do what they were put there to do.

No matter what billionaire companies like Sinclair Broadcasting or Fox News or others think or believe or want. And those battles don’t always go well, Steve, and they’re never quick. And one thing we, the people don’t have is we don’t have the kind of resources and patience that corporate lawyers have, and they have a lot of resources and they can sit and wait for things to happen for years.

And eventually they went out through attrition. And I hate to say this and make the analogy, but I feel like it’s true. And I think that we see the same kind of thing and that kind of creeping cynicism that you mentioned, Steve. It’s really just infested our entire political environment.

[00:38:34] Grumbine: I’m there

[00:38:35] Huff: The degree to which the largest voting block in the country, Steve, isn’t Democrats or Republicans, and it’s surely not people voting for Jill Stein. It’s the people that are eligible to vote that don’t bother to show up. Wrap your head around who’s winning the elections. It’s the, I didn’t show up crowd. And then that makes it all the easier for these other installed corporate candidates to squeak by with far less than 50 percent of a vote and a simple plurality, sometimes under 20% depending upon how things figure. And when you get into gubernatorial elections, or local elections, it gets even weirder. To call that a democracy is an absurd abuse of the language. But worse, it’s an abuse of us as people, and it’s a long range gaslighting campaign to get Americans to believe that coming out and voting for Biden or Trump is gonna change what’s happening in Gaza or Ukraine.

[00:39:31] Grumbine: When it comes to elections, you read your Howard Zinn, you understand that our founding laws were meant for the wealthy landowners, not the people out of doors.

[00:39:41] Huff: Nope.

[00:39:42] Grumbine: And so as people out of doors, we don’t really have a lot of plow. And you think about the way that the structure, I’m talking about specific US institutions.

And I consider, for example, the parliamentarian, the rotating villain in Congress. There’s all these instances where the private corporation has interests. And since the private corporations are people, they have the right to do whatever they want to do. When you understand that Supreme court, which is another bulwark against democracy. Senate, against democracy.

Yes. And so the idea that we can just do things through a vote, let’s say we have a million people that didn’t vote before suddenly vote today. And you get a more enhanced Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump. Or maybe get another Donald Trump instead of a Joe Biden. The point is that very few thinking people said, we should have Joe Biden be president.

The guy can barely tie two words together, but dammit, he’s a good looking man and he’s paid his due. Let’s get all Joe right up there. I just don’t envision that being the way it went. Cause I remember being in the streets for then Bernie Sanders, whom I had a lot of hope and faith in up to a point.

I

[00:41:02] Huff: Yeah. And you brought this up, Steve, because some of the criticism of Sanders was that he was a sheepdogger for the DNC and the corporate elites and so on. But the reality is whatever Sanders knew or didn’t know, or whatever role he wittingly or unwittingly played, it wasn’t about him. And he was very clear about that.

And the corporate media did everything they could to make it about him. And no matter how many times he said, this is a movement, this is about people. And he particularly said that it’s about young people. And marginalized people and the corporate media don’t know what to do with that. That scares them.

And that scares the political elites, like nobody’s business, which is why the right has been really crafting their AstroTurf campaigns for co-opting populism by getting people in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. To believe the myth that the government is the problem and the public sector is just a ruse of taking all your hard earned money and wasting it on people who sit on their couches and do nothing.

If we wanted to really look at that analysis further, it’s interesting that people don’t seem to have much of a problem with the military industrial complex hoovering up the most tax money. And spending it not at all on American interests or the interests of working people or even people that are rank and file members of the military or their health care.

These things just fall apart with even modest scrutiny, Steve. But the corporate media has an incessant drumbeat. And in the so called heartland of this country, a lot of people are accustomed to the habits of the news that they’ve developed over a lifetime, whether it’s boomers or Xers. They are tied into a media ecosystem.

And that system has been broken for a long time, and it’s also a broken record. And so they keep repeating mantras of years by because they’re familiarities to people. The idea that somebody like, whether it’s Clinton or Trump, rolls into the Mahoning Valley and promises people that they’re going to bring back jobs to the auto plants and the steel mills, that’s such a gross gaslighting and abuse of people that live there and what their families have endured.

They’re literally electioneering on the backs of people whose lives have been destroyed. And then they were subsequently destroyed again by the opioid epidemic because it tended to hit those collapsed Rust Belt areas among the worst through there, Appalachia, and into the South and the Deep South. The establishment doesn’t care about those people.

They just care about the votes to continue the charade. And Steve, that’s what independent journalists can do. That’s the power of the free press. It can platform those narratives. It can call those people in power to account for the policies they put in place and tell the public what they actually do.

Just like Reagan creating the myth of the Welfare Queen, it was someone that didn’t even exist. She was loosely based after some woman in Detroit, but there was no actual person. There was no Welfare Queen. It was a total ruse. It was just a way to get white male working class people who just lost their jobs in the industry to be angry about other issues instead of the owners and the people that took away their livelihoods and their jobs and ruined their financial legacies.

So they scapegoated it on black people, they scapegoated it on poor people, they scapegoated it on immigrants. Is it 2020? Is it 2010? Is it 1980? Is it 1900? Is it 1870, Steve, is it the 1830s, is it 1803? I don’t know what year it is. Cause that’s the same mantra we’ve been hearing the whole time.

[00:44:44] Grumbine: got to jump in here because you actually committed a Macro N cheese foible that I want to definitely bring to your attention to see

[00:44:51] Huff: I like this

[00:44:53] Grumbine: Ronald Reagan. One of his chief victory laps was his concept that there is no such thing as public money, there’s only taxpayer dollars. Margaret Thatcher famously said the same thing when it’s exactly the opposite. One of the things that happens with a currency issuing nation, whether it be the UK and the pound Japan and the yen, the currency issuing government spends money into existence and when it comes back as a tax, it taxes it out of existence. It deletes it. The only way new money is spent into the economy is when Congress says, write a bill and then new money comes in.

Or you have automatic stabilizers that kick in like unemployment or food stamps or interest payments like they did with the raising of interest rates. That’s free money to those who already have money. There is no such thing as taxpayer dollars. Tax dollars are never spent. They’re always deleted.

They’re like a coupon. The coupon issuing government gets its coupon back and throws it away. Just like the 50 cent off that you get from Sbarro’s.

[00:46:00] Huff: throws it away.

[00:46:01] Grumbine: It’s the same thing. There is no reusing of tax dollars, but the mantra of taxpayer dollars is so rich that everyone holds onto it. But really it’s carrying Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s number one, screw you to the people line.

And we see the left, the right, the center all carry their line forward because it’s the same thing as social security. All money, whether it be social security, whether it be sending it to Israel to destroy Gaza. Any other thing that you find gross and unfortunate that the government does that’s all new money. But they try to put it on you as it’s taxpayer dollars, both for good and bad.

I don’t want my tax dollars going to her abortions.

[00:46:44] Huff: Right, right.

[00:46:45] Grumbine: And each of these things is brought up with this idea of taxpayer dollars. And they use it as a wedge when in reality, you notice they didn’t say, well, we need to raise taxes to fund Ukraine and to fund Israel. No, because it’s never taxpayer money.

[00:47:01] Huff: In that regard, it’s a brilliant smokescreen, isn’t it, Steve?

[00:47:04] Grumbine: It is. And guess what it leads to: a bunch of angry white guys who look at their paycheck every week and go, damn it. My tax has gone up.

[00:47:12] Huff: But that’s another one of those mythologies that we were hinting at earlier.

[00:47:16] Grumbine: Yes. Dan Kovalik, whom I happen to love, who’s one of the people that was on here.

[00:47:21] Huff: I know Dan’s a friend of ours yeah Dan’s a great guy.

[00:47:24] Grumbine: He’s one of my favorite guys out there. And he came on here and he said no less than three times. Well, our tax dollars,

[00:47:30] Huff: Yeah. Right, right. Well, I like it. I’m happy to be corrected, Steve. I appreciate it. Well, look, we know that this is because they’re spending money that doesn’t even exist until they’re printing it. And then they talk about the debt ceiling as if it’s an actual thing.

[00:47:42] Grumbine: it’s a lie. All of it.

[00:47:44] Huff: Yeah. I think that’s one of the biggest underreported stories because, well, this is your show, right?

[00:47:51] Grumbine: You got it, brother.

[00:47:52] Huff: by the way, Steve, we should invite you to do a piece for us about all this for Project Censored.

[00:47:57] Grumbine: This is why the show mattered so much to me. Because every time we are in this economic vein that really focus on this heavily. We’re chasing Nina turned around, please stop carrying the water for them to do this to us.

[00:48:10] Huff: Right, right, right.

[00:48:11] Grumbine: We get a Bernie says, stop saying it Bernie!

[00:48:13] Huff: I feel with you, Steve, because for years and years at Project Censored, we’ve been trying to get people to stop saying mainstream media.

[00:48:21] Grumbine: I got to do it now too.

[00:48:23] Huff: For the same reason that you just described because there’s nothing mainstream about 90 percent of the media being controlled by six private for profit corporations or five other big tech companies.

There’s nothing mainstream or mainstreet about the ideas and the views that they platform. It’s corporate media or establishment legacy press. And then there’s independent media, which means very little. It could mean almost anything. And there are issues with journalism across the spectrum. We don’t want to pretend that corporate bad, independent good.

What we try to call attention to in terms of critical media literacy education on somewhat akin to what you’re talking about with fiscal literacy, is that we think that if people have the tools to understand what’s happening, they then have a more meaningful way to engage, to create that agency so that they have a means by which to achieve the goals.

And they can defeat the cynicism that they are confronted with on a daily basis because they can make some inroads and they can make some modest changes and they can make some choices and decisions about how to improve their lives and the lives of people in their own communities. And journalism should be a really important component of that because people need access to accurate, transparently sourced information.

That is not simply controlled for the private sector and private interests, but actually comes out so that we, the people, all of us, not the corporations that were granted personhood between 1886 and 2010, but actual living, breathing people that comprise our society.

[00:49:50] Grumbine: That’s right. I want to bring up one final thing that I really want your take on, because this is something that’s stuck so far in my craw and I don’t know how to fix it. So I’m a guilty sports fan. I love all things, Washington sports, whether it be the commanders, nationals.

[00:50:08] Huff: We all have guilty pleasures, man. Yep.

[00:50:12] Grumbine: But when I listened to DC sports radio, they’re talking about moving the Washington capitals and the Washington wizards to the richest part of America and Arlington, Alexandria, Virginia. Medium income somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,-170,000 a house per person. And then they’re taking that from the nation’s capital, where there’s a lot of poor people down there near Chinatown. That income, that revenue stream from the economic activity.

Basically,

they’re trying to say that the reason they need to move it is because of all the crime in the area,

[00:50:53] Huff: Of course,

[00:50:54] Grumbine: all the crime, all the homelessness, people are afraid to leave their car. I’m an economic activist. So when I think about that, I say, let’s trace the austerity train. Let’s see how spending has been reduced and how economic desperation has taken over a community.

And they don’t think about that. And it’s all the coded language, but this is coming from sports talk radio.

[00:51:18] Huff: it’s back to the Roseanne issue. That’s where it’s coming through. And these people don’t even know that they’re saying it half the time.

[00:51:25] Grumbine: Yes. Just imagine people cheering on moving to the richest part of the country from the people that worry about having a roof over their head.

[00:51:36] Huff: Unwitting conduits. They’re unwitting conduits. They have a job. They love sports. They don’t think behind the headlines. They don’t think behind the topics.

[00:51:45] Grumbine: Tell me about this from your vantage point. What do we do with this?

[00:51:49] Huff: Educate, find ways to talk. So you have a passion for this subject, which is wonderful. And I think that we can take these passions and our love of things, and we can transform them or turn them into vehicles to have meaningful conversations with people in our community, particularly those with whom we may have other significant disagreements.

Finding common ground and common interests is a way to talk to people about other things, like their worldviews, or how they see things, and it allows people then to ask more innocuous sounding questions that are actually deep and probing questions about political economy.

[00:52:29] Grumbine: Yeah.

[00:52:30] Huff: But you can do it in a way where you’re talking about sports and just like these people can talk about it in a way that they can use that coded language to reinforce mythologies that work against working people.

You and I can use different language and other ways to call out and show how these very people are doing the same thing. And that if you give them the opportunity to reexamine the words they’re using and the things that they’re saying, and the realities on the ground of the things they’re cheering on, then you’re giving them an opportunity to change their mind in a way that’s actually noble or admirable.

It’s not gotcha journalism, and it’s not, I’m right, you’re wrong, no matter what. How we communicate to people is as important, or if not more important, than what we’re actually communicating. And we don’t spend time thinking about that. Our media system is like a cutthroat worldwide wrestling match with chairs flying and name calling.

And my goodness, it’s no wonder people turn this stuff off or it’s no wonder that they do watch it because they got the popcorn out. Oh, Trump’s guaranteed going to say something crazy now. Or watch Biden mangle this sentence. Meanwhile, the important things that are happening in people’s communities, like you just said, Steve, are going under the radar while they’re all over the place being talked about, the truth is under the radar.

And I say that with the 49ers because they left San Francisco because of crime and because of this and that to tony Santa Clara and Levi Stadium. And the play, there was just a big write up in the corporate media out here in the San Francisco Chronicle about the players living in tony Morgan Hill.

It’s all rubbish and it all is the exact same narrative that you just peddled about the Washington sports teams. It’s the same ones we hear here in Oakland about why they have to go to Las Vegas. Again, it has nothing to do with working people. It has everything to do with hedge fund money and banks and greed and wealth.

It doesn’t celebrate athleticism any more than it celebrates community involvement. It’s a transplanted, astroturfed community of rich people flying into people’s neighborhoods, letting them beg for jobs selling $20 beers so they can go and pay a bunch of people to play games on their corporate plantations.

That’s the reality of professional sports today

[00:54:40] Grumbine: Well said.

[00:54:41] Huff: and Dave Zirin, you know him, there’s a lot of people that have a lot of good things they can do in the world of sports to really change the way people see the things that are happening and really understand our caste system, systemic racism, a whole raft of things people can begin to understand by expanding their love of a game or love of something or passion for sport and going beyond and going deeper.

And looking at how some of the very same things that you and I just talked about with government or economics pertain to other things and we can learn similar lessons there. And I say that we don’t have to be PhDs in these areas. We can help each other understand it. We can demystify just like you demystify macroeconomics.

We try to demystify media censorship and propaganda.

[00:55:28] Grumbine: Beautiful. I love this. The book is called State of the Free Press 2024: Project Censored. My guest, Mickey Huff, this particular one for 2024 is a must read. It really focuses on the news that didn’t make the news and why. Mickey, your final thoughts, sir.

[00:55:45] Huff: Steve, I just wanted to thank you again and appreciate the opportunity to come on. And I appreciate all the efforts of you and your team to put together the program you do to talk about important issues that don’t get the attention they deserve. And I would encourage your listeners to go to projectcensored.org. You can check out all of our top 25 stories, our process, methodology, our judges, all the instructors. We work with over 20 colleges around the country, several hundred students a year. Help us put these books together each year. We have the Project Censored show that airs every week on over 50 stations that talks about these issues.

We’ve got documentary films, video shorts. We are on social media because rather than shy people away or shun them away from it or finger wag, we want people to learn how they’re being used and manipulated by it, and how they can use it more to benefit their own interests in their own lives and their own communities.

So, ProjectCensored.org is the place to go. All of our stories are online for free. There’s other stuff in the books that isn’t online. Steve, your listeners can go and find a lot of stuff about us for free, right at our website. So thank you for the opportunity for introducing us to them. And I look forward to returning the favor at some point and talking to you about macroeconomics.

[00:56:52] Grumbine: Awesome. Thank you so much. My guest, Mickey Huff. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. We are out of here.

[00:57:06] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.