Project Censored's State of the Free Press

With any “Top 10” list, there’s a natural tendency to look first at number one, and neither I nor Project Censored would discourage you from doing that, when it comes to their annual list of the top censored stories of the year. This year, the top story is about workplace deaths and injuries — with striking racial disparities, particularly for much-maligned foreign-born workers. Injury rates for southern service workers — predominantly Black — are especially alarming, 87% in one year, according to one poll. Sensationalized deaths and injuries make the news all the time, but workplace deaths and injuries (nearly 6,000, and 2.8 million respectively in a year) are another matter altogether. They’re a non-story, even when advocates strive to shine a light on them.

But this pattern of what’s deemed newsworthy and what isn’t leads to a deep point. In the introduction to the list, Associate Director Andy Lee Roth writes that “readers can only appreciate the full significance of the Project’s annual listing of important but underreported stories by stepping back to perceive deeper, less obvious patterns of omission in corporate news coverage.” And I couldn’t agree more. This has always been a theme of mine as long as I’ve been reviewing their lists, because the patterns of what’s being blocked out of the public conversation are the clearest way of seeing the censoring process at work — the process that Project Censored founder Carl Jensen described as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method … that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in its society.”

It’s not just that somehow all the news assignment editors in America overlooked this or that story. Where there are patterns of omission so consistently, year after year, they can only be explained by systemic biases rooted in the interests of particularly powerful special interests. What’s more, in addition to patterns of omission in the stories as a whole, one can also find intersecting patterns within individual stories. The above description of the top story is an example: race, class, region, citizenship status and more are all involved.

At a big-picture level, there are three dealing with cyber issues and four that are each clearly dealing with the environment, corporate misconduct, harm to consumers and race. Or perhaps I should say seven dealing with race, the more I think about what “clearly” means. Two of the four stories I counted as dealing with race involved global environmental issues, which almost always have an obvious racial component, while a third, “Abortion Services Censored on Social Platforms Globally,” disproportionately impacts minorities in the US as well globally. Those I counted as “clearly” with no problem. But another three are pretty damn clear, too, with a moment’s thought.

For example, story number seven, “Military Personnel Target Gen Z Recruits with Lurid Social Media Tactics” clearly involves cyber deception of social media consumers with the aim of luring them into a dangerous workplace from which they cannot simply resign once they realize they’ve been lied to or conned. But in addition to cyber, consumer and workplace harm, the target audience and resulting recruits are undoubtedly disproportionately non-white, though that’s not explicitly dwelt on. The same could be said for two other stories: “New Federal Rule Limits Transcript Withholding by Colleges and Universities” and “Controversial Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing Challenged by US Commission.” Anything involving education or the criminal justice system is bound to involve disproportionate harm to minorities, as statistics invariably show. In fact, all 10 could well reflect this reality. But that’s enough to make my point clear.

I’m dwelling on race because it’s important, but also because it’s easily highlighted in this context. But there are other hidden connections to be found in these stories as well. I’ll leave those as an exercise for the reader, as they say in the trade. But the point is, as you do more than just simply read these stories — as you reflect on them, on why they’re censored, whose stories they are, what harms are being suffered, whose humanity is being denied — you will find yourself seeing the world more from the point of view of those being excluded from the news, and from the point of view that you’re interconnected with them at the least, if not one of them too.

Thousands Killed and Injured on the Job, with Significant Racial Disparities in Deaths and Injuries

Working in America is becoming more dangerous, especially for minorities, according to recent studies reported on by Truthout and Peoples Dispatch, while the same isn’t true for other developed nations.

Workplace fatalities increased 5.7% in the 2021-2022 period covered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics or BLS’s Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, Tyler Walicek reported for Truthout. “Nearly 6,000 US workers died on the job,” he wrote — a 10-year high — while “a startling total of 2.8 million were injured or sickened” according to another BLS report.

The racial disparities were sharp. The average workplace death rate was 3.7 deaths per hundred thousand full-time workers, but it was 24.3% higher (4.6 deaths) for Latiné workers and 13.5% higher (4.2 deaths) for Black workers. The majority of Latiné deaths (63.5%) were of foreign-born workers, and 40% of those were in construction. “It’s not hard to imagine that communication lapses between workers on an active construction site could feasibly create dangerous situations,” Walicek noted.

Transportation incidents were the highest cause of fatalities within both groups. Violence and other injuries by persons or animals were second highest for Black workers, for Hispanic or Latiné workers it was falls, slips, or trips. Black people and women were particularly likely to be homicide victims. Black people represented 13.4% of all fatalities, but 33.4% of homicide fatalities — more than twice the base rate. Women represented 8.1% of all fatalities, but 15.3% of homicide fatalities — a little less than twice the base rate.

The non-fatal injury rate for service workers in the South, particularly workers of color, is also alarmingly high, according to an April 5, 2023 report by Peoples Dispatch summarizing findings from a March 2023 survey by the Strategic Organizing Center or SOC. The poll of 347 workers, most of whom were Black, “found that a shocking 87% were injured on the job in the last year,” they reported. In addition, “More than half of survey respondents reported observing serious health and safety standard  at work,” and “most workers worried about their personal safety on the job, most believe that their employer prioritizes profit over safety, most do not raise safety issues for fear of retaliation, and the vast majority (72%) believe that their employer’s attitude ‘places customer satisfaction above worker safety.’”

“Compared to other developed countries, the United States consistently underperforms in providing workers with on-the-job safety,” Project Censored noted. “Walicek argued that this is a direct consequence of ‘the diminution of worker power and regulatory oversight’ in the United States.” US workplace fatality rates exceeded those in the UK, Canada, Australia and much of Europe, according to a 2021 assessment by the consulting firm Arinite Health and Safety, Walicek reported.

“Workers are increasingly organizing to fight back against hazardous working conditions,” Project Censored noted, citing a civil rights complaint against South Carolina’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration or SC OSHA filed by members of the recently-formed Union of Southern Service Workers or USSW “for failing to protect Black workers from hazardous working conditions,” as reported by the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina. The USSW complaint alleged that “from 2018 to 2022, SC OSHA conducted no programmed inspections in the food/beverage and general merchandise industries, and only one such inspection in the food services and warehousing industries.” On April 4, 2023, when it filed the complaint, USSW went on a one-day strike in Georgia and the Carolinas, to expose unsafe working conditions in the service industry. It marked the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination while supporting a sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tenn. Then on Dec. 7, USSW sent a petition to federal OSHA requesting that it revoke South Carolina’s state OSHA plan “because the plan has failed to maintain an effective enforcement program.”

Neither the BLS findings nor the conflict between the USSW and SC OSHA have received much corporate media coverage. The BLS fatalities report was released in December 2023, with no US daily newspaper coverage when Project Censored’s analysis was done. There was a story on the Minnesota findings by FOX in Minneapolis-St. Paul the month the report was released. And a full story on Green Bay ABC affiliate WBAY on April 12, 2024, “as part of its coverage of ‘Work Zone Safety Awareness Week.’” Project Censored noted.

“Corporate coverage of the conflict between the USSW and SC OSHA has also been scant,” they noted. While independent, nonprofits like DC Report, “have consistently paid more attention,” there were but two corporate examples cited covering the second action: Associated Press and Bloomberg Law, but neither addressed the issue of racial disparities.

In conclusion, Project Censored noted, “The corporate media’s refusal to cover the harsh realities of workplace deaths and injuries — and the obvious racial disparities in who is hurt and killed on the job — makes the task of organizing to address occupational safety at a national level that much more difficult.”

A “Vicious Circle” of Climate Debt Traps World’s Most Vulnerable Nations

Low-income countries who contributed virtually nothing to the climate crisis are caught in a pattern described as a “climate debt trap” in a September 2023 World Resources Institute report authored by Natalia Alayza, Valerie Laxton and Carolyn Neunuebel.

“After years of pandemic, a global recession, and intensifying droughts, floods and other climate change impacts, many developing countries are operating on increasingly tight budgets and at risk of defaulting on loans,” they wrote. “High-interest rates, short repayment periods, and . . . the coexistence of multiple crises (like a pandemic paired with natural disasters) can all make it difficult for governments to meet their debt servicing obligations.”

“Global standards for climate resilience require immense national budgets,” Project Censored noted. “Developing countries borrow from international creditors, and as debt piles up, governments are unable to pay for essential needs, including public health programs, food security, and climate protections.”

In fact, The Guardian ran a story describing how global South nations are “forced to invest in fossil fuel projects to repay debts,” a process critics have characterized as a “new form of colonialism.” They cited a report from anti-debt campaigners Debt Justice and partners which found that “the debt owed by global south countries has increased by 150% since 2011 and 54 countries are in a debt crisis, having to spend five times more on repayments than on addressing the climate crisis.”

Like the climate crisis itself, the climate debt trap was foreseeable in advance. “A prescient report published by Dissent in 2013, Andrew Ross’s “Climate Debt Denial,” provides a stark reminder that the climate debt trap now highlighted by the World Resources Institute and others was predictable more than a decade ago,” Project Censored notes. But that report highlighted much earlier warnings and efforts to address the problem.

The concept of an ecological debt owed to the global South for the resource exploitation that fueled the global North’s development was first introduced “in the lead-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro,” Ross noted. Subsequently, “The Kyoto Protocol laid the groundwork for such claims in 1997 by including the idea of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ among nations, but climate activists did not fully take up the call for debt justice until the Copenhagen summit in 2009.” Prior to that summit, in 2008, NASA climatologist James Hansen estimated the U.S. historical carbon debt at 27.5% of the world total, $31,035 per capita.

While a “loss and damage” fund “to assist developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change” was established at the 2022 Climate Summit, its current commitments ($800 million) fall far short of the $100 billion more each year by 2030 which the 14 developing countries on the fund’s board have argued for. Some estimates place the figure much higher, “at around $400 billion,” according to a Euronews story last June.

The climate debt trap “has received limited news coverage,” Project Censored notes. Aside from The Guardian, “independent news coverage has been limited to outlets that specialize in climate news.” Neither of the two corporate media examples it cited approached it from debtor countries’ point of view. In May 2023, Bloomberg’s “analysis catered to the financial interests of international investors,” while a December 2023 New York Times report “focused primarily on defaults to the United States and China, with less focus on how poorer countries will combat deficits, especially as climate change escalates.”

Saltwater Intrusion Threatens U.S. Freshwater Supplies

Sea-level rise is an easy-to-grasp consequence of global warming, but the most immediate threat it poses — saltwater intrusion into freshwater systems — has only received sporadic localized treatment in the corporate press. “In fall 2023, saltwater traveling from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River infiltrated the freshwater systems of the delta region, contaminating drinking and agricultural water supplies as well as inland ecosystems,” Project Censored notes. “This crisis prompted a scramble to supply potable water to the region and motivated local and federal officials to issue emergency declarations.”

While outlets like Time, CNN and CBS News covered the saltwater intrusion at the time, they “focused almost exclusively on the threat to coastal Louisiana,” but “a pair of articles published in October 2023 by Delaney Nolan for The Guardian and [hydrogeologist] Holly Michael for The Conversation highlighted the escalating threat of saltwater intrusion across the United States and beyond.”

“Deep below our feet, along every coast, runs the salt line: the zone where fresh inland water meets salty seawater,” Nolan wrote. “That line naturally shifts back and forth all the time, and weather events like floods and storms can push it further out. But rising seas are gradually drawing the salt line in,” he warned. “In Miami, the salt line is creeping inland by about 330 feet per year. Severe drought – as the Gulf coast and midwest have been experiencing this year – draw the salt line even further in.”

“Seawater intrusion into groundwater is happening all over the world, but perhaps the most threatened places are communities on low-lying islands,” such as the Marshall Islands, which is “predicted to be uninhabitable by the end of the century,” Michael wrote. Here in the U.S., “Experts said the threat was widespread but they were especially concerned about cities in Louisiana, Florida, the Northeast, and California,” Nolan reported.

“Fresh water is essential for drinking, irrigation and healthy ecosystems,” Michael wrote. “When seawater moves inland, the salt it contains can wreak havoc on farmlands, ecosystems, lives and livelihoods.” For example, “Drinking water that contains even 2% seawater can increase blood pressure and stress kidneys. If saltwater gets into supply lines, it can corrode pipes and produce toxic disinfection by-products in water treatment plants. Seawater intrusion reduces the life span of roads, bridges and other infrastructure.”

While Time, CNN and CBS News focused narrowly on coastal Louisiana, Project Censored noted that some news outlets, “including FOX Weather and Axios” misreported the threat as “only temporary rather than a long-term problem.” More generally, “corporate media typically treat saltwater intrusion as a localized issue affecting specific coastal regions,” they wrote. “Aside from a brief article in Forbes acknowledging the growing problem for coastal regions in the US and around the world, corporate media have largely resisted portraying saltwater intrusion as a more widespread and escalating consequence of climate change.”

Natural Gas Industry Hid Health and Climate Risks of Gas Stoves

While gas stoves erupted as a culture war issue in 2023, reporting by Vox and NPR (in partnership with the Climate Investigations Center) revealed a multi-decade campaign by the natural gas industry using tobacco industry’s tactics to discredit evidence of harm, thwart regulation, and promote the use of gas stoves. While gas stoves are a health hazard, the amount of gas used isn’t that much, but “house builders and real estate agents say many buyers demand a gas stove,” which makes it more likely they’ll use more high-volume appliances, “such as a furnace, water heater and clothes dryer,” NPR explained. “That’s why some in the industry consider the stove a ‘gateway appliance.’”

In a series of articles for Vox, environmental journalist Rebecca Leber “documented how the gas utility industry used strategies previously employed by the tobacco industry to avoid regulation and undermine scientific evidence establishing the harmful health and climate effects of gas stoves,” Project Censored noted.

“The basic scientific understanding of why gas stoves are a problem for health and the climate is on solid footing,” she reported. “It’s also common sense. When you have a fire in the house, you need somewhere for all that smoke to go. Combust natural gas, and it’s not just smoke you need to worry about. There are dozens of other pollutants, including the greenhouse gas methane, that also fill the air.”

The concerns aren’t new. “Even in the early 1900s, the natural gas industry knew it had a problem with the gas stove,” Leber recounts. It was cleaner than coal or wood — it’s main competition at the time, “but new competition was on the horizon from electric stoves.” They avoided scrutiny for generations, but, “Forty years ago, the federal government seemed to be on the brink of regulating the gas stove,” she wrote. “Everything was on the table, from an outright ban to a modification of the Clean Air Act to address indoor air pollution.” The gas industry fought back with a successful multiprong attack, that’s being mounting again today, and “Some of the defenders of the gas stove are the same consultants who have defended tobacco and chemicals industries in litigation over health problems.”

Documents obtained by NPR and CIC tell a similar story. The industry “focused on convincing consumers and regulators that cooking with gas is as risk-free as cooking with electricity,” they reported. “As the scientific evidence grew over time about the health effects from gas stoves, the industry used a playbook echoing the one that tobacco companies employed for decades to fend off regulation. The gas utility industry relied on some of the same strategies, researchers and public relations firms.”

“I think it’s way past the time that we were doing something about gas stoves,” says Dr. Bernard Goldstein, who began researching the subject in the 1970s. “It has taken almost 50 years since the discovery of negative effects on children of nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves to begin preventive action. We should not wait any longer,” he told NPR.

“By covering gas stoves as a culture war controversy, corporate media have ignored the outsize role of the natural gas industry in influencing science, regulation, and consumer choice,” Project Censored noted. Instead, they’ve focused on individual actions, local moves to phase out gas hookups for new buildings and rightwing culture war opposition to improving home appliance safety and efficiency, including the GOP House-passed “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act.”

Abortion Services Censored on Social Platforms Globally

On the first national election day after the Dobbs decision, PlanC, a nonprofit that provides information about access to the abortion pill, posted a TikTok video encouraging people to vote to protect reproductive rights. Almost immediately, its account was suddenly banned. This was but one example of a worldwide cross-platform pattern.

“Access to online information about abortion is increasingly under threat both in the United States and around the world,” the Women’s Media Center or WMC reported in November 2023. “Both domestic and international reproductive health rights and justice organizations have reported facing censorship of their websites on social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok as well as on Google.” The governments of South Korea, Turkey and Spain have also blocked the website of Women on Web, which provides online abortion services and information in over 200 countries. At the same time abortion disinformation, for fake abortion clinics, remains widespread.

“Women’s rights advocacy groups are calling the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade the catalyst for the suppression of reproductive health information on social media,” Project Censored noted. “Hashtags for #mifepristone and #misoprostol, two drugs used in medical abortions, were hidden on Instagram after the Dobbs decision, the WMC reported,” as part of a wider pattern.

Within weeks of the decision, U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) wrote to Meta, Ars Technica reported, questioning what the company was doing to stop abortion censorship on their platforms. “The senators also took issue with censorship of health care workers, Ars Technica wrote, “including a temporary account suspension of an ‘organization dedicated to informing people in the United States about their abortion rights.’”

“US state legislatures are currently considering banning access to telehealth abortion care,” Project Censored noted. “Furthermore, CNN reported that ‘at the end of 2023, nine states where abortion remained legal still had restricted telehealth abortions in some way.’”

There are similar censorship problems with Meta and Google worldwide, according to a March 2024 report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate or CCDH and MSI Reproductive Choices, which provides contraception and abortion services in 37 countries. This sparked a Guardian article by Weronika Strzyżyńska. “In Africa, Facebook is the go-to place for reproductive health information for many women,” MSI’s global marketing manager, Whitney Chinogwenya, told the Guardian. “We deal with everything from menopause to menstruation but we find that all our content is censored.” She explained that “Meta viewed reproductive health content through ‘an American lens,’” the Guardian reported, “applying socially conservative US values to posts published in countries with progressive policies such as South Africa, where abortion on request is legal in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.”

Abortion disinformation is also a threat — particularly the promotion of “crisis pregnancy centers” or CPCs which masquerade as reproductive healthcare clinics but discourage rather than provide abortion services. WMC reported on June 2023 CCDH report which “found that CPCs spent over $10 million on Google Search ads for their clinics over the past two years.” Google claimed to have “removed particular ads,” said Callum Hood, CCDH’s head of research, “but they did not take action on the systemic issues with fake clinic ads.”

“Women’s rights organizations and reproductive health advocates have been forced to squander scarce resources fighting this sort of disinformation online,” Project Censored noted, which has gotten some coverage, but “As of June 2024, corporate coverage of abortion censorship has been limited.” The sole CNN story it cited ran immediately after the Dobbs decision, before most of the problems fully emerged. “There appeared to be more corporate media focus on abortion disinformation rather than censorship,” they added. “Independent reporting from Jezebel, and Reproaction via Medium, have done more to draw attention to this issue.”

Global Forest Protection Goals at Risk

The UN’s goal to end deforestation by 2030 is unlikely to be met, according to the 2023 annual Forest Declaration Assessment, Olivia Rosane reported for Common Dreams in October 2023. The goal was announced to great fanfare at the 2021 UN summit in Glasgow, but the failure of follow-through has received almost no notice.

The same month, the World Wildlife Fund issued its first Forest Pathways Report, in which it warned:

The two largest tropical forests are at risk of reaching tipping points. This would release billions of tonnes of carbon and have devastating consequences for the millions of people who depend on the stability of their ecosystems. It would also have a global impact on our climate and catastrophic effects on biodiversity.

The problem is money, according to the report. “We are investing in activities that are harmful for forests at far higher rates than we are investing in activities that are beneficial for forests,” the coordinator of the report, Erin Matson, told Common Dreams. To meet the UN’s 2030 goal would require $460 billion annually, according to the report, but only $2.2 billion is being invested. Meanwhile more than 100 times as much public finance is “committed to activities that have the potential to drive deforestation or forest degradation,” known as “gray” finance, the report explained.

While the overall picture is dark, not all countries are failing. “Well over 50 countries are on track to eliminate deforestation within their borders by 2030,” the report noted.

As the report’s lead author, Mary Gagen, noted in an article published by The Conversation, “Global forest loss in 2022 was 6.6 million hectares, an area about the size of Ireland. That’s 21% more than the amount that would keep us on track to meet the target of zero deforestation by 2030, agreed in Glasgow.” At 33% over the necessary target, loss of tropical rainforests was “even more pronounced,” Gagen reported.

In her article, Gagen emphasized four key recommendations: (1) Accelerate the recognition of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ right to own and manage their lands, territories and resources. (2) Provide more money, both public and private, to support sustainable forest economies. (3) Reform the rules of global trade that harm forests, getting deforesting commodities out of global supply chains, and removing barriers to forest-friendly goods, and (4) Shift towards nature-based and bio economies.

Corporate media in the U.S. ignored both reports, though one story in the Washington Post discussed the subject the month after both reports were issued, but “made no direct reference to either of them,” Project Censored summarized. In contrast, “International outlets, including Germany’s DW and France 24, a state-owned television network, did produce substantive reports based on the Forest Declaration Assessment.”

Military Personnel Target Gen Z Recruits with Lurid Social Media Tactics

“If the military was a great, honorable profession, then they wouldn’t need to spend $6 billion a year bribing people to join,” journalist and veteran Rosa del Duca explained. Nonetheless, 2022 was the worst year for recruitment since 1973, when the draft was abolished. That’s the background to the story Alan MacLeod reported for MintPress News about the military, “using e-girls to recruit Gen Z into service.”

While MacLeod also deals with the army sponsoring YouTube stars—male and female—to “join” for a day as part of a whole spectrum of social media efforts, his main subject is Army Psychological Operations Specialist Hailey Lujan, whose online videos feature “sexually suggestive content alongside subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) calls to join up,” Macleod reports. “The 21-year-old makes content extolling the fun of Army life to her 731,000 TikTok followers. ‘Don’t go to college, become a farmer or a soldier instead,’ she instructs viewers in a recent video. ‘Just some advice for the younger people: if you’re not doing school, it’s ok. I dropped out of college. And I’m doing great,’ she adds.”

Project Censored noted, “Lujan’s videos seemingly violate the code of conduct of the image-conscious US military, and it is unclear what role the military has in producing Lujan’s content.” But that ambiguity is part of the allure.

“There are many active duty service members with large social media followings, but what makes Lujan stand out is her offbeat, Gen-Z style humor and how she leans into the idea that she is a military propaganda operation,” Macleod writes. “With videos titled ‘My handlers made me post this’, “’Not endorsed by the DoD  :3’ or ‘most wholesome fedpost’, she revels in layers of irony and appears to enjoy the whole ‘am I or aren’t I’ question that people in her replies and mentions constantly debate.”

“I can’t believe she’s getting away with posting some of this stuff,” said del Duca in an interview with MintPress News, “Everyone learns in boot camp that when you are in uniform, you cannot act unprofessionally, or you get in deep trouble.” The Defense Department didn’t respond when MacLeod reached out for clarification.

“Lujan is not the only online military influencer, but her overt use of her sensuality and her constant encouragement of her followers to enlist make her noteworthy.” Project Censored noted. “She is using her femininity to recruit legions of lustful teens into an institution with an infamous record of sexism and sexual assault against female soldiers.” MacLeod wrote.

“The branches of the US military are no stranger to partnerships with entertainment giants that traditionally engage viewers from all walks of life—as in armed forces’ partnerships with the National Football League. But this new attempt to appeal to niche youth audiences has not been scrutinized,” Project Censored said.

“It is now well-established (if not well-known) that the Department of Defense also fields a giant clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job it is to influence public opinion, the majority doing so from their keyboards,” MacLeod reported, adding that a 2021 Newsweek exposé “warned that this troll army was likely breaking both domestic and international law.”

As of May 2024, Project Censored reported “no new coverage on this specific instance” that appears to take such lawbreaking to a new level.

New Federal Rule Limits Transcript Withholding by Colleges and Universities

More than six million students have “stranded credits” due to the practice of colleges and universities withholding students’ transcripts to force them to repay loan debts. But a new federal Department of Education regulation will make withholding more difficult, Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner reported for The Hechinger Report in December 2023. Transcript withholding “has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators,” they wrote. “Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice.”

The rule was part of a package also intended to “strengthen the US Department of Education’s ability to protect students and taxpayers from the negative effects of sudden college closures,” the DOE said in a press release. It went into effect in July 2024. Specifically, it prevents withholding a transcript for terms in which a student received federal financial aid and paid off the balance for the term.

“As Katherine Knott reported for Inside Higher Education ... the new policy is part of a set of regulations intended to enhance the DOE’s oversight of institutions by providing additional tools to hold all colleges accountable,” Project Censored explained. “But these protections do not apply to institutions that accept no federal student aid, including many for-profit colleges.” However, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is also investigating transcript withholding, which the Bureau has deemed abusive because the practice is ‘designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.’”

“It’s a huge step forward, and it’s really going to benefit a lot of people,” Martin Kurzweil, an official at consulting firm Ithaka S+R, told Knott. The firm first identified the problem in a paper three years ago. He called the decision “stunning,” given it was just three years since his firm identified the problem. “That’s lightning speed in policy terms,” he told Knott. “It speaks to the salience of this issue and unfairness in transcript withholding. I commend the Education Department for taking this so seriously.” Practically, it’s essentially a national ban, he added. “I suspect that for a lot of institutions, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth to try to carve off a term that was completed but not fully paid for. It’ll be administratively difficult.”

Another expert — Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the New America think tank, told The Hechinger Report something similar: that it probably helps all students, not just ones getting federal aid. “It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’” Conroy told them. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.”

This has already been seen at the state level, The Hechinger Report noted. For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.

Corporate news coverage has been limited as of May 2024, Project Censored noted. There has been only limited corporate news coverage of the transcript withholding rule. When the rule package was announced in October 2023, the Washington Post published a substantive report on the package, emphasizing the protections from sudden college closures, but only briefly noted the issue of transcript withholding. Early reporting in U.S. News & World Report and the New York Times (in a partnership with The Hechinger Report) did cover the issue. But the government’s response has gone virtually unnoticed.

Controversial Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing Challenged by U.S. Commission

You might be surprised — even shocked — to learn that federal judges can determine defendants’ sentences based on charges they’ve been acquitted of by a jury. But in April 2024, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) — a bipartisan panel that creates guidelines for the federal judiciary — voted to end the practice as it applies to “calculating a sentence range under the federal guidelines.”

The change will significantly limit federal judges’ use of acquitted-conduct sentencing, as the legal news service Law360 and Reason magazine reported. The commission voted unanimously “to prohibit judges from using acquitted conduct to increase the sentences of defendants who receive mixed verdicts at trial,” Stewart Bishop reported for Law360, but was “divided” on whether its proposal ought to apply retroactively. There are still narrow circumstances where such conduct can be considered — if it underlies a charge the defendant is found guilty of as well as the acquitted crime.

Acquitted conduct had been allowed under a lower standard — if the judge found the charges more likely truth than not, rather than the jury’s standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s “a practice that has drawn condemnation from a wide range of civil liberties groups, lawmakers, and jurists,” C.J. Ciaramella reported for Reason, which in turn has “raised defendants’ scores under the federal sentencing guidelines, leading to significantly longer prison sentences.”

But now, “Not guilty means not guilty,” chair of the USSC, US District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, said in a press release. “By enshrining this basic fact within the federal sentencing guidelines, the Commission is taking an important step to protect the credibility of our courts and criminal justice system.”

Project Censored noted that “Acquitted-conduct sentencing partly explains why two Black men from Virginia, Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne, have been serving life sentences for the murder of police officer Allen Gibson in 1998 despite being found not guilty by a federal jury in 2001,” a case whose reconsideration has been reported on repeatedly by Meg O’Connor at The Appeal. The initial travesty of justice in this case was that police hid exonerating evidence from their original attorneys, and because of that, they pled guilty to lesser state charges. That was then used to give them life sentences in federal court, even though they were acquitted of murder in that trial. An evidentiary hearing was ordered by the Virginia Supreme Court in February, 2024, and the judge in that hearing allowed some new evidence to be introduced — but not all of it. Still, it’s possible that Richardson could be released from prison.

There’s been little corporate media coverage. Project Censored cited one story in Bloomberg Law, but nothing in the New York Times nor the Washington Post. In addition, “Richardson’s and Claiborne’s cases have received nearly no national coverage by corporate outlets,” except for a March 2023 BET report, “which addressed coerced confessions but not acquitted-conduct sentencing.”

Generative AI Apps Raise Serious Security Concerns

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps carry considerable risks, some poorly understood, which can result in exposing sensitive data and exposing organizations to attacks from bad actors. In response, both government and businesses have taken steps to limit or even block AI access to data.

Congress “only permits lawmakers and staff to access ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of the app with enhanced privacy features, and forbids them from using other AI apps or pasting blocks of text that have not already been made public into the program,” Project Censored noted. A follow-up regulation banned the use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on government-issued devices. And the National Archives and Records Administration is even more restrictive. In May 2024 it “completely prohibited employees from using ChatGPT at work and blocked all access to the app on agency computers.” What’s more, “Samsung decided to ban its employees’ use of generative AI apps (and develop its own AI application) in May 2023 after some users accidentally leaked sensitive data via ChatGPT,” Priya Singh reported for Business Today in April 2024.

Programs such as ChatGPT and Copilot are built by a training process that collects and organizes data that can be regurgitated in response to just a snippet of text. They are then “aligned” with an added layer of training to produce helpful output — which is what ordinary users normally see.

But something as simple as asking ChatGPT to repeat a word endlessly can cause it to break alignment and reveal potentially sensitive data, Tiernan Ray reported for ZDNet in December 2023. Researchers from Google’s DeepMind AI research lab found that ChatGPT “could also be manipulated to reproduce individuals’ names, phone numbers, and addresses, which is a violation of privacy with potentially serious consequences,” he reported. “With our limited budget of $200 USD, we extracted over 10,000 unique examples,” the researchers wrote. “However, an adversary who spends more money to query the ChatGPT API could likely extract far more data.”

And while training data itself can hold sensitive information, users are constantly adding new sensitive data that can also be exposed. In an article for tech news site ZDNet, Eileen Yu cited a survey of some 11,500 employees in the US, Europe (France, Germany, and the UK), and Asia (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea), which found that “57 percent of employees used public generative AI tools in the office at least once weekly, with 22.3 percent using the technology daily,” and that “31 percent of employees polled admitted entering sensitive information such as addresses and banking details for customers, confidential HR data, and proprietary company information into publicly accessible AI programs (and another 5 percent were unsure if they had done so).”

“Corporate media have given a lot of breathless coverage to the existential threat to humanity allegedly posed by AI,” Project Censored notes.“Yet these outlets have been far less attentive to AI apps’ documented data security risks and vulnerability to hackers, issues that have been given exhaustive coverage by smaller, tech-focused news outlets.”

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Salon.