How come I never heard about that in the news?

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question about some important issue you’ve found out about long after it occurred, then you’re not alone. I find myself asking that very same question every year around this time, when the latest edition of the annual Censored book comes out in the United States.

Censored 2016 has just been released, and with it comes the same old question about why I’ve never read, viewed or heard about certain big news stories that were not really considered “hot news” enough to be reported in depth by the major U.S. news media companies (and by extension, the corporate-dominated Japanese press as well).

Project Censored, the California-based nonprofit media-watch group that compiles every year the top 25 unreported or underreported news stories of the year before, and Seven Stories Press, the New York-based publishing house that has enough courage to print each year’s Censored book, have done it yet again with Censored 2016. Among the top 25 censored stories are a few news topics that you may have remembered seeing covered well in the independent news media (but not in the corporate press) sometime during 2014 and 2015, other stories that may strike you as vaguely familiar (“Where have I heard that story before?”), and other stories that will no doubt leave you scratching your head and wondering why and how they disappeared from the news radar of the big media companies — or why those stories were never on the radar in the first place.

Stories like what? Well, for instance, take Censored 2016’s No. 14 censored story about how the population of “displaced persons” (refugees, exiles or other victims left homeless by war or poverty) around the world has hit an all-time high of 50 million people and rising. Only now are we seeing the big media companies in the U.S. and elsewhere superficially covering the issue with the waves of “immigrants” pouring into European countries from areas where the U.S. is waging war. But the story was there all along — what took big media companies so long to catch up to the issue?

Or what about other top censored stories in Censored 2016, such as the Pentagon and NATO encircling China and Russia with a ring of U.S. military bases and missile defense systems (the No. 13 top censored story)? Or how about the No. 9 censored story: how tens of millions of American citizens living in poverty appear far less in news coverage by the big media companies than a few hundred U.S. billionaires do? (No big surprise there, but that reporting gap should not even exist in the first place.)

A top censored story in Censored 2016 that hits close to home for us here in Japan is this year’s No. 5 censored story: “Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Deepens”. Japanese corporate media reporting of the ongoing Fukushima nuclear crisis — and yes, it is still at a “crisis” stage more than four years after the 2011 nuclear accident — has been shameful enough, but U.S. and other foreign media coverage of Fukushima seem to have been just as bad or even worse. The New York Times, among other big media companies, tends to downplay the Fukushima catastrophe as the “worse nuclear accident since Chernobyl”. Actually, folks, Fukushima is the worst nuclear accident ever in the history of human civilization. But somehow that seriousness gets distorted by the time it reaches us through the airwaves and headlines of the big news companies.

If the ongoing mass die-off of marine life all around the Asia-Pacific region that we are currently seeing is any indication, then Fukushima will be recognized as much more than a nuclear accident and more accurately as the trigger for even more extreme natural disasters and ecosystem breakdowns that we will be seeing in the coming years.

Japan is also represented in Censored 2016 with another important essay concerning Fukushima and censorship: a piece by Japan-based U.S. filmmaker Ian Thomas Ash and how his film on Fukushima and radiation effects on Japanese victims, A2-B-C, has faced direct and indirect censorship in Japan, post-Fukushima.

And I too am privileged to have contributed a chapter in this year’s Censored 2016, titled “‘Dark Alliance’: The Controversy and the Legacy, Twenty Years On”. It has nothing to do with Japan per se, but rather is focused on the “Dark Alliance” investigation in the U.S. in the mid-1990s by the late journalist Gary Webb. I was quite familiar with Webb’s investigative series — and the connections it made between the CIA, crack cocaine and the right-wing Nicaraguan contras paramilitary groups — having covered it at the time (and since then) for independent media on the Web.

Twenty years after “Dark Alliance”, I look back on the controversy surrounding that important series and hope that I do justice with my chapter in the new Censored book in honoring the legacy of both “Dark Alliance” and Gary Webb, who I consider to have been one of the best investigative reporters of my generation.

I will have much more to say about my chapter in Censored 2016 a few months from now, when the actual 20th anniversary of “Dark Alliance” rolls around, so please be looking forward to that.

For now, all I can say is: Buy the new Censored 2016 book, if knowing the truth is important to you. I referred earlier to the book’s organizer, Project Censored, as a media watch group, but that is not quite accurate. As the new book shows, Project Censored stands on the frontline of not only criticizing the news media but is also an active force in helping to encourage up-and-coming journalists to fill in the news gaps that so many employees of big news media companies routinely miss. It’s been exciting for me to be involved with Project Censored, first as a big fan of the yearly Censored books for many years and now as a contributing writer.

“Do you trust your country’s news media?” — this is a direct question I throw out to Japanese and overseas exchange students in one of my university journalism courses in Kyoto every year as a point of class discussion. And the answer that usually comes back from most of them is a resounding No! I then try to direct the discussion toward this idea: So, what do you think is the solution to trusting the news media again…and what are you going to do about it?

Project Censored is doing something about it. And you can too, by picking up your own copy of the new Censored 2016 book some time soon and supporting the important work the organization has been doing for more than three decades. In the process, you will be supporting the kind of reporting you really want to see every time you open the pages of a newspaper or magazine, turn on the TV, listen to the radio or check out a news website — real news as opposed to “junk food news”, as Project Censored calls it.

So, how come you haven’t heard about this big story or that one in the news before? Treat yourself to a copy of Censored 2016 and find out exactly why you haven’t. It may well be the best book purchase you make this whole year.