Author Archives: Edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth

SPACE JUNK: The corporate media’s fawning coverage of billionaires’ space tourism is one of the best examples of junk food news of the past year, written by Jen Lyons, Marcelle Swinburne, Sierra Kaul, Gavin Kelley, and Mickey Huff

Adapted from Project Censored’s “State of the Free Press 2023”
By Edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth
Posted on December 13, 2022 by Edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth

Remember the Cold War Space Race between the former Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s? During the past year, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk went ahead and turned that into a modern-day dick-measuring contest, for lack of a better phrase, to see who could get there first for the longest. Their space outfits, extensively reported on by CNN Science, received more attention than the pollution caused by this narcissistic billionaire power competition, in which one rocket launch produced an estimated 300 tons of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, where it can remain for years. Continue reading →

Censorship by proxy: How big tech and billionaires dodge First Amendment laws and engage in censorship on the platforms where most of us get our news

Adapted from Project Censored’s “State of the Free Press 2023”
By Edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth
Posted on December 2, 2022 by Edited by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth

Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs—Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet). Their CEOs are routinely lionized in popular culture and the press as intrepid entrepreneurs, inventors of today’s must-have tools for work and play, and stewards of the public square. They include, but are not limited to Bill Gates (Microsoft, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon, the Washington Post)—all of whom are deeply involved and invested in computer software, social media platforms, and the worldwide web itself (e.g., Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube). Continue reading →