The truth about the Cuban Five, published in the book Project Censored 2008
By
Alicia Jrapko Read Spanish Version
Project
Censored is a media research group at Sonoma State University in
northern California. Every year, Project Censored publishes a book
with a list of topics that have not been reported upon, and the 25
most-censored news stories during the year prior to the book’s
publication.
The project began in 1976 under the direction of
Dr. Carl Jensen, professor emeritus of Communications Studies at
Sonoma State University. After he retired in 1996, Dr. Peter
Phillips, a sociology professor at the university, assumed the
project’s direction and continues to train students of critical
thought in the field of journalism.
Hundreds of news stories
with the most diverse subjects are sent every year to Project
Censored. They are reviewed by students and professors familiar with
the project. Each story needs special investigative work, and the
idea is to select those stories that, because of their importance,
need to be disseminated. Because the case of The Five has been
ignored and silenced by the major media, kept from U.S. public
opinion for nine years, the importance of their case deserved a full
chapter in the 2008 book, which will be published in early September.
Among
the personalities who select (and have selected) the stories to be
published are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Norman
Solomon, Susan Faludi, George Gerbner, Sut Jhally , Frances Moore
Lappe, Herbert I. Schiller, Barbara Seaman, Erna Smith, and Mike
Wallace.
The
chapter “Bias of Corporate Media in the Case of the Five Cubans”
contains 4,000 words on nine pages. The author, Jeffrey Huling, is a
student at Sonoma State University. Before being assigned at random
by Professor Phillips to investigate the case, Huling had never heard
of the five Cubans.
According
to Huling, working on this story opened his eyes to the lies and
hypocrisy of the U.S. government, beyond what he thought his
government was capable of doing.
“As
a studied the details of the case, I felt terribly frustrated when I
saw the weakness of justice, overrun by political corruption,”
Huling said.
Project Censored 2008 has been translated into
several languages, including Spanish, Italian and Arabic. In the
United States, 15,000 to 20,000 copies are sold every year. Project
Censored’s Web page, www.projectcensored.org, gets between 25,000 and
30,000 visits per day.
The
international reach of Project Censored is another tool in the
struggle to reveal the truth about the case of the five Cubans. The
Project reveals the complicity of the U.S. corporate media as it
tries to silence a tale of heroism, justice, sacrifice and a
country’s right to self-defense when it is not aligned with the
policies of the government of the United States.
