20 Years of Censored News

CARL JENSEN (1929–2015) was born in Brooklyn, NY, served in Air Force intelligence during the Korean War, and later worked in advertising during its Mad Men-era heyday. In the late sixties, realizing that his current occupation did not match his intellectual and humanitarian ambitions, he went back to school and earned his PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the mid-seventies, observing the increasing stranglehold corporate interests had on U.S. news media, Jensen saw the need for an independent organization capable of monitoring the news and exposing the corporate bias reflected in how events were—or weren’t—portrayed there. This organization became Project Censored, the media watchdog group that to this day continues its work covering stories suppressed or underreported by the mass media. In addition to editing Project Censored’s yearly anthologies, Jensen wrote and edited several other books of media criticism, including The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 and Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century.

PROJECT CENSORED, founded in 1976 by Carl Jensen at Sonoma State University, has as its principal objective the advocacy for and protection of First Amendment rights, including freedom of information. In 2008, Project Censored received the PEN/Oakland Literary Censorship Award. Most recently, Project Censored received the 2014 Pillar Award in Journalism and New Media, given annually to persons of conscience, conviction, and achievement who stand up for what’s right and what’s true in the face of corporate and political intimidation. For more information, visit www.projectcensored.org.