Censored Notebook

Clearing the Black Smoke of Fake News

by Andy Lee Roth
A 1938 radio broadcast, “The War of the Worlds,” dramatized an invasion by Martians whose technological powers vastly surpassed those of Earth’s human defenders. At the program’s climax, an “eyewitness” described the desperate scene as Martian machines attacked New York: “This is the end now… black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running towards the East River… thousands of them, dropping in like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster… People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use.” 

Engaging Students in Critical Media Literacy—in the Classroom and Beyond

By Andy Lee Roth
In the past five years, more than 1,300 students from dozens of college and university campuses in the United States and Canada have flexed their media literacy “muscles” by researching and publicizing important but underreported news stories through Project Censored’s Campus Affiliates Program. 

Protecting Free Speech in Fearful Times

Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff
This essay extends an argument originally published in Censored 2014:
Fearless Speech in Fateful Times (pp. 25-26, 249-250).
Free speech is necessary to democracy; without it, people cannot truly participate in government, as the late constitutional law scholar Ronald Dworkin expressed in a 2006 essay, “The Right to Ridicule.” Free speech, Dworkin wrote