The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2016-2017

The Sundarbans are a vast mangrove delta that connects India and Bangladesh along the coast of the Bay of Bengal. In Bengali, Sundarban means “beautiful forest,” and the region is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, as Anuradha Sengupta reported for YES! Magazine, residents of islands in the Sundarbans, such as Ghoramara, are “struggling to cope” with rising seas, erratic weather patterns, severe floods, heavy rainfall, and intense cyclones that are the consequences of global climate change.

In 1991, Shell Oil Company produced and distributed a twenty-eight-minute documentary titled Climate of Concern. Asserting that climate change was taking place “at a rate faster than at any time since the end of the ice age—change too fast perhaps for life to adapt, without severe dislocation,” the film addressed potentially drastic consequences of climate change including extreme weather, flooding, famines, and climate refugees.

In 2014, then–US attorney general Eric Holder warned that so-called “risk assessments” might be injecting bias into the nation’s judicial system. As ProPublica reported in May 2016, courtrooms across the country use algorithmically-generated scores, known as risk assessments, to rate a defendant’s risk of future crime and, in many states—including Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin—to unofficially inform judges’ sentencing decisions.

Right-wing conservatives are using money and power to influence public policy to suppress student dissent on US college and university campuses. The right-wing Goldwater Institute, which is funded by conservatives including Charles Koch and the Mercer family, has proposed model legislation that seeks to quell student dissent in favor of guest speakers who attempt to discredit climate change, oppose LGBTQ rights, and espouse hate speech, Alex Kotch reported for AlterNet in March 2017.

On December 23, 2016, then-president Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). As Sarah Lazare reported for AlterNet, the 2017 NDAA included a provision to create a new federal center with “sweeping” surveillance powers to counter foreign “propaganda and disinformation.” The Global Engagement Center, Lazare wrote, will be granted “broad and ill-defined powers to surveil the ‘populations most susceptible to propaganda,’ compile reporting and social media messaging critical of the U.S.

In cooperation with AT&T, US federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have been secretly collecting telephone records since 1987 under a program known as Hemisphere, Aaron Mackey and Dave Maass reported for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The Hemisphere database contains “trillions” of domestic and international phone call records, and AT&T “adds roughly four billion phone records” each day, including calls from non-AT&T customers “that pass through the company’s switches.”

Governments around the world shut down Internet access more than fifty times in 2016, Lyndal Rowlands reported for the Inter Press Service (IPS) in December of that year. Around the world, governments shutting down Internet access limited freedom of speech, swayed elections, and damaged economies. “In the worst cases,” Rowlands wrote, “Internet shutdowns have been associated with human rights violations,” as happened in Ethiopia and Uganda.

In June 2016, Beck & Lee, a legal firm based in Miami, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of supporters of Bernie Sanders against the Democratic National Committee and its former chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, alleging that the DNC broke legally-binding neutrality agreements in the Democratic primaries by strategizing to make Hillary Clinton the nominee before a single vote was cast.

Each year, more than 65,000 pregnant women in the United States suffer life-threatening complications, including physical and psychological conditions aggravated by pregnancy, and more than 600 die from pregnancy-related causes. Elizabeth Dawes Gay reported that inadequate health care in rural areas and racial disparities are drivers of this maternal health crisis.

US Navy training activities are deadly for marine mammals in the North Pacific. In a five-year period, the US Navy has killed, injured, or harassed whales, dolphins, porpoises, sea lions, and other marine wildlife in the North Pacific Ocean nearly twelve million times—legally, according to a report for Truthout by Dahr Jamail.