CENSORED: The News That Didn’t Make the...

CENSORED: The News That Didn’t Make the News and Why: The 1996 Project Censored Yearbook edited by Carl Jensen & Project Censored (Seven Stories: $14.95; 352 pp., illustrated, paperback original). The 20th edition of this annual collection showcases significant issues that the compilers deem to have been overlooked by the mainstream media. Jensen castigates news agencies for cranking out the “sensationalized, personalized, and homogenized inconsequential trivia which is served up to the public on a daily basis.” In the rush to cover O.J. Simpson, Hugh Grant, Windows 95 and Shannon Faulkner, electronic and print media largely ignored the efforts of congressional Republicans to gut both the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Election Commission, the rebirth of slavery in Sudan, how the deregulation of the telecommunications industry is producing near-monopolies and the danger posed by underground stores of highly radioactive waste in the former Soviet Union.