As assistant director of the mediawatch group Project Censored, I encounter regular criticism from mainstream media representatives who claim that the underlying thesis of our work that there exists, in the United States, a problem of news media selfcensorship is entirely without merit or validity. To hear these folks tell it, the concept of news media selfcensorship is a theory that, on the legitimacy scale, falls somewhere between backwardmasking of satanic messages and the Loch Ness Monster. Where are the examples?, they frequently challenge. And as we at Project Censored continually point out, this is a difficult problem to document precisely because there are so few smoking gun instances. As one can easily imagine, its infinitely easier to analyze and document news stories that appear, as opposed to stories that dont. Indeed, the decision to avoid a story or issue is almost never put down in memo form which is also what makes this form of censorship so insidious.

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