Mickey Huff, Michael Kolbe, Nolan Higdon, Sam Park, JenniferEiden, and Kimberly Soiero The waters are rising while we are dreaming ojdancing with the stars. —Walter Mosley1 I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not injorm, I am saying something jar more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic injormation. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well injormed. —Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 1985) Thirty years ago, Project Censored founder, Dr. Carl Jensen, coined the term Junk Food News. Jensen referred to the increased coverage of utter inanity as serious news as Junk Food, like Twinkies for the brain. Around that same time, New York University media ecologist Neil Postman published a seminal work—Amusing Ourselves to Death: Pub- lic Discourse in the Age of Show Business.2 In the book, Postman perhaps unwittingly yet presciently warned about what has grown to become our current bread and circus sideshow, made-for-reality TV faux news culture—comprised of deleterious distractions and distortions that produce dazed, disgruntled, and dismayed civic dilettantes in delirious denial about key issues of our time, about where we are heading as a society, and the eventual decline of American civilization.3 Since the 1980s, Project Censored has covered the growing and now normalized trend of Junk Food News, which Jensen began analyzing after news editors took umbrage at his critiques of the failures and possible censorship concerns related to the so-called “mainstream”
