Mickey Huff

Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation, discusses the state of legacy media and the urgent need for critical media literacy today. Reviewing how corporate media covers the news filling its pages with junk food news stories that perpetuate stories of “billionaires in space” and Hollywood scandals, Huff notes how propaganda often thrives on censorship, noting that the best propaganda is largely true but is often missing certain crucial elements that would allow the public to analyse issues more in-depth. Huff elaborates how legacy media uses public concern for “disinformation” to regain control of the narrative by proclaiming anything that does not mirror establishment media as “fake news.” Huff states that this is a transparent twist on censorship and the curation of information. Reviewing the conflicts of interest within organisational alliances that inform legacy media content, Huff scrutinises the Disinformation Governance Board, chaired by co-author of the Patriot Act, Michael Chertoff, and Facebook’s official fact-checker, the Atlantic Council, a lobby arm of NATO. Huff surveys recent neoliberal political narratives that pretend that “fake news” was uniquely a problem during Donald Trump’s presidency while he vituperates the “reactionary control of the narrative” which he claims is “another form of propaganda that wants to get people to accept the notion that there is a form of censorship that’s good for us.”