Every fall, Project Censored presents the 25 most censored stories of the past year. The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) is proud to announce that freepress.org Editor Bob Fitrakis and Senior Editor Harvey Wasserman's article "How a Republican election supervisor manipulated the 2004 Central Ohio vote, in black and white," posted November 23, 2004, was rated number three on the list of the 25 most censored stories of 2004-2005.

The censored story focuses on the role of Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder, the former head of the county's Republican Party, and how he failed to put out 76 voting machines on Election Day, all of them in the Democratic city of Columbus and 42 of them in the heavily pro-Kerry majority African American wards on the city's east side. Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips estimates that this may have cost Kerry up to 17,000 votes. Damschroder was recently suspended for a month without pay for accepting a check in his office from a Diebold lobbyist made out to the Republican Party on the day bidding opened for voting machines in Franklin County.

In July 2004, DOE issued approval for construction of a facility at the PORTS site that will convert highly reactive depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6, left over from the former gaseous diffusion process) to the more stable uranium oxide. Although this conversion would appear to be desirable, there are downsides to the operation. One is that the technology is unproven. Another is that large numbers of cylinders of DUF6 are being trucked to PORTS from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for processing in a facility which is already 14 months behind schedule in its construction. DOE has estimated that the conversion facility, when operational, will take at least 25 years, working around the clock, to convert this DUF6 to uranium oxide. There are also large quantities of DUF6 at Paducah, Kentucky. Ohioans want to make every effort to ensure that our state does not become a defacto waste dump.

On July 15, 2005, the citizen organization PRESS (Ports mouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security) held a press conference in the Southern Ohio town of Portsmouth to announce confirmation of excessive background radioactivity first measured in November 2003 by Russian nuclear physicist and environmentalist Sergey Pashenko. The testing done by Pashenko in 2003 in the area around the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) yielded background radiation levels at least 100 times greater than normal background levels. PORTS is located north of Portsmouth and just south of Piketon, Ohio.

In an era when journalistic integrity has all but given way to the corporate bottom line and the regurgitation of government spin, a new book is being published. Goats in Prison: From Hippies to Headlines will offer an exciting look at the early years of one of the few surviving examples of America's "underground press." Smartly edited, this book will document the anti-war movement beginning in 1970 with actual articles, photographs, cartoons and even advertisements, chronicling events and the struggle to report them up to the present day. "Make no mistake about it" (as Richard Nixon would say), this book is no acid trip down foggy-memory lane. The Columbus Free Press is still publishing. This fact alone is what separates this book from those in the Woodstock-flashback publishing genre. It is an insiders' look at what really happened, and still is happening. Perhaps only in the conservative heartland could left-wing journalism find the motivation to survive for 35 years...and there is much to learn from its history. Steve Conliff, former Freeper from the 70s is editing the book.