Validated Independent News stories (VINs) are news stories reported in the independent media that have been ignored or only partially covered by corporate media. Each year, college and university teachers and students participating in Project Censored’s campus affiliates program review several hundred independently-sourced news stories for their significance, accuracy, quality of sources, and competing corporate news coverage. Project Censored posts those stories that pass this review process as Validated Independent News stories (VINs).
The validation process helps to counter the negative consequences of what Project Censored’s founder, Dr. Carl Jensen, called “news inflation”—the concept that, although we have more and more of it, what passes today as “news” often seems to be worth less and less.
The news stories that Project Censored highlights as Validated Independent News stories may be socially or politically controversial—and sometimes even psychologically challenging—but we are confident that each is the result of serious journalistic effort and thus deserving of wider public attention.