Excellent UK-based media analysis
7 November 2019 — Media Lens
A recent viral clip of Jeremy Corbyn featured vital truths about the corporate media that ought to be at the forefront of public consciousness in the approach to the UK General Election on December 12. The clip began:
‘A free press is essential to our democracy. But much of our press isn’t very free at all.’
30 September 2019 — Media Lens
Reality clashed with the BBC version of false consensus in a remarkable edition of HardTalk last month. Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was starkly honest about humanity’s extreme predicament in the face of climate breakdown and refused to buckle under host Stephen Sackur’s incredulous questioning. Sackur’s inability to grasp that we are already in a climate emergency, and that massive changes are necessary now to avoid societal collapse, was clear for all to see. His line of questioning attempted to present Hallam to the BBC audience as a dangerous revolutionary, trying to destroy capitalism for twisted ideological reasons.
Sackur: ‘You want to bring down the capitalist system as we know it, is that correct?
Hallam: ‘The capitalist system is going to be brought down by itself. The capitalist system is eating itself.’
17 September 2019 — Media Lens
Nothing happened on September 2 in central London. Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, did not initiate a protest outside the Home Office. He did not sing and play the Floyd classic ‘Wish You Were Here’, or say:
‘Julian Assange, we are with you. Free Julian Assange!’
22 July 2019 — Media Lens
The greatest fear of those holding the most power and wealth is that they will lose their exalted position in the world. They will resist any changes to the grossly unequal and unjust class structure that causes grievous damage to so many people; and to the planet itself. Even the threat of real change must be crushed. This, in a nutshell, underpins the astonishing and relentless campaign to stop Jeremy Corbyn, a moderate leftist, from ever becoming Prime Minister.
11 June 2019 — Media Lens
For anyone persuaded by the state-corporate campaign of sneers and smears depicting Julian Assange as a shit-smearing narcissist and rapist, the comments made by Nils Melzer, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, must be deeply shocking. The BBC headline:
‘Julian Assange subjected to psychological torture, UN expert says’
30 May 2019 — Media Lens
‘Twas the night before Christmas. I’m heading back to the family home and enjoying a rare taste of my old life among the corporate sardines on the 17:11 from London Victoria. Appropriately enough, the tin can we’re in is packed and silent: a hundred opposable thumbs are twitching over a hundred touch screens. Not a word is spoken. I have a feeling that if I were to attempt to talk to any of the humanoids around me, it would be regarded as a situationist prank. You could hear an email drop.
23 May 2019 — Media Lens
Relying on the corporate media, including BBC News, to provide a reliable account of the world is literally a matter of life or death, on many levels.
30 April 2019 — Media Lens
A new report on April 25 by a respected think tank has estimated that US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in August 2017 have caused around 40,000 deaths. This atrocity has been almost entirely blanked by the British ‘mainstream’ media, including BBC News. Additional sanctions imposed in January 2019 are likely to lead to tens of thousands of further deaths.
18 April 2019 — Media Lens
In December 2010, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore commented on Julian Assange in the Mail on Sunday:
‘Indeed it’s difficult to get a clear picture of the complaints by two women he had sex with in Sweden in August… The sex appears to have been consensual, though his refusal to use condoms was not. His behaviour looks bad rather than illegal but who really knows? The Swedish prosecutors themselves say they believe these women’s stories but don’t believe these are crimes.’
‘Who really knows?’ The answer, of course, was and is that, in the absence of a trial, nobody except the people directly involved knows what really happened.
5 April 2019 — Media Lens
According to corporate journalism, a tidal wave of ‘fake news’ has long been threatening to swamp their wonderful work reporting real news. The ProQuest media database finds fully 805,669 hits for newspaper articles mentioning the term ‘fake news’. The key sources of such fakery are said to be social media, and above all, of course, Russia.
19 March 2019 — Media Lens
In 2010, US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was given a 35-year prison sentence after she had leaked more than 700,000 confidential US State Department and Pentagon documents, videos and diplomatic cables about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Perhaps the most notorious of the releases was a US military video that WikiLeaks titled ‘Collateral Murder’. It showed the indiscriminate slaying of up to eighteen people in Baghdad on 12 July, 2007. The footage, taken from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, showed the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters journalist and his rescuers. A second Reuters staff member, employed as a driver and camera assistant, was also killed. Two young children, whose father was among those killed, were seriously wounded.
6 March 2019 — Media Lens
One of us had a discussion with an elderly relative:
‘He can’t be allowed to become Prime Minister.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s so awful…’
‘What is?’
‘The way he hates the Jews.’
The last comment was spoken with real anguish, the result of continuous exposure to just two main news sources: the Daily Mail and the BBC.
What is astonishing is that, just four years ago, essentially no-one held this view of Jeremy Corbyn.
