Category: Media Lens

Excellent UK-based media analysis

‘Damned Fun’ – ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ And The Military-Entertainment Complex

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Tuesday, 7 June 2022 — Media Lens

In 1990, Tom Cruise, star of the 1986 blockbuster, ‘Top Gun’, said:

‘Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is – that “Top Gun” was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That’s why I didn’t go on and make “Top Gun II” and “III” and “IV” and “V.” That would have been irresponsible.’

It would indeed, and one can only admire Cruise’s honesty and selfless determination… in 1990…  not to mislead young people.

Why, then, 32 years later, would Cruise decide to appear in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’? The Daily Mail provides a clue:
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‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness

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Friday, 20 May 2022 — Media Lens

In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. In an ‘ordinary town’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, people are struggling to cope with unbearable heat and humidity. It is the combination of the two, measured by the so-called ‘wet-bulb temperature’, that is potentially fatal. When it approaches the core body temperature of 36C, sweat cannot evaporate and humans can no longer cool themselves down. Dehydration rises to dangerous levels. Vital organs become seriously stressed, especially the heart. Unless the body temperature is reduced, death follows in a matter of hours.

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‘A Crime Against Humanity’: The ‘Greenwash Festival’ Of COP26

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8 November 2021 — Media Lens

One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist:

‘#COP26  has been named the must excluding COP ever.
This is no longer a climate conference.
This is a Global North greenwash festival.
A two week celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.’

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Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping The Public Away From Power

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22 October 2021 — Media Lens

In their classic book on the news media, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a ‘propaganda model’ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actual societal purpose ‘on matters that are of significance for established power’ is to avert any ‘danger’ that the public can ‘assert meaningful control over the political process’ (Herman and Chomsky, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Vintage, 1988/1994, p. 303).

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‘That Is Actually Bollocks’: 20 Propaganda Horrors From 20 Years of Media Lens – Part 2

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18 June 2021 — Origin: Media Lens

11. The BBC On The Saintly Motives For Waging War On Iraq And Libya

In focusing on the grim future in April, US vice president, Kamala Harris, surely revealed far more than she intended about the grim past:

‘For years and generations, wars have been fought over oil. In a short matter of time, they will be fought over water.’

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‘The Savage Punishment Of Gaza’: Israel’s Latest Assault On Palestine’s Open Prison

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25 May 2021 — Origin: Media Lens

Recent media coverage of Israel and Palestine, not least by BBC News, has been full of the usual deceptive propaganda tropes: Israel is ‘responding’ or ‘reacting’ to Palestinian ‘provocation’ and ‘escalation’; Palestinian rockets ‘killed’ Israelis, but Palestinians ‘have died’ from unnamed causes; Israel has ‘armed forces’ and ‘security forces’, but Hamas has ‘militants’. And, as ever, Palestinians were killed in far greater numbers than Israelis. At least 248 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza, including 66 children. Palestinian rocket fire killed 12 in Israel, including one child.

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Shocking Omissions: ‘Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 Years Of The Guardian’ – John Pilger and Jonathan Cook Respond

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20 April 2021 — Origin: Media Lens

Long before ‘the propaganda model’ flew off Edward Herman’s keyboard and into ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the book he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, Leo Tolstoy had captured the essence of non-conspiratorial conformity:
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CDC Reports 1,095 Deaths Following Experimental COVID Vaccines While UK Government Reports 294 Deaths

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1 March, 2021 — Global Research

Health Impact News 26 February 2021
The CDC has done another data dump today into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines.

The data goes through February 18, 2021, with 19,907 recorded adverse events, including 1,095 deaths following injections of the experimental COVID mRNA shots by Pfizer and Moderna.

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‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 2

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11 February 2021 — Media Lens

Cogitation By David Edwards

As we saw in Part 1, in 1914 and again in 1939, millions of men and women welcomed war. Arnold Ridley and his pals did make this choice, but in reality the choice had been made for them by decades and centuries of the relentless ‘patriotic’ propaganda described by Tolstoy, which most people were powerless to resist.

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‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 1

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9 February2021 — Media Lens

A Cogitation by David Edwards

The name Arnold Ridley will be familiar to many viewers of ‘Dad’s Army’, one of Britain’s best-loved TV comedies, which ran a long time ago (1968-1977) but is still shown on prime time BBC TV.

Ridley played Private Godfrey, the loveable, most doddery member of a Second World War platoon of elderly Home Guard troops tasked with defending a stretch of the British coast ‘from the Novelty Rock Emporium to Stone’s Amusement Arcade’.

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Stuck In A Lift With John Pilger – ‘News And How To Use It’ by Alan Rusbridger

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4 December 2020 — Media Lens

Noticing the way journalists seemed unable to resist commenting on our work, even if it was just to slag us off, Glenn Greenwald tweeted us in 2012:

‘You are really deeper in the heads of the British establishment-serving commentariat than anyone else – congrats.’ (Greenwald, Twitter, 12 September 2012)

If that was true then, our relationship with the commentariat now feels more like a case of out of sight, out of mind. We have been blocked en masse on Twitter, even by loveable liberals like Jeremy Bowen, Jon Snow, Mark Steel (yes, ‘radical’ Mark Steel!), Steve Bell, Frankie Boyle (the less said about that the better) and, of course, Owen Jones and George Monbiot.

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The Dead And Those About To Die – Climate Protests And The Corporate Media

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17 November 2020 — Media Lens

The Roman poet Horace famously declared:

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patrie mori.’

It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. Wilfred Owen, the great English poet of the First World War, described this phrase as ‘the old Lie’ in his famous war poem, ‘Dulce et decorum est’. Patriotism so often means ‘honouring’ those who ‘fell in service to this country’, grand ceremonies at war memorials, feasts of royal pageantry. And then sending yet more generations of men and women to fight in yet more wars.

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‘None Of It Reported’: How Corporate Media Buried The Assange Trial

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7 October 2020 — Media Lens

One of the most imposing features of state-corporate propaganda is its incessant, repetitive nature. Over and over again, the ‘mainstream’ media have to convince the public that ‘our’ government prioritises the health, welfare and livelihoods of the general population, rather than the private interests of an elite stratum of society that owns and runs all the major institutions, banks, corporations and media. Continue reading →