Excellent UK-based media analysis
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.
27 February 2019 — Media Lens
Earlier this month, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, author of ‘Utopia For Realists’, was interviewed by the high-profile Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson. During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Janary, Bregman had bluntly told billionaires that they should stop avoiding taxes and pay their fair share:
‘We gotta be talking about taxes. That’s it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.’
13 February 2019 — Media Lens
We were sad to hear that the comedian Jeremy Hardy had died on 1 February. Typically, media reports and obituaries prefixed the label ‘left-wing’ before the word ‘comedian’ as a kind of government health warning. What they really meant was that he was ‘too far left’. Normally, the media don’t label entertainers as ‘extreme centrists’, ‘neocon sympathisers’ or ‘Israel supporters’, when perhaps they should.
7 February 2019 — Media Lens
In support of their claim that Maduro is a ‘tyrant’ who does not allow free elections, corporate media consistently point to a lack of press freedom. When British academic Alan MacLeod of Glasgow Media Group reviewed 166 Western media articles evaluating the state of press freedom between 1998-2014, he found that all depicted Venezuelan media as ‘caged’, or unfree. Last week, Canadian political analyst Joe Emersberger commented in The Canary:
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5 February 2019 — Media Lens
In our new book, we describe a ‘Propaganda Blitz’ as a fast-moving campaign to persuade the public of the need for ‘action’ or ‘intervention’ furthering elite interests. Affecting great moral outrage, corporate media line up to insist that a watershed moment has arrived – something must be done!
A classic propaganda blitz was triggered on January 23, when Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself ‘interim President’. This was presented as dramatic new evidence that the people of Venezuela had finally had enough of Nicolas Maduro’s ‘regime’.
