Category: Media Lens

Excellent UK-based media analysis

‘How Dare You!’ The Climate Crisis And The Public Demand For Real Action

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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.’

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Stockholm Syndrome – Julian Assange And The Limits Of Guardian Dissent

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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!’

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The Campaign To Stop Corbyn – Smears, Racism And Censorship

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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.

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‘Mirthless Laugh’ – The Persecution And Torture Of Julian Assange

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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’

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Human Alchemy – Field Notes On Watching Emotions

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30 May 2019 — Media Lens

Incident On The 17:11 From Victoria

‘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.

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Media Lens: 40,000 Dead Venezuelans Under US Sanctions: Corporate Media Turn A Blind Eye

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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.

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Media Lens: Assange Arrest – Part 2: ‘A Definite Creep, A Probable Rapist’

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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.

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Media Lens: Fake News Tsunami – Trump’s ‘Collusion’ And Corbyn As ‘Dangerous Hero’

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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.

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The Destruction of Freedom: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange And The Corporate Media

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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.

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Media Lens: The Fake News Nazi – Corbyn, Williamson And The Anti-Semitism Scandal

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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.

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Media Lens: ‘We Don’t Do Propaganda’

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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.’

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