Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: Bombing Osirak, Burying UN Resolution 487 – An Exchange With The BBC’s Jonathan Marcus
On June 7, 1981, eight Israeli aircraft bombed the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor ten miles southeast of Baghdad. Ten Iraqis and one French civilian were killed. In response to the attack, UN Security Council Resolution 487 was passed 15-0, on June 19, 1981, with no-one opposing and no-one abstaining – not even the United States. Continue reading
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Media Lens 1 March 2012: Iran – Next In Line For Western ‘Intervention’?
What would it take for journalists to seriously challenge government propaganda? A war with over one million dead, four million refugees, a country’s infrastructure shattered, and the increased threat of retail ‘terror’ in response to the West’s wholesale ‘terror’? How horrifying do even very recent experiences have to be, how great the war crimes, before… Continue reading
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Media Lens 1 March 2012: Iran – Next In Line For Western ‘Intervention’?
What would it take for journalists to seriously challenge government propaganda? A war with over one million dead, four million refugees, a country’s infrastructure shattered, and the increased threat of retail ‘terror’ in response to the West’s wholesale ‘terror’? How horrifying do even very recent experiences have to be, how great the war crimes, before… Continue reading
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Media Lens: UN ‘Travesty’: Resolutions Of Mass Destruction – Part 2
Ironically, like other media that dismissed highly credible scientific analyses of the death toll in Iraq – published in one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet – the BBC has been reporting hundreds of deaths in Homs based on anecdotal evidence and highly questionable sources. Continue reading
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Media Lens: UN ‘Travesty’: Resolutions Of Mass Destruction – Part 1
It has been said that compassion is ‘the only beauty that truly pleases’ While beauty ordinarily provokes the fiery itch of desire or the sullen shadow of envy, compassion is cooling, blissful, inspiring awe and wonder. It implies an ability to stand outside our own needs as observers, to perceive the suffering of others as… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Snow, White And The Two Daves – The Guardian Responds
Our most recent media alert, Silence Of The Lambs, created a small ripple in the Guardian universe. We had asked why even the paper’s most radical journalists, Seumas Milne and George Monbiot, are silent on the propaganda role of the liberal media, particularly the Guardian, in propping up power. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Silence Of The Lambs
One of the original aims of Media Lens, when we began in 2001, was to engage in honest, open and rational debate with journalists working for major news organisations. It wasn’t about ‘bashing’ them or trying to make them look bad. We wanted to examine media assumptions, challenge journalists’ arguments and find out more about… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Selective Outrage – Iran And Libya
News that a fourth scientist in two years, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, had been assassinated in Iran by an unknown agency generated minimal outrage in the press. Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘A Death Sentence For Africa’
The UN climate summit in Durban, South Africa, ended with one of those marathon all-night cliffhanger negotiations that the media love so much. The outcome was a commitment to talk about a legally-binding deal to cut carbon emissions – by both developed and developing countries – that would be agreed by 2015 and come into… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Climate Crisis – The Collapse In Corporate Media Coverage
The latest round of UN climate talks has just begun in Durban, South Africa, but the world’s richest nations are already planning to prevent any new treaty from taking effect before 2020. Achim Steiner, head of the UN environment programme, has condemned the action as a ‘political choice’, rather than one based on science, calling… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The IAEA, Iran And ‘Fantasy Land’
Indeed, informed scepticism in the corporate media has been muted or non-existent – the image of Iran as a ‘nuclear threat’ has yet again been imposed on the public mind. Any reasonable news reader and viewer would find it extremely difficult to question the emphatic declarations offered right across the media ‘spectrum’. Continue reading
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Media Lens Cogitation: Free to be Human – An Interview with David Edwards
The aim of Richard Capes’ More Thought blog is ‘to provide detailed audio/video/written interviews with authors of non-fiction social, political, philosophical and environmental books that I consider essential reading’. Here is Richard’s November 10 interview with Media Lens co-editor David Edwards about his book Free to be Human. The interview is quite long, we urge… Continue reading
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Media Lens Cogitation: Falling By David Edwards
April Fool’s Day, 1999, and the heart specialist says to me, with the usual twinkle in his eye: ‘It’s not Mickey Mouse territory, but you’ll be okay.’ Continue reading
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Media Lens: Killing Gaddafi
Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader’s capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato airstrikes. In fact, it… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Britain’s Own Pravda-Style Propaganda: Part 2
Ten years later, the violent consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan are truly appalling. A Stop the War video, ‘What is the true cost of the Afghanistan war?’ details some of the appalling statistics: Continue reading
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Media Lens: Britain’s Own Pravda-Style Propaganda: Part 1 Ten Years Of ‘Involvement’ In Afghanistan
In a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been ‘unavoidable’ and that ‘we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events’, struggling with ‘the incoherence of our own changing policies, for… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Targeting Syria – The ‘Bad News’ For The Guardian
Afghanistan and Iraq may still be in flames. A bloodbath may continue to flow from Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya. No matter, mainstream journalists are appalled that a double Russian and Chinese veto at the UN has thwarted Western efforts to do more good in Syria. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Golden Rule Of State Violence: Terrorism Is What They Do; Counterterrorism Is What We Do
A defining feature of state power is rhetoric about a ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ role in world affairs. Errors of judgement, blunders and tactical mistakes can, and do, occur. But the motivation underlying state policy is fundamentally benign. Reporters and commentators, trained or selected for professional ‘reliability’, tend to slavishly adopt this prevailing ideology. Continue reading
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Media Lens: To Avert A Bloodbath – Libya And The Press – Part 2
On August 23 and 24, the media once again abandoned all pretence of objectivity in celebrating the ‘fall’ of Tripoli, as they had in celebrating the ‘fall’ of Kabul and Baghdad. This, again, was a moment of national triumph, of vindication – the famed concern with ‘balance’ was brushed aside as mean-spirited, even nasty (the… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 