Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: To Avert A Bloodbath – Libya And The Press – Part 1
Naturally it is the role of the enlightened West to steer Libya towards democracy. Editors working for the media conglomerate at the heart of the phone hacking police/political corruption scandal – a major attack on democracy and civil rights – presumably perceived no irony in their preaching of ‘democracy, and legal freedoms’. Words that should… Continue reading
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Media Lens: A ‘Malign Intellectual Subculture’ – George Monbiot Smears Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger And Media Lens
In a piece that recalled the iconic scene from The Usual Suspects, Monbiot lined up Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, and Media Lens, as political commentators who ‘take the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Murdoch’s Other Moral Crimes
When Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before the House of Commons media select committee on July 19, not one of the MP inquisitors demanded accountability for News International’s biggest moral crime – its shameful role as a facilitator of war. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Avalanche! Media Hyperbole On News Corp, The ‘Free’ Press And A ‘Berlin Wall Moment’
There’s no doubt that a body blow has been delivered to Rupert Murdoch’s mighty News Corporation empire. Leading politicians, who until very recently had been both obsequious and fearful, now want to put themselves at least a bargepole’s length away from the media mogul. Continue reading
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Media Lens: BBC Bombast – Propaganda, Complaints And Black Holes of Silence
The newscaster – Huw Edwards, Fiona Bruce, perhaps Emily Maitlis or Nick Owen – looks directly into the camera with the requisite degree of gravitas. The message is clear: ‘You can trust us. We have no agenda. This is the BBC. This is The News.’ Continue reading
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Media Lens: 'Extreme Dishonesty’ – The Guardian, Noam Chomsky and Venezuela
Noam Chomsky was once famously described by the New York Times as ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive’. And yet, as mentioned earlier, the Guardian is normally happy to ignore him and his views. But when Chomsky expresses criticism of an official enemy of the West, he suddenly does exist and matter for the Guardian. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Rape, Mercenaries, And Bloodbaths On The Scale Of Yemen? The Media Blank Amnesty’s Failure To Find Evidence In Libya
It ought to be surprising that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch exposed US-UK propaganda in a way that the entire pack of Western media hounds was unable or unwilling to do. But as we have described many times, with rare exceptions, journalists function as stenographers to power. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Three Little Words: WikiLeaks, Libya, Oil
‘Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves — 43.6 billion barrels — outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects.’ So reported the Washington Post on June 11, in a rare mainstream article which, as we will see, revealed how WikiLeaks exposed the real motives behind the war on… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Operation Rheinübung
Working on Media Lens has given us ten years of first-hand experience of just how tightly discussion can be controlled in an ostensibly democratic society. No matter how carefully we have formulated our questions, no matter how politely we have delivered them, we have been branded angry, irrational, unworthy of attention. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Bad News From The BBC – Part 2: The ‘John Motson Approach To Analysing News’
By now we had given Danahar several opportunities to respond seriously to highly credible analysis of BBC News reporting, including its heavily biased and misleading coverage of the Israeli killing of nine peace activists after he had taken over as BBC Middle East Bureau Chief. Danahar did not seem able or willing to answer sensibly. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Bad News From The BBC – Part 1: ‘Replete With Imbalance And Distortion’
One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, ‘Violence erupts at Israel borders’. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC ‘impartiality’ decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened. Continue reading
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Media Lens: You Cannot Kill An Ideology With A Gun
The media rush to glorify Obama the ‘warrior president’ is symptomatic of a Western society that has come to view war as entirely normal. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fallujah, Iraq 2004 – Misrata, Libya 2011
Our point – an obvious one, we would hope – is not at all to suggest that we support Gaddafi’s tyranny or his atrocities. Our point is that, time and again, our ostensibly independent mass media fall into line when the state declares war. When the official enemy attacks civilians our media howl with righteous… Continue reading
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Media Lens: If At First You Don’t Succeed – Four Decades Of US-UK Attempts To Topple Gaddafi
Behind a wall of silence, the US and UK have been conducting over the last four decades a massive, largely secret war against Libya – often using Chad, the country lying on its southern border, as its base. The current attacks on Col. Gadafi’s troops and attempts to assassinate the Libyan leader with the US… Continue reading
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Ten Years Of Media Lens – Some Questions And Answers
It has been a long, winding road from Southampton’s Giddy Bridge public house in 2001, where David Edwards first put to David Cromwell the possibility of starting some kind of media watch site. The idea seemed absolutely right, in fact blindingly obvious: why had we not thought of it before? Why had nobody else thought… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Yemen’s Useful Tyranny – The Forgotten History of Britain’s ‘Dirty War’: Part 2
Using declassified government files, historian Mark Curtis has exposed Britain’s ‘dirty war’ in Yemen in the 1960s, which he describes as one of the ‘least known aspects of recent British history’. The war lasted almost a decade under both Tory and Labour governments, and cost around 200,000 lives. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Yemen’s Useful Tyranny – The Forgotten History of Britain’s ‘Dirty War’: Part 1
All revolutions are not equal. While Libya is deemed worthy of the West’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ – express delivery by B-2 bomber, F-15 fighter and cruise missile – protesters elsewhere have been denied such Western largesse. In response to the atrocities in Yemen, for example, Obama has sent mere words. The reason, as one astute commentator… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Noble’ War In Libya Part 2
Like a skilled conjuror, the media slips effortlessly, and without explanation, between the obvious need for ‘positive engagement’ and the obvious need to ‘confront tyranny’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Noble’ War In Libya – Part 1
One can hardly fail to be impressed by the corporate media’s faith in humanity. Or at least that part of humanity with its finger on the cruise missile button. Last week, the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn predicted that ‘Western nations will soon be engaged in a war in Libya with the noble aim of protecting civilians.’ Continue reading
The New Dark Age 