Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: HEADSHOT – PROPAGANDA, STATE RELIGION AND THE ATTACK ON THE GAZA PEACE FLOTILLA – PART 2
As discussed in Part 1, media coverage of the non-violent Iranian capture of 15 British sailors (in Iranian waters) focused on the humiliating failure of the sailors to open fire in self-defence. Journalists took a very different view of the May 31 Israeli attack on the ship Mavi Marmara carrying human rights activists and supplies… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: HEADSHOT – PROPAGANDA, STATE RELIGION AND THE ATTACK ON THE GAZA PEACE FLOTILLA – PART 1
The public, in a sense, does not receive news – it receives the +same+ event repeated over and over again. The same security forces are always taking regrettable but necessary action against terrorists and militants. The public no longer sees real, changing, complex events; it sees the same frozen, benevolent image of the world. As… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: PROJECTILE DYSFUNCTION – IRON DOME, ISRAEL, TRIDENT, AND THE MEDIA
Last week, the BBC reported Barack Obama’s request to Congress for $200 million in military aid to assist Israel’s construction of a short-range rocket defence system, Iron Dome. The funding will be in addition to the $3 billion in military aid the US annually sends to Israel. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: BREAK THE SILENT SPRING – A MEDIA LENS APPEAL FOR YOUR SUPPORT
We witnessed in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq how the sheer weight of media propaganda could make an invented, non-existent threat seem real. The same media have now made the choice between three corporate drones offering the same form of “friendly fascism” appear meaningful. The front page of the BBC’s news website… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE ART OF LOOKING PRIME MINISTERIAL – THE 2010 UK GENERAL ELECTION
On April 15, news media broadcast the first of three live, 90-minute “prime ministerial debates” between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the leaders, respectively, of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. By the end of the second debate on April 22, the word ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned a total of five times… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: VICTORY FOR THE OVERLORDS – OBAMA’S HEALTHCARE REFORM
In November 2008, the historic importance of Barack Obama’s presidential victory was a relentless theme across the media spectrum. Even the pretence of a mainstream commitment to balanced reporting vanished from sight in deference to the self-evident Truth. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: WHEN FACTS AND PROPAGANDA COLLIDE – THE BBC BENDS OVER BACKWARDS TO ACCOMMODATE ISRAELI CLAIMS
When a Thai kibbutz worker was killed in Israel by a rocket launched from Gaza last week, BBC News online gave the incident headline coverage flagged up on its home page. By contrast, the killing of two Palestinian teenagers, Mohammad Qadus and Osaid Qadus, by Israeli soldiers on Saturday was buried at the end of… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: WAR AS PR – OPERATION MOSHTARAK, MEANING “TOGETHER”
Idiocy is one thing, but the BBC’s idiocy all went one way – no journalist swooned with comparable helplessness at the feet of experts excoriating US-UK propaganda. As news of Sambrook’s move arrived, his former colleagues at the BBC were once again deferring to the “intelligent”, “thoughtful”, “sceptical” American and British politicians hawking the public… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: GATES OF DELUSION Media Distortions And +Real+ Climate Scandals
Since November last year, the public has been bombarded with the story of stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealing a supposed “scandal” of scientific malpractice, stupidly and lazily named “climategate”. Further media frenzy erupted over an erroneous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement that 80 per cent… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: HAITI – THE BROKEN WING
In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The… Continue reading
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Guest Media Lens Alert: How Alternative Media Provide the Crucial Critique of the Mainstream – Richard Keeble Responds to Tim Luckhurst
On January 4, Tim Luckhurst, former BBC journalist and current Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, wrote an article in the Independent with the dramatic title, ‘Demise of news barons is just a Marxist fantasy.’ Luckhurst argued that leftist critics are gleefully predicting the end of corporate journalism. According to Luckhurst “there is… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: NUCLEAR DECEIT – THE TIMES AND IRAN
On December 14, The Times announced that it had obtained documents about Iran’s nuclear programme that revealed “a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator. This is the component of a nuclear weapon that triggers the explosion”. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: WERE AFGHAN CHILDREN EXECUTED BY US-LED FORCES? AND WHY AREN’T THE MEDIA INTERESTED?
American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed. Kabul-based Times correspondent Jerome Starkey reported the shocking accusations… Continue reading
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Media Lens Alert: Chilcot Inquiry – the establishment goes to work – part 2
The Iraqi “threat” was a fantasy invented by the immensely powerful, nuclear-armed bullies of the West. This is why former British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, was able to observe last month that prior to the attacks on September 11, 2001, Iraq was merely “a grumbling appendix”. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: CHILCOT INQUIRY – THE ESTABLISHMENT GOES TO WORK – PART 1
The use of military and economic force to control and exploit the world is non-negotiable for these interests. We are free to vote for the Labour party to attack ‘threatening’, but in fact defenceless, Third World countries, or we can vote for the Conservative party to do the same. We can buy the Guardian that… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE SILENCE OF THE BBC 100 – BBC TRUST CHAIRMAN RESPONDS TO ‘NEWSPEAK’
One of our readers recently took us to task for a serious omission in our new book, ‘Newspeak in the 21st Century’ (Pluto Press, 2009). He asked how we could possibly have failed to include the BBC’s Newsnight presenter, Emily Maitlis. In August 2008, Maitlis opened Newsnight with these words about the conflict between Russia… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: DANCING ON A MASS GRAVE – OLIVER KAMM OF THE TIMES SMEARS MEDIA LENS
One of our most relentless critics is Oliver Kamm, leader writer and blogger at The Times. Kamm joined the paper in 2008 having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund. In a 2006 blog, Kamm described us as “a shrill group of malcontents”, an “aggressively simple-minded lobby” guilty of “unprofessional and often… Continue reading
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GUEST MEDIA LENS ALERT: A COMPARATIVE REVIEW OF FLAT EARTH NEWS AND NEWSPEAK – PART 2 By Jonathan Cook
The professional journalist, they suggest, is trained to seek out facts from which he or she constructs an “objective” news report. On this view, journalists select facts in the same way that, adopting an analogy used by Edwards and Cromwell, a geologist collects rocks for research. “Geologists have no emotional attachment to their rocks –… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS: THE BBC’S JEREMY PAXMAN ON IRAQ – “WE WERE HOODWINKED”
Does not government submission of evidence mark the point where serious journalism +begins+ rather than ends? What is the reason for journalism at all, if the responsibility is simply to accept what a US Secretary of Defence says because we “know” he “is an intelligent, thoughtful man, and a sceptical man”? Continue reading
The New Dark Age 