Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE BALANCE OF POWER – EXCHANGES WITH BBC JOURNALISTS – PART 2
19 October, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media A Gale Of Spring Air – Barbara Plett And The President On September 24, we wrote to the BBC’s Barbara Plett: Dear Barbara Plett It’s hard to believe your article, ‘Debuts and diatribes at the UN’, was written by a Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE BALANCE OF POWER – EXCHANGES WITH BBC JOURNALISTS – PART 1
Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility… Continue reading
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Media Lens Alert: The Westminster Conspiracy
Last month, Greg Dyke, who was the BBC’s director general from 2000-2004, described the BBC as part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy. “The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: IRAN – THE WAR DANCE
The IAEA, which met in Vienna on September 18, adopted a resolution expressing concern about “Israeli nuclear capabilities” and called on agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei to work on the issue. The motion was adopted by 49 votes to 45, with 16 abstentions. Russia and China, both permanent members of the UN security council, voted in… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Cockroach Test
News that philosopher Alain de Botton had been hired as Heathrow’s “writer in residence” generated minor ripples across the media pond, including occasional murmurs of disapproval. Journalists momentarily failed to repress their awareness that truth into corporate profit-maximising does not go, although without perceiving the implications for themselves. Continue reading
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Media Lens: “An Existential Threat”: The US, Israel and Iran
The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.” The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: SIDING WITH THE GENERALS – THE INDEPENDENT ON HONDURAS
The BBC Q&A noted: “The role of the US is key, as it is Honduras’s biggest trading partner.” Curiously, the article failed to mention that the US has its only Central American military base in Honduras. In fact the Honduran military is armed, trained and advised by Washington in a relationship that is deep and… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: AFGHANISTAN — “BIG BEASTS” BIG BLOODBATH
At the heart of the uncertainty lies the internet and how to make it pay. For 100 years the corporate mass media has flourished thanks to its monopoly of the means of mass communication. Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write that the industrialisation of the press in the… Continue reading
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Media Lens 9 July, 2009: Hired Hands – Part 2: Reporting Elections In Iran And Iraq
The call for a “louder voice” of outrage from the West over the Iranian elections could hardly be more ironic. Consider the media response to the January 2005 elections in Iraq that took place under superpower military occupation in conditions of extreme violence. In Iraq the Iraqi interim government had forced the independent al-Jazeera TV… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Hired Hands – Part 1: Iran, Obama, Gaza, And MPs’ Expenses
Inevitably, then, corporations do not restrict themselves merely to the arena of economics. Rather, as John Dewey observed, “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”. Over decades, corporations have worked together to ensure that the choices offered by ‘representative democracy’ all represent their greed for maximised profits. Continue reading
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GUEST MEDIA LENS ALERT: Turning Children Into Consumers By Sharon Beder
Children are naïve about advertising and can easily be manipulated and exploited by marketers to want and demand their products. Corporate marketers believe that over time they can be shaped into lifelong consumers with brand loyalties and that can be profitable for decades to come. What is more, children influence family spending decisions worth hundreds… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Guardian, Climate And Advertising – An Open Email To George Monbiot
Why do you, George Monbiot (and others at the Guardian) not simply challenge the false picture of the world generated by the advertisers in your newspaper? This avoids the problem, which you deem “inescapable”, of running a newspaper without advertising. Why do you not write articles exposing named campaigns by named advertisers that appear in… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: CARTOON KOREA – FILTERED TO FIT: How The Media Keep Us Angry, Ignorant And Afraid
The message being delivered is that North Korea is of the James Bond school of cackling, malevolent villains. This is signalled through unsubtle trigger words whose true meaning is hidden but understood Continue reading
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Media Lens 18 May, 2009: Beholden To The Big Powers: Israel, Gaza And The UN
For the corporate media, then, there is no need for forensic analysis of this latest cynical sidelining of the UN, a body set up to promote world peace after all. There has been no rottweiler unearthing of this UN capitulation which, once again, effectively covers up major atrocities committed by Israel with heavy backing from… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Left-Wing Media Fallacy Jeremy Bowen, The BBC, And Other National Treasures
There are several good reasons why the media are keen to accept that they are biased to the left. First, the overwhelming preponderance of right-wing flak machines – ‘centre-left’ parties and governments, business front groups and powerful ‘religious’ organisations – persuades media executives that they really are too left-leaning. There is just far less flak… Continue reading
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Media Lens 24 April, 2009: Protesting War – An Exchange With The BBC’s Diplomatic Editor, Mark Urban
You would have us believe that this original, grubby motivation can be separated from the effort “to bring about a successful outcome in southern Iraq”. It cannot. ‘Success’ in Iraq has always meant securing control of the country and its oil resources – the welfare of the Iraqi people was, of necessity, always subordinated to… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Children Of Darkness – Killing ‘Them’ – Part 2
The idea that Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians was intended to stop rocket attacks is hard to reconcile with the fact that Israel deliberately provoked those attacks when it broke the ceasefire with its November 4, 2008 attack killing six people in Gaza Continue reading
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Media Lens: Children Of Darkness – Killing ‘Them’ – Part 1
As we have noted before, journalists are highly evolved intellectual herd animals. They possess sophisticated sense organs capable of detecting minute changes in the propaganda environment. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Selective Vision: Iran, Israel And Nuclear Arms
When a demonstrably mendacious leader claims he “passionately believed” in a lie, the media has to take him at his word. This is the same brand of journalistic gullibility that has had such tragic consequences for the people of Iraq. This is the endless, uncritical obedience to power that boosted the warmongering agenda of London… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 