Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness
In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. In an ‘ordinary town’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, people are struggling to cope with unbearable heat and humidity. It is the combination of the two, measured by the so-called ‘wet-bulb temperature’,… Continue reading
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Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping The Public Away From Power
In their classic book on the news media, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a ‘propaganda model’ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actual societal purpose ‘on matters that are of significance for established… Continue reading
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Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media
22 September 2021 — Origin: Media Lens During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists: ‘I simply pass on’ Continue reading
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‘That Is Actually Bollocks’: 20 Propaganda Horrors From 20 Years of Media Lens – Part 2
18 June 2021 — Origin: Media Lens 11. The BBC On The Saintly Motives For Waging War On Iraq And Libya In focusing on the grim future in April, US vice president, Kamala Harris, surely revealed far more than she intended about the grim past: ‘For years and generations, wars have been fought over oil. In a Continue reading
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‘That Is Actually Bollocks’: 20 Propaganda Horrors From 20 Years of Media Lens – Part 1
After 20 years of Media Lens, it seems only natural that we should look back in gratitude at the support we’ve received. In response to one of our early pieces, a kindly columnist at the Observer commented: Continue reading
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‘Our Indifference To Ourselves’ – Beyond The ‘Virtue’ Of Self-Sacrifice – Part 2
As we saw in Part 1, in 1914 and again in 1939, millions of men and women welcomed war. Arnold Ridley and his pals did make this choice, but in reality the choice had been made for them by decades and centuries of the relentless ‘patriotic’ propaganda described by Tolstoy, which most people were powerless to resist. Continue reading
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‘Absolute And Arbitrary Power’: Killing Extinction Rebellion And Julian Assange
The use and misuse of George Orwell’s truth-telling is so widespread that we can easily miss his intended meaning. For example, with perfect (Orwellian) irony, the BBC has a statue of Orwell outside Broadcasting House, bearing the inscription: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want… Continue reading
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The Arrogance Of BBC News
When we started Media Lens in 2001, we had a rather naïve expectation that journalists might: a) want to respond rationally to reasoned criticism; and b) have privileged access to unparalleled journalistic resources, experts and arguments that would enable journalists to respond with serious points to our challenges. In particular, we imagined that BBC journalists and editors… Continue reading
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Stockholm Syndrome – Julian Assange And The Limits Of Guardian Dissent
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!’ Continue reading
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Human Alchemy – Field Notes On Watching Emotions
‘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… Continue reading
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Life Or Death – Corporate Media Or Honest Media?
Relying on the corporate media, including BBC News, to provide a reliable account of the world is literally a matter of life or death, on many levels. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Assange Arrest – Part 2: ‘A Definite Creep, A Probable Rapist’
As discussed in Part 1, the nub of this ‘mainstream’ scorn was the belief that Assange’s concerns about extradition were a cowardly excuse for fleeing possible sex crimes – fears of extradition were a nerdish, paranoid fantasy. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fake News Tsunami – Trump’s ‘Collusion’ And Corbyn As ‘Dangerous Hero’
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. Continue reading
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The Destruction of Freedom: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange And The Corporate Media
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… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Dump The Guardian!
We were sad to hear that the comedian Jeremy Hardy had died on 1 February. Typically, media reports and obituaries prefixed the label ‘left-wing’ before the word ‘comedian’ as a kind of government health warning. What they really meant was that he was ‘too far left’. Normally, the media don’t label entertainers as ‘extreme centrists’,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Democracy Or Extinction
What will it take for governments to take real action on climate? When will they declare an emergency and do what needs to be done? How much concerted, peaceful public action will be required to disrupt the current economic and political system that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction? Continue reading
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Veneration Of Power Leading To Climate Catastrophe
In a recent media alert, we presented a few rules that journalists must follow if they are to be regarded as a safe pair of hands by editors and corporate media owners. One of these rules is that ‘we’ in the West are assumed to be ‘the good guys’. This seriously damaging narrative, flying in… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Limits Of Dissent – Glenn Greenwald And The Guardian
When we think of prisons, we tend to think of Alcatraz, Bang Kwang and Belmarsh with their guard towers, iron bars and concrete. But in his forthcoming book, ’33 Myths of the System’, Darren Allen invites us to imagine a prison with walls made entirely of vacuous guff: ‘Censorship is unnecessary in a system in… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Follow Your Bliss – A Follow-Up
Last February, I responded on Twitter to a tweet from The Times urging young journalists to apply for the Anthony Howard Award. Lucky winners could spend a year writing about politics for The Times and Observer newspapers, and also for New Statesman magazine. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Filter Bubble – Owen Jones And Con Coughlin
The nightmare version of ‘news’ is maintained by a corporate ‘filter bubble’ that blocks facts, ideas and sources that challenge state-corporate control of politics, economics and culture. It is maintained by a mixture of ruthless high-level control and middle- and lower-level compromise, conformity and self-serving blindness. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 