Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: Beyond The ‘Blog-O-Bots’ – Robert Fisk On The British Media – Part 1
In the 1960s, psychologist Lester Luborsky used a camera to track the eye movements of subjects asked to look at a set of pictures. Some of the pictures were sexual in content – one showed the outline of a woman’s breast, beyond which a man could be seen reading a newspaper. The response of some… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Bambi Journalism – The Art Of Professional Naivety
9 January 2006 — Media Lens On October 20, 2005, we published a Media Alert, ‘Real Men Go To Tehran,’ www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051020_real_men_go_to_tehran.php We detailed media reactions after an anonymous British official had accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that had killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May, 2005. Tony Continue reading
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Media Lens: Guardians of Power By Gabriele Zamparini
21 December 2005 — Media Lens Exclusive interview with Media Lens’ editors David Edwards and David Cromwell “Guardians of Power. The Myth of the Liberal Media” is a new book by David Edwards and David Cromwell, the two editors of Media Lens, an excellent watchdog “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”. According Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Insane Society – Climate Change, Advertising, And The Independent
Fromm concluded that modern Western society was indeed insane and that this insanity threatened the very survival of the human species. If this sounds extreme, consider the media response to the most terrifying threat of our time – global climate catastrophe. In 2004 a paper in the leading science journal Nature warned that, as a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burning the Planet for Profit
Mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not really matter. Meanwhile, the truly vital issues receive scant attention to the point of invisibility: the parlous prospects for humanity’s survival and the root causes underlying the global environmental threat. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Tragic Blindness of the Embedded BBC – White Phosphorus, Fallujah And Unreported Atrocities
Readers may recall from previous media alerts that we did not know then whether unusual or banned weapons – including cluster bombs, depleted uranium, napalm, white phosphorus and poisonous gas – had been used in Fallujah, or whether atrocities had been committed by ‘coalition’ forces against civilians. We did know, however, that the BBC had… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Smearing Chomsky – The Guardian Backs Down
On November 4, we published a Media Alert, ‘Smearing Chomsky’, detailing the Guardian’s October 31 interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. The alert produced the biggest ever response from Media Lens readers – many hundreds of emails were sent to the newspaper. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Thought Control and ‘Professional’ Journalism – Part 2
“Professional” journalism accepts that powerful interests – the political and economic allies of the corporate media – should be allowed to set the news agenda. Reporters are to channel the words of officialdom without expressing their own personal opinions. To express criticism of the powerful in news reports is deemed “unprofessional” – that is, “crusading”,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Smearing Chomsky – the Guardian in the Gutter
This is one of the most shocking and appalling media smears we have seen of Chomsky – and we have been shocked and appalled many times in the past. We spend our time well when we reflect that the source is not some rabid, right-wing, Murdoch organ but this country’s “leading liberal newspaper” – the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Thought Control and ‘Professional’ Journalism – Part 1
25 October 2005 — Media Lens Early last century, industrial technology allowed business interests to produce mass media at a cost that outclassed the capacity of non-corporate media to compete. As a result, radical publishers were marginalised and media diversity rapidly narrowed. To counter claims that society was being, in effect, brainwashed by this media Continue reading
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Media Lens: Real Men Go To Tehran
20 October 2005 — Media Lens The Roman historian Tacitus observed: “Crime once exposed has no refuge but in audacity.” What better example than Tony Blair’s declaration at an October 7 press conference: “There is no justification for Iran or any other country interfering in Iraq.”? (Adrian Blomfield and Anton La Guardia, ‘Stop meddling in Continue reading
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Media Lens: Killing with Impunity – Nine-Second Coverage For Dozens of Dead Iraqi Women and Children
Last night’s BBC Newsnight programme reported the deaths of 70 “Iraqi militants” in US air raids on the western Iraqi city of Ramadi. The item lasted just nine seconds. This included three seconds of scepticism from an Iraqi doctor who reported that in fact civilians were amongst the dead. Viewers’ attention was then rapidly diverted… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Independent – Power, Privilege, And The Projection Of Establishment Values
11 October 2005 — Media Lens A Special Kind of Independence “I am a maximalist. I want more of everything.” (Sir Anthony O’Reilly, chief executive, Independent News & Media Plc) “More than a million species could die out as a result of global warming. And it is not an asteroid that will have caused this, Continue reading
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Media Lens: Immediate Withdrawal from Iraq – The Guardian Blanks Public Opinion
We do not know whether Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger wrote yesterday’s leader on “Britain’s post-invasion commitment to Iraq”, but we assume that he approved it. (’Signposting the Exit,’ The Guardian, September 21, 2005) “No one is arguing for an immediate pull-out”, the editorial claims. Presumably those calling for an immediate withdrawal, including many in the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying The Lancet – Update
In our Media Alert, Burying The Lancet – Parts 1 And 2 (September 5 and 6), we focused on the media response to a November 2004 report in The Lancet which estimated nearly 100,000 excess civilians deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 US-UK invasion. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Lancet – Part 2
In our analysis we found that in both the US and the British press, news reports initially presented the estimates of 100,000 deaths in Iraq and 1.7 million deaths in Congo without critical comment. The difference lies in the days, weeks and months that followed. Whereas the Congo figures and methodology were accepted without challenge,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Lancet – Part 1
As a test of the independence and honesty of the mass media, few tasks are more revealing than that of reporting our own government’s responsibility for the killing of innocents abroad. In an age of ’converged’ political parties and globalised corporate influence, few establishment groups have any interest in seeing such horrors exposed, while many… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 2
The Independent – like the Guardian, a newspaper with supposed progressive credentials – noted blandly in a recent editorial that “Global warming is given little coverage by the US media.” (Leader, ‘The American consensus of denial is crumbling,’ August 19, 2005). True enough. But look at our own doorstep; at the wholly inadequate coverage of… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cheerleading the Climate Criminals – Part 1
Earlier this month, New Scientist reported the astonishing news that the world’s largest frozen peat bog, comprising an area the size of France and Germany combined, was melting. According to researchers who have been studying the permafrost of western Serbia, the bog could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times as… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Dark Heart of Robin Cook’s ‘Ethical’ Foreign Policy – Part 2
Ethical foreign policy? Cook supplied Hawk fighter-bombers to the Suharto regime committing genocide in East Timor. He propagandised on behalf of US-UK sanctions that killed one million Iraqi civilians. He defended the cynical December 1998 bombing of Iraq and spread government lies about Iraq’s alleged failure to cooperate with inspectors. He repeated propaganda justifying Nato’s… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 