Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: Every Bloodbath Has A Silver Lining – Part 1
9 March 2005 — Media Lens The Sting – You’re Next In a remarkable article in last week’s Guardian entitled, “The war’s silver lining”, Jonathan Freedland wrote: Continue reading
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Media Lens: Is the Earth Really Finished? Countering Despair with the Momentum of Hope
At such a desperate moment in the planet’s history, we could simply throw up our hands in despair, or we could try to reduce the likelihood of the worst predictions coming true. The corporate media has yet to examine its own role in setting up huge obstacles to the latter option of hope. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Media Complicity in War Crimes
On February 13, The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an international peoples’ initiative, declared much of the Western media guilty of deception and incitement to violence in its reporting on Iraq. The tribunal, meeting in Rome, made its pronouncement after taking testimony from independent journalists, media professors, activists, and a member of the European Parliament. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Email Reveals BBC Contempt For Public Complaints
What does it say when a senior BBC journalist can dismiss testimony relating to our government’s involvement in war crimes as merely “these sorts of things”? And what does it say that a journalist can suggest that it might be an option to simply ignore a public complaint of such seriousness? Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fears for a Finite Planet
According to Sir Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of Business Industry, business is the only route to cleaner water, better healthcare, better education and better roads. “Have I heard that in Davos? Have I hell. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute, and how we have got to help… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Priorities of Power – The Real Meaning Of Elections In Iraq
In truth it is quite wrong to describe the corporate media as ‘mainstream’. We wouldn’t describe Flat Earthism as mainstream geology, nor would we describe Mein Kampf as mainstream political philosophy. There isn’t a cultural or philosophical tradition on the planet that takes seriously the idea that truth-telling can be reconciled with greed. The idea… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Silence is Green: The Green Movement And The Corporate Mass Media
It is one of the great ironies of our time that, as evidence of environmental catastrophe has inexorably mounted, so the visibility of radical environmental movements has collapsed. In the late 1980s, public outrage at environmental devastation propelled the likes of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Green Party onto the media stage. With… Continue reading
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Media Lens: BBC Apology on Iran
On January 21, we published a Rapid Response Media Alert, ‘Targeting Iran – The BBC Propaganda Begins,’ in which we noted that the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, James Robbins, had reported that US relations with Iran were “looking very murky because of the nuclear threat”. (BBC1, 13:00 News, January 20, 2005) Continue reading
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Media Lens: Targeting Iran – The BBC Propaganda Begins
Remarkably, in an almost exact repeat of events in 2002 and 2003, the BBC is now reflexively boosting the US claim that Iran presents a threat to the West. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Unity in Deceit – The British Media and Iraq’s election
20 January 2005 — Media Lens Introduction – A Simple Question People sometimes tell us we’re too hard on the media. They say: ‘Come on, there +is+ a fair amount of diversity, a range of different views. And the Independent publishes some valuable stuff, so does the Guardian – take a look at the Comments Continue reading
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Media Lens: Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media
It is a brutal fact of modern media and politics that honesty and sincerity are not rewarded, but instead heavily punished, by powerful interests with plenty at stake. It does not matter how often the likes of Pinter, Le Carré, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are shown to be right. It does not matter how… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Dwarfing the Tsunami – A Warning
12 January 2005 — Media Lens “Civilisation exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.” (Will Durant, historian) Festive Depression Curious things happen to the British public around Christmas. The weeks and months leading up to December 25 are characterised by a manic focus on consumption, materialism and unrestrained hedonism. The Season of Good Continue reading
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Media Lens: Naked Empire– Part 2: Mainstream Reviews of Books by Andrew Marr, Jon Snow and John Pilger
Readers of our Media Alerts will be well aware of John Pilger’s view of the media and establishment power more generally. He reserves a special place in his articles for the deceptions of the ‘liberal’ press. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Naked Empire Part 1 – Mainstream Reviews of Books by Andrew Marr, Jon Snow and John Pilger
In this two-part Media Alert we will test a simple claim: that elite journalists promote a fraudulent version of the world shaped by the powerful interests of which they are a part. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Power of Nightmares – Adam Curtis Responds
On 18 and 19 November, we sent out a two-part media alert about the recent BBC2 series, ‘The Power of Nightmares’. Adam Curtis, who wrote and directed the series, located key goals of modern US foreign policy in the beliefs of a group of myth-making neo-conservative “idealists”. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Protest the BBC on Thursday, December 2 – This is Why. Part 2
Like the rest of the mainstream media, the BBC did next to nothing to expose the devastating effects of US-UK war and sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq from 1990 onwards. Ahead of last year’s war, the BBC endlessly echoed and channelled UK government propaganda claims, almost never subjecting those claims to serious challenge. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Protest the BBC on Thursday, December 2 – This is Why. Part 1
The BBC, of course, is not the Nazi media, but there have been real war crimes in Iraq, a real mass slaughter, and the BBC has helped make it possible. Please read the examples below and protest on December 2 out of compassion for the suffering of the men, women and children of Iraq. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fallujah – The BBC’s Director of News Responds
On November 8 and 11 we published two Media Alerts: ‘Legitimising Mass Slaughter in Fallujah’‚ in which we commented on the bias and inhumanity of BBC and ITV News reporting on Fallujah. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Power of Nightmares and the Real Politics of Fear – Part 2
American elites have long sought to manufacture and promote a shared myth of ‘America’ based on “symbols by which Americans defined their dream and pictured social reality.” Adam Curtis alluded to this myth-making in his BBC series The Power of Nightmares, but he portrayed it as a process initiated and pursued by neoconservatives from the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Power of Nightmares and the Real Politics of Fear – Part 1
The idea that past dreams “have failed” so that people “have lost faith in ideologies” is Blairite nonsense. In reality, corporate globalisation has sought to crush meaningful politics – dismissed as “ideological politics” – regardless of the wishes of the public. Opinion polls and global mass protest movements show that vast numbers of people are… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 