Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: How To Be A Reliable ‘Mainstream’ Journalist
There are certain rules you need to follow as a journalist if you are going to demonstrate to your editors, and the media owners who employ you, that you can be trusted. Continue reading
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Blanket Silence: Corporate Media Ignore New Report Exposing Distorted And Misleading Coverage of Corbyn
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the 17 years since Media Lens began, it’s that media professionals generally hate being challenged, critiqued or criticised. This fierce antipathetical belligerence underlies the corporate media’s total refusal to mention, far less discuss, a recent damning report on how the corporate media have been misreporting Labour and its… Continue reading
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Media Lens: To Do Or To Be? – The Sixth Filter
In their ‘propaganda model of media control’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky identified five key factors filtering corporate media output: elite ownership bent on profit-maximisation, dependence on advertising, state-corporate subsidised news sources, political and legal flak, and the hyping of foreign ‘threats’. These structural, carrot-and-stick pressures combine to ensure that ‘mainstream’ media ‘serve the ends… Continue reading
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Guest Media Alert by John Pilger: ‘Hold the front page. The reporters are missing’
This is a slightly amended version of the foreword to the new Media Lens book, ‘Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality’, published today by Pluto Press. Warm thanks to John Pilger for contributing this superb piece to our book. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Israel Is The Real Problem
Elite power cannot abide a serious challenge to its established position. And that is what Labour under Jeremy Corbyn represents to the Tory government, the corporate, financial and banking sectors, and the ‘mainstream’ media. The manufactured ‘antisemitism crisis’ is the last throw of the dice for those desperate to prevent a progressive politician taking power… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘World On Fire’: Climate Breakdown
What will it take for society to make the deep-rooted changes required to prevent the terrifying and awesome threat of climate breakdown? This summer’s extreme weather events are simply a prelude to a rising tide of chaos that will be punctuated by cataclysmic individual events – floods, heatwaves, superstorms – of increasing severity and frequency.… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Syrian Observatory – Funded By The Foreign Office
No-one, it seems, would dream of challenging such a high figure supplied by a clothes shop owner supporting regime change in Syria from Coventry. Nobody challenges SOHR’s methodology, or complains of statistics being thrown about with irresponsible abandon. Why? Because the 2004 and 2006 Lancet reports seriously undermined the US-UK case for conquering Iraq, whereas… Continue reading
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‘A Suffocating Groupthink’: Sampling The Corporate Media On Israel, Iran, Syria And Russia
The gaping chasm between reality and unreality is exemplified by recent contrasting statements about journalism from two veteran reporters. On the one side we have Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, who enjoys a public image of principled honesty and a supposedly fierce commitment to news balance and impartiality. But, when he was challenged… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Universe Remains Unhurt
28 March 2018 — Media Lens And then there was light. But there must already have been space. God would be hard-pressed to reach the light switch without space. The light switch would be hard-pressed to exist. In reality, only two possible impossibilities are conceivable among the many known unknowns: – the universe flashed into Continue reading
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Media Lens: No Spirit Of Liberty – The Salisbury Case, Corbyn And The Need For Dissent
Fifteen years ago this month, the US-led ‘Shock and Awe’ offensive began against Iraq, supposedly to disarm the country of its ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The illegal invasion and subsequent brutal occupation led to the loss of around one million lives, created millions of refugees, destroyed the infrastructure of a country already ravaged by over… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘A Load Of Tosh’ – The BBC, ‘Showbiz News’ And State Propaganda
On January 22, BBC News at Ten carried a piece by ‘defence’ correspondent Jonathan Beale reporting a speech by General Sir Nick Carter, the British Army’s Chief of General Staff. Carter gave his speech, pleading for more resources in the face of the Russian ‘threat’, at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), an establishment thinktank… Continue reading
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Media Lens: A Liberal Pillar Of The Establishment – ‘New Look’ Guardian, Old-Style Orthodoxy
It is certainly true that the Guardian ‘will remain what it has always been’: a liberal pillar of the establishment; a gatekeeper of ‘acceptable’ news and comment. ‘Thus far, and no further’, to use Chomsky’s phrase. But, as mentioned, the Guardian will not go even as far in the political spectrum as Corbyn: a traditional… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Survival? Symptoms Of Breakdown
If the human species survives long enough, future historians might well marvel at what passed for ‘mainstream’ media and politics in the early 21st century. They will see that a UK Defence Secretary had to resign because of serious allegations of sexual misconduct; or, as he put it euphemistically, because he had ‘fallen short’. But… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Noam Chomsky And The BBC: A Brief Comparison
A recent interview with 88-year-old Noam Chomsky once again demonstrates just how insightful he is in providing rational analysis of Western power and the suffering it generates. By contrast, anyone relying on BBC News receives a power-friendly view of the world, systematically distorted in a way that allows the state and private interests to pursue… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Bowing Down Before The BBC: Polly Toynbee and The Role Of A Liberal Propagandist
A standard technique deployed by corporate journalists to fend off challenges from the public is to point to selected examples of ‘abuse’ and then tar all reasoned criticism with the same mucky brush. Or, if that doesn’t work, to sneer at claims of ‘conspiracy’ or ‘plots’, thus permitting instant dismissal of the arguments made. Polly… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo
When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ‘rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Breaking Of The Corporate Media Monopoly
Without doubt this was one of the most astonishing results in UK political history. Dismissed by all corporate political pundits, including the clutch of withered fig leaves at the Guardian, reviled by scores of his own Blairite MPs (see here), Corbyn ‘increased Labour’s share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Blowback – Manchester and the Libya Connection
In the wake of yet another horrendous atrocity, this time in Manchester claiming 23 lives, ‘respectable’ media once again refused to seriously discuss the extent to which violent attacks against ‘us’ are linked to ‘our’ violent attacks against ‘them’. Instead, howls of disgust typically arise when anyone mentions terms like ‘blowback’ and ‘reaping the whirlwind’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: A Response To George Monbiot’s ‘Disavowal’
Guardian columnist George Monbiot has responded to our recent media alert on the alleged gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib, Syria, on April 4: ‘Here’s a response to the latest attempt by @medialens to dismiss the mounting evidence on the authorship of the #KhanSheikhoun attack’ This is a very serious misrepresentation of what we have… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 