Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: So What Is Objective Journalism?
It turns out that most journalists are only nervous of expressing personal opinions when criticising the powerful. Andrew Marr can’t call the Iraq war a ‘crime’, but he can say that the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 meant that Tony Blair ‘stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result’… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Rehabilitating Bush – The Deadly Illusion Of Corporate Dissent
3 March 2017 — Media Lens The title of the editorial said it all: ‘The Guardian view on George W Bush: a welcome return’ In a tongue-in-cheek, almost jovial, piece the Guardian unsubtly rehabilitated a man responsible for crimes that are among the most egregious in all history. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The ‘Superficial, Arrogant Smugness’ Of BBC News – Peter Oborne Delivers Some Home Truths On BBC Radio 4 Today
In a recent media alert, we noted the occasional tell-tale signs of uncomfortable truths that slip through cracks in the propaganda façade of BBC News. Very occasionally, the propaganda nature is clearly highlighted and can be enjoyed for its directness and the flustered BBC response it provokes. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Undermining Democracy – Corporate Media Bias on Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and Syria
Are we able to prove the existence of a corporate media campaign to undermine British democracy? Media analysis is not hard science, but in this alert we provide compelling evidence that such a campaign does indeed exist. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Deranged And Deluded: The Media’s Complicity In The Climate Crisis
Today many scientists believe that we have effectively entered a new geological era called the Anthropocene during which human activities have ‘started to have a significant global impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems’. Indeed, we are now faced with severe, human-induced climate instability and catastrophic loss of species: the sixth mass extinction in four-and-a-half billion… Continue reading
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Media Lens: BBC Propaganda Watch: Tell-Tale Signs That Slip Through The Cracks
Even the most powerful systems of propaganda inadvertently allow uncomfortable truths to slip out into the public domain. Consider a recent BBC News interview following the death of Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro. Dr Denise Baden, Associate Professor in Business Ethics at the University of Southampton, who has studied Castro’s leadership and Cuban business models,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fake News About ‘Fake News’ – The Media Performance Pyramid
In the wake of Brexit and Trump, ‘mainstream’ media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Flagship Of Fearmongering: The Guardian, MI5 And State Propaganda
Readers of the Guardian woke up last Tuesday (November 1, 2016) to find that the newspaper and website had been given over to promoting MI5. To be more precise: the paper was trumpeting a fearmongering ‘exclusive’ with MI5 Director-General, Andrew Parker. It was billed as ‘the first interview of its kind’ and was conducted by… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Centrist Soft-Liberal Feminism’ – Presidentialising Hillary Clinton
These, then, are the four causes for celebration: Clinton is 1) a woman, 2) a ‘feminist’ with 3) ‘a long track record of standing up for the right causes’, and 4) she would be ‘the safest pair of hands in decades’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Great Libya War Fraud
The smearing of Corbyn fits well with the similarly uniform propaganda campaign taking the ‘threat’ of Iraqi ‘WMD’ seriously in 2002 and 2003. Then, also, the entire corporate media system assailed the public with a long litany of fraudulent claims. And then there was Libya. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Menwith Menace: Britain’s Complicity In Saudi Arabia’s Terror Campaign Against Yemen
The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fifteen Years Of Media Lens – An Appeal For Support
We began Media Lens, not because we believed high quality broadsheets were offset by a morally debased tabloid press; not because the ‘left-leaning’ liberal press was fine, but the Tory press was dreadful; not because the press as a whole was biased on some issues, or plagued by ‘churnalism’. We started Media Lens because the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Great Iraq War Fraud
Last week, seven years after the Iraq Inquiry was set up, Sir John Chilcot finally delivered his long-awaited report. Although it stopped short of declaring the Iraq war illegal, and although it failed to examine the real motives for war, the report was not quite the whitewash that had been feared by peace campaigners. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Killing Corbyn
The ‘Brexit’ referendum vote, split 52% to 48% in favour of leaving the European Union, has been exploited by the ‘mainstream’ media to launch yet another assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. ‘Impartial’ BBC News, directed by former Murdoch editor James Harding, has been one of the worst culprits. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Fairy Tale Of The ‘Self-Questioning’ BBC
Coverage of Western policy by the BBC is, ‘driven by a crude, skewed “good guy versus bad guy” narrative formula.’ This BBC agenda is shaped by the compelling need of the state broadcaster to serve power. As a result, ‘it has aligned itself with deeply undemocratic, unrepresentative forces and values.’ Continue reading
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Media Lens: How The Press Hides The Global Crimes Of The West: Corporate Media Coverage Of Chad
One of the essential functions of the corporate media is to marginalise or silence acknowledgement of the history – and continuation – of Western imperial aggression. The coverage of the recent sentencing in Senegal of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, for crimes against humanity, provides a useful case study. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Anatomy Of A Propaganda Blitz – Part 2: ‘Hitlergate’
As with so many propaganda blitzes, intense media coverage was triggered by ‘dramatic new evidence’; namely, the discovery of a graphic posted by Naz Shah two years ago, before she became a Labour MP. The graphic shows a map of the United States with Israel superimposed in the middle, suggesting that a solution to the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Anatomy Of A Propaganda Blitz – Part 1
We live in a time when state-corporate interests are cooperating to produce propaganda blitzes intended to raise public support for the demonisation and destruction of establishment enemies. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Corbyn’s Millions – Blair’s Millions
While ‘social media’ like Facebook and Twitter are forms of corporate media, it is unarguable that they and other web-based outlets have helped empower a serious challenge to traditional print and broadcast journalism. For the first time in history, uncompromised non-corporate voices are able to instantly challenge the filtered ‘mainstream’ version of events. This certainly… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Rebranding The Conquistadors As Social Justice Warriors – The Guardian, Corporate Sponsorship And ‘Branded Content’
From the moment Jeremy Corbyn stood as prospective Labour leader, the Guardian has waged a relentless campaign to destroy this rare shoot of progressive hope. The paper has backed away from the truth about state and corporate power fuelling yet more catastrophic climate change. It has failed to fully and consistently expose the corporate basis… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 