Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
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Media Lens: Obama – The Art Of Ruin
Putin likes to portray himself as a bare-chested, judo wrestling, fighter pilot. But then Thatcher was famously filmed clinging to the commander’s cupola of a charging tank with a Union Jack fluttering at her side. Declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq from an aircraft carrier, George Bush made a grandiose landing in a military jet with… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Our Only Fear Was That He Might Pull His Punches’ – BBC Caught Manipulating The News
While some may believe that the corporation’s failure to provide fair and balanced journalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, many others will recognise that it stretches back many decades: coverage of the West’s destruction of Libya in 2011; the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003; Nato’s war on the former Yugoslavia in… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The New McCarthyism – Keep The War Versus Stop The War
Media treatment of the term ‘blowback’, the concept that foreign policy has consequences that rebound on its perpetrators, illustrates a fundamental hypocrisy in ‘the mainstream’. It is fine for approved journalists and commentators to use the word when discussing terrorist attacks, actual or feared, here in the West. But abuse and vitriol will be heaped… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Manufacturing Consensus – Hilary Benn’s Speech
The myth of corporate media impartiality – vital for retaining readers’ support – makes it hard for structurally pro-war media to declare too openly in favour of the West’s endless wars. What they can do is celebrate speeches that just happen to be pro-war. To applaud skills of oratory, courage, leadership – to note that… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Let’s Bring In Our Pentagon Spokesman’ – Bombing Syria
One of the great Freudian slips of our time was supplied by a Fox News anchor on March 24, 1999, as Nato was preparing to wage war on Yugoslavia: ‘Let’s bring in our Pentagon spokesman – excuse me, our Pentagon correspondent.’ For indeed the unwritten rule informing this type of journalism is: if you want… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Sick Sophistry – BBC News On The Afghan Hospital ‘Mistakenly’ Bombed By The United States
One of the defining features of the corporate media is that Western crimes are ignored or downplayed. The US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on the night of October 3, is an archetypal example. At least twenty-two people were killed when a United States Air Force AC-130 repeatedly attacked the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Nuclear War And Corbyn – The Fury And The Farce
Last month, 250,000 party members voted Jeremy Corbyn leader of the Labour party, ‘the largest mandate ever won by a Party Leader’. The combined might of the political and media establishment had fought and lost its Stalingrad, having bombarded Corbyn with every conceivable smear in a desperate [attempt] to wreck his reputation with the British… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Media Activism In A Time Of Hope – An Appeal For Support
We might disagree with Corbyn on any number of issues, but he is at least recognisably human. He seems more like the people we know, less like the people with serious suits and unserious souls who view themselves as ‘The Masters of Mankind’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Corbyn And The End Of Time – The ‘Crisis Of Democracy’
As we have noted many times, it turns out that the fiercest gatekeepers protecting the ‘liberal’ press, ironically, are the handful of salaried ‘dissidents’ that work for them. Revered as heroes for their truth-telling, they do not speak out honestly on the performance of their corporate employers. If they tell the truth, they risk damaging… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Whitewash – The Guardian Readers’ Editor Responds On Jeremy Corbyn
As we have seen, high-profile Guardian journalists and others have been lined up to direct a flood of ‘disaster’ warnings, dismissals, derision, disbelief and mockery at Corbyn, and only Corbyn. Nothing remotely comparable has been directed at Burnham, Cooper or Kendall. This is a spectacular example of bias. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Fantasy Politics – ‘Corbyn’s Morons’ And The ‘Sensible Approach’
One might think that, in discussing the popularity of Corbyn’s leadership bid, a rational media would give serious attention to the visions, strategies and success of Podemos, Syriza and the SNP. For example, we can imagine in-depth interviews with Iglesias and Colau on Corbyn’s prospects. We can imagine discussions of how a weakening of the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Address Your Remarks To Downing Street’ –The Sunday Times Editor Deepens His Snowden Debacle
As we noted in our previous alert, the Sunday Times dramatically claimed that Russia and China had ‘cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden’. The ‘exclusive story’ contained precisely no evidence for its anonymous claims, no challenges to the assertions made and no journalistic balance. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Testing The Limits – Paul Krugman Of The New York Times and Gary Younge of the Guardian
Our criticism of leftish corporate journalists has always attracted a mixture of support and opposition. At worst, our criticism has been viewed as a kind of betrayal, as if sending awkward challenges has the power to undo the good work these writers are doing, perhaps demotivating them and even persuading them to stop working for… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Hillary Clinton – Of Glass Ceilings And Shattered Countries
We live in a time when compassionate rhetoric is used as a weapon of state-corporate control. The rhetoric focuses on ethical concerns such as racial, gender and same-sex equality, but is disconnected from any kind of coherent ethical worldview. Corporate commentators are thereby freed to laud these moral principles, even as they ignore high crimes… Continue reading
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Media Lens: When Free Speech Becomes Dead Silence – The Israel Lobby And A Cowed Academia
The sudden cancellation of an academic conference on Israel, as well as the lack of outcry from ‘mainstream’ media, demonstrates once again the skewed limits to ‘free speech’ in ‘advanced’ Western democracies. ‘Je suis Charlie’ already feels like ancient history. It certainly does not apply when it comes to scrutiny of the state of Israel. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Love For Libya: 2011-2015
Islamic State’s horrific mass beheading of 21 Coptic Christians last month forced a reluctant UK media system to return to Libya, scene of saturation news coverage in 2011. Then, the media lens hovered obsessively over every Libyan government crime – indeed, over every alleged and even predicted crime – in an effort to justify a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘A Conspiracy Of Silence’ – HSBC, The Guardian And The Defrauded British Public
Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed has delved deeper into the HSBC scandal, reporting the testimony of a whistleblower that reveals a ‘conspiracy of silence’ encompassing the media, regulators and law-enforcement agencies. Not least, Ahmed’s work exposes the vanity of the Guardian’s boast to be the world’s ‘leading liberal voice’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Corrosive, Shallow, Herd-Like And Gross’ – Peter Oborne And The Corporate Media
In a free society, Oborne’s courageous whistleblowing would have triggered a wide-ranging debate on how profit-seeking media owned and run by a tiny elite, dependent on corporate advertisers, subsidised by state and corporate ‘news’, obviously produce a vision of the world in which corporate domination is viewed as ‘just how things are’. The astonishing, hidden… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Conundrum – Syriza, Democracy And The Death Of A Saudi Tyrant
It’s always a tricky moment for the corporate media when a foreign leader dies. The content and tone need to be appropriate, moulded to whether that leader fell into line with Western policies or not. Thus, when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez died in 2013, conventional coverage strongly suggested he had been a dangerous, quasi-dictatorial, loony lefty. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Feral Journalism – Rewilding Dissent
Journalists admit, even in public, but particularly in private, that there is much they just cannot say. As Noam Chomsky has noted, the best investigative reporters ‘regard the media as a sham’ trying to ‘play it like a violin: If they see a little opening they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 