Media Lens
Excellent UK-based media analysis
-
Media Lens: Endless Stalemate: How Fossil Fuel Interests Are Killing Climate Action By David Cromwell
Sadly, the madness looks set to continue if we recognise that the corporate media is an integral part of the problem: pulverising us with corporate advertising to encourage increased levels of consumption and planetary resource depletion, while averting our gaze from the root cause of the climate problem; namely, corporate-led global capitalism. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Electrified Thought Fences – Narcissism: Real And Imagined By David Edwards
One of the great tasks of the state-corporate commentariat is to install electrified thought fences between the public and rare voices attempting to challenge the status quo. Dissidents are attacked from ostensibly noble positions opposing fascism, genocide, sexism and selfishness. The smears are empowered by the fact that they target an opponent’s reputation with ugly-looking… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Launchpad For A Revolution? Russell Brand, The BBC And Elite Power By David Cromwell
When someone with interesting things to say is granted a high-profile media platform, it is wise to listen to what is being said and ask why they have been given such a platform. Comedian and actor Russell Brand’s 10-minute interview by Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight last week was given considerable advance publicity and generated… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Journalist Or Activist? Smearing Glenn Greenwald By David Edwards
Modern thought control is dependent on subliminal communication. Messages influencing key perceptions are delivered unseen, unnoticed, with minimal public awareness of what is happening or why. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Where Journalism Collides With State ‘Security’: BBC News, MI5 And The Mantra Of ‘Keeping People Safe’ By David Cromwell
In our May 13 media alert we highlighted how the state, and a compliant media, relentlessly raise fears of the ‘shadows and threats’ that supposedly assail us. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Structural Inclinations – The Leaning Tower of Propaganda: Chemical Weapons Attacks In Ghouta, Syria By David Edwards
After years of unmissable, terrible carnage in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – the Pew Research Journalism Project finds that ‘the No. 1 message’ on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, and Al Jazeera, was ‘that the U.S. should get involved in the conflict’ in Syria. It seems that no level of suffering and chaos are sufficient… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Tilting At Easy Targets: Climate Change And The ‘Highly Ideological’ Liberal Mindset By David Cromwell
When a senior UN climate official warns that the world is ‘heading for a heart attack’ (The Times, September 23, 2013), there is clearly no time to lose in taking the radical action necessary to avert disaster. But we also have to understand why it is that no matter how many scientific warnings and ‘wake… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Massacres That Matter – Part 2 – The Media Response On Egypt, Libya And Syria By David Edwards
Corporate media coverage of atrocities in Egypt, Libya and Syria has closely matched US-UK government interpretations and priorities. While the US government has refused to describe what was very obviously a military coup in Egypt on July 3 as a coup, many media have also tended to shy away from the term, referring instead to… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State By David Cromwell and David Edwards
Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as ‘the international community’, are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden’s exposure of the massive US… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘A Political Ploy’? The Guardian Editors Swallow US Claims On Syrian WMD By David Edwards
‘It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack; it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack. In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies By David Edwards
Unsurprisingly, the same political executives who had fabricated the case for war on Iraq sought to fabricate reasons for ignoring peer-reviewed science exposing the costs of their great crime. More surprising, one might think, is the long-standing media enthusiasm for these fabrications. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘The Planet Can’t Keep Doing Us A Favour’ By David Cromwell
The false ‘balance’ in climate journalism is heavily skewed by the supposed need to share time between climate science and climate science denial. This is irrational ‘journalism’ by media professionals who have been seduced by a stubborn minority of people who ‘refuse to accept that climate change is happening despite the overwhelming scientific evidence’ Continue reading
-
Media Lens: When The Next Moment Matters More: ‘The Special One’ – Part 3 By David Edwards
And how amazing, we treat the planet exactly as we treat the present moment: as an intrinsically worthless resource to be ridden, used, exploited on the way to ‘better’ and ‘more’. Our world is being made a hell by the pursuit of seven billion personal utopias, rendered uninhabitable by people who never inhabit the present. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘You Say What You Like, Because They Like What You Say’ By David Cromwell
The local elections in England earlier this month saw the right-wing UK Independence Party win over 140 council seats, gaining around 25 per cent of the vote where it stood. This led to a deluge of media headlines and stories echoing UKIP leader Nigel Farage’s gleeful claim of a ‘game changer’ in domestic politics. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘This Madman Must Be Stopped’ – Syrian Chemical Weapons By David Edwards
This really is astonishing, in the strange world of media propaganda, news reports contradict editorials and headlines contradict content. The guiding ethic: ‘I want to believe!’ It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that media performance is shaped by state-corporate forces that are deeply invested in decades of war and the spoils that go with… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: ‘The Stupidest And Most Extreme Section Of The British Left’
In a media alert earlier this year, we described our under-resourced challenges of the corporate media as ‘jousting with toothpicks’. Although the analogy was light-hearted, the work of Media Lens is serious and would not be possible without your support. Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Thatcher’s Tyrants – The Tanks, The Guns, The Christmas Cards By David Edwards
Indicatively, according to Lexis, over the past month, there have been 461 UK national newspaper articles mentioning the word ‘Thatcher’. There have been 29 articles mentioning ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Saddam’. None of these has mentioned that Thatcher armed and financed the Iraqi dictator. Anyone interested in gauging the true extent of freedom of speech in the… Continue reading
-
Media Lens: Heading For A Different Planet By David Cromwell
The systematic propaganda of the corporate media – its deep-rooted antipathy towards upholding proper journalistic standards in the public interest – extends to its coverage of human-induced climate change. The Independent recently delivered a masterpiece of headline obfuscation with: ‘World cools on global warming as green fatigue sets in.’ Continue reading
-
Media Lens: The Iraq War Was Not A Media Failure By David Edwards
It is a bitter, even surreal, irony that the media ‘failure’ on Iraq is being lamented by journalists who have since repeated the same performance on Libya, Syria, Israel-Palestine, Iran, Venezuela, WikiLeaks, climate change, and much else besides. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 