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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
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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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The 'Isn't Capitalism Wonderful’ Page: Video-Most Facebook “Likes” Are Fake or, 'I got plenty of nothing,'
This video shows not only how Facebook creates value out of thin sir, but how super-cheap labour in the Third World makes it all possible. Continue reading
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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
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Google Moves to Destroy Online Anonymity …
The bottom line is that anonymity reduces Google’s ability to monetize personal information and sell it to its advertisers. So Google is on a campaign to destroy anonymity … and unintentionally helping tyrants in the process. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Game Over For The Climate?
Last week, the Independent marked the half-century with a well-meaning but frankly insipid ‘landmark series’ titled ‘The Green Movement at 50’. But there’s a glaring hole in such coverage; and, indeed, in the ‘green movement’ itself: the insidious role of the corporate media, a key component of corporate globalisation, in driving humanity and ecosystems towards… Continue reading
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Bank of America still not yours… yet
Bank of America executives, investors, and opponents alike reacted with surprise to yesterday’s news—posted for two hours on Dow Jones Newswire and elsewhere—that the mammoth financial institution, realizing it was heading for a taxpayer bailout, was asking Americans to start thinking about what they’ll do with the bank once they own it, and to start… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Postcard From The Precipice – An Appeal For Support
The great claim among sections of the left is that ‘We have to cooperate with the corporate media to get our message out – how else are we going to be heard?’ For decades, often well-intentioned progressives have committed themselves to ‘changing the system from within’. Alas, as ‘insiders’, it is more often the system… Continue reading
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Media Lens Cogitation: Free to be Human – An Interview with David Edwards
The aim of Richard Capes’ More Thought blog is ‘to provide detailed audio/video/written interviews with authors of non-fiction social, political, philosophical and environmental books that I consider essential reading’. Here is Richard’s November 10 interview with Media Lens co-editor David Edwards about his book Free to be Human. The interview is quite long, we urge… Continue reading
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Statewatch News Online, No 1 of 2: 13 July 2011 (18/11)
Home page: http://www.statewatch.org/ e-mail: office@statewatch.org EU: Statewatch Analysis: The Frontex Regulation – Consolidated text after 2011 amendments EU “SMART BORDERS”?: Frontex Call for Tender: “Rapid Deployment Unattended Ground Sensor systems for Land border surveillance” EU: Council of the European Union: ECRIS and Prum EU: Member States to be bound by new security rules, Parliament adopts Continue reading
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Media: The Spreading of False Ideologies into our Culture By Steven J. M. Jones
By its own definition it is media’s job to tell us about ourselves and the world around us, to enable us to make informed decisions in a democratic society. That’s the theory. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Ten Years Of Media Lens – Operation Rheinübung
Working on Media Lens has given us ten years of first-hand experience of just how tightly discussion can be controlled in an ostensibly democratic society. No matter how carefully we have formulated our questions, no matter how politely we have delivered them, we have been branded angry, irrational, unworthy of attention. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: TECTONIC TILTING – Unlevel Playing Fields And The Rise Of Climate Scepticism
The media at least claim, albeit erroneously, to offer a balance in reporting and commentary, such concerns are deemed irrelevant to advertising. Adverts – arguably an even more powerful influence distorting public perceptions than factual journalism – +all+ promote mass consumerism. Why is it important for a democracy to have balance in reporting and commentary,… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Cockroach Test
News that philosopher Alain de Botton had been hired as Heathrow’s “writer in residence” generated minor ripples across the media pond, including occasional murmurs of disapproval. Journalists momentarily failed to repress their awareness that truth into corporate profit-maximising does not go, although without perceiving the implications for themselves. Continue reading
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GUEST MEDIA LENS ALERT: Turning Children Into Consumers By Sharon Beder
Children are naïve about advertising and can easily be manipulated and exploited by marketers to want and demand their products. Corporate marketers believe that over time they can be shaped into lifelong consumers with brand loyalties and that can be profitable for decades to come. What is more, children influence family spending decisions worth hundreds… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Guardian, Climate And Advertising – An Open Email To George Monbiot
Why do you, George Monbiot (and others at the Guardian) not simply challenge the false picture of the world generated by the advertisers in your newspaper? This avoids the problem, which you deem “inescapable”, of running a newspaper without advertising. Why do you not write articles exposing named campaigns by named advertisers that appear in… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Living Our Values’: Guardian News & Media And The Climate – Part 1
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media November 25, 2008 PART 1 – IN THEORY Last week, Guardian News & Media (GNM) published ‘Living Our Values’, an independently audited account of the company’s annual performance on sustainability issues. GNM, which encompasses the Guardian, the Observer and guardian.co.uk, claims to have strong Continue reading
The New Dark Age 