A coup attempt is in full-swing in Venezuela, orchestrated from Washington. As ever, supposedly ‘objective’ media outlets such as the BBC are softening up public opinion for this imperialist intervention.
9 October 2017 — TRNN
Real Media interviews HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson about the UK’s newly appointed International Trade Minister Rona Fairhead and her controversial past as BBC Trust chair and HSBC director (inc. transcript) Continue reading
26 May 2017 — The Peoples Assembly
We’ll be protesting and partying to the tune outside the BBC HQ as the Chart Show is aired to demand the track is played. If they wont play it on the airways we’ll blast the song to the public ourselves!
Captain Ska’s “Liar Liar GE2017” is a scathing attack on the Conservative’s record in office, attacking the Tories over food banks, the NHS crisis, education funding crisis and a drop in living standards.
Continue reading
29 July 2016 — The Canary
Damning evidence has exposed the BBC’s role in advancing the Labour coup. The UK’s public service broadcaster gave double the airtime to Jeremy Corbyn’s critics than to his allies at the start of the coup, according to new content analysis.
21 June 2016 — Media Lens
Last week, climate scientists warned that:
‘Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it in our lifetimes’.
Adding to the sense of urgency, NASA reported that last month was the hottest May on record since 1880. Since October 2015, every month has been globally the hottest ever measured. Meanwhile, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US say that ‘future summers could regularly be hotter than the hottest on record’.
31 March 2016 — Media Lens
On the night of October 3, 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship repeatedly attacked a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Forty-two people were killed and dozens wounded. The US military plane had conducted five strafing runs over the course of more than an hour despite MSF pleas to Afghan, US and Nato officials to call off the attack.
13 January 2016 — Media Lens
Nobody with a questioning mind seriously expects impartiality from BBC News. Certainly not anyone who has followed its reporting on the National Health Service, Scottish independence, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or a myriad of other important issues.
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 1999; genocidal UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s; the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91; the miners’ strike in 1984-85; the Falklands War in 1982; and on and on.
5 November 2015 — Media Lens
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 to get close to the ‘defence’ establishment, you better be close to the ‘defence’ establishment: ideologically, sympathetically, ‘patriotically’.
A near-perfect example of this industry-wide perceptual bias has been supplied this year by BBC diplomatic editor, Mark Urban.
2 October 2014 — Media Lens
The referendum campaign on Scottish independence heightened many people’s awareness of the pro-elite bias of the ‘mainstream’ news media. The grassroots power of social media in exposing and countering this bias was heartening to see. But the issue of independence for Scotland is just one of many where the traditional media consistently favour establishment power.
22 July 2014 — Electronic Intifada
The BBC has provided evidence this week that it prefers to use the territorial claims of the Israeli government to the whole of Jerusalem as a framework for its reporting, rather than acknowledging international law.
10 May 10, 2014 — Human Rights Investigations
So-called “anti-terror operations” in Mariupol today have seen a number of deaths as Ukrainian military and “National Guard” (an outfit including many virtually untrained neo-fascists) face off against crowds of unarmed protestors. The BBC covered this situation and, whilst admitting the Ukrainian army is killing unarmed civilians, have edited a video to cut out the part where the Ukrainian army shoots a cameraman, injuring him severely and at a man who is on his knees with his hands in the air. Continue reading
8 April 2014 — Electronic Intifada
The BBC’s reporting around the status of Jerusalem is “of such a low standard it fails to qualify as journalism,” say campaigners.
This argument is the basis of the challenge made last week by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and Friends of Al Aqsa (FoA) against the BBC’s insistence on referring to the whole of Jerusalem as an Israeli city, in contradiction to international law.
24 March 2014 — Media Lens
Coverage of the Scottish independence referendum, due to be held on September 18 this year, is a compelling example of the deep establishment bias of the corporate media. Some critics have characterised the BBC’s coverage, in particular, as though Scotland is merely a region or a county of the United Kingdom called ‘Scotlandshire‘.
The New Dark Age 