BBC
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The nerve of these guys! Karzai ‘wins’ anyway By William Bowles
Have you ever seen anything more outrageous? Talk about double standards! For weeks the BBC bombarded us with outrage concerning the elections in Iran with wall-to-wall coverage of the protests and predicting some other kind of ‘colour’ revolution, a green one this time (what will USAID, NDI, Freedom House, George Soros et al do, when… Continue reading
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Negative spacemen By Alan Simpson MP
Nick Griffin has become Labour’s negative space. He occupies the political ground that Labour has abandoned and fills it with a different emptiness. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE BALANCE OF POWER – EXCHANGES WITH BBC JOURNALISTS – PART 2
19 October, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media A Gale Of Spring Air – Barbara Plett And The President On September 24, we wrote to the BBC’s Barbara Plett: Dear Barbara Plett It’s hard to believe your article, ‘Debuts and diatribes at the UN’, was written by a Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: THE BALANCE OF POWER – EXCHANGES WITH BBC JOURNALISTS – PART 1
Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility… Continue reading
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Lest we forget? By William Bowles
9 October, 2009 There is something ironic—if not downright obscene—about the fact that in the UK the Poppy is used as the symbol of remembrance for all those who have died in the UK’s countless imperial wars, a symbol that is being used to punt the latest ‘adventure’, Afghanistan, home of the opium poppy. The Continue reading
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Media Lens Alert: The Westminster Conspiracy
Last month, Greg Dyke, who was the BBC’s director general from 2000-2004, described the BBC as part of a “conspiracy” preventing the “radical changes” needed to UK democracy. “The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media… Continue reading
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Dyke in BBC ‘conspiracy’ claim
The BBC is part of a ‘conspiracy’ preventing the ‘radical changes’ needed to UK democracy, the corporation’s former director general has said. 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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Media Lens: “An Existential Threat”: The US, Israel and Iran
The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.” The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: AFGHANISTAN — “BIG BEASTS” BIG BLOODBATH
At the heart of the uncertainty lies the internet and how to make it pay. For 100 years the corporate mass media has flourished thanks to its monopoly of the means of mass communication. Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write that the industrialisation of the press in the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Hired Hands – Part 1: Iran, Obama, Gaza, And MPs’ Expenses
Inevitably, then, corporations do not restrict themselves merely to the arena of economics. Rather, as John Dewey observed, “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”. Over decades, corporations have worked together to ensure that the choices offered by ‘representative democracy’ all represent their greed for maximised profits. Continue reading
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Covering (up) the coup in Honduras – the BBC does its bit for the Empire By William Bowles
The really important aspect of the BBC’s manipulation of language has to be seen in the larger context of the BBC’s mandate to control our perceptions of reality. So for example, its use of the programme ‘Masterchef’ to boost the UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq by promoting ‘our boys’, when the fact is, the great… Continue reading
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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 70 The great, international, demonic, truly frightening Iranian threat
On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that ‘Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere’ (English translation: ‘Should we bomb Iran?’). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington’s… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Left-Wing Media Fallacy Jeremy Bowen, The BBC, And Other National Treasures
There are several good reasons why the media are keen to accept that they are biased to the left. First, the overwhelming preponderance of right-wing flak machines – ‘centre-left’ parties and governments, business front groups and powerful ‘religious’ organisations – persuades media executives that they really are too left-leaning. There is just far less flak… Continue reading
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Media Lens 24 April, 2009: Protesting War – An Exchange With The BBC’s Diplomatic Editor, Mark Urban
You would have us believe that this original, grubby motivation can be separated from the effort “to bring about a successful outcome in southern Iraq”. It cannot. ‘Success’ in Iraq has always meant securing control of the country and its oil resources – the welfare of the Iraqi people was, of necessity, always subordinated to… Continue reading
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Video: Is Zionism Racism? UK Ambassador gets grilled on the walkout
It is an incredibly important excerpt of a document on the nature of what the journalist clearly recognises as a “stunt” and the Ambassador insists upon calling a “protest”, falling all over his own rhetoric in the process. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Children Of Darkness – Killing ‘Them’ – Part 2
The idea that Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians was intended to stop rocket attacks is hard to reconcile with the fact that Israel deliberately provoked those attacks when it broke the ceasefire with its November 4, 2008 attack killing six people in Gaza Continue reading
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Media Lens: Children Of Darkness – Killing ‘Them’ – Part 1
As we have noted before, journalists are highly evolved intellectual herd animals. They possess sophisticated sense organs capable of detecting minute changes in the propaganda environment. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Selective Vision: Iran, Israel And Nuclear Arms
When a demonstrably mendacious leader claims he “passionately believed” in a lie, the media has to take him at his word. This is the same brand of journalistic gullibility that has had such tragic consequences for the people of Iraq. This is the endless, uncritical obedience to power that boosted the warmongering agenda of London… Continue reading
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Welcome to the crony capitalist convention where New Labour got into bed with the bankers but we were the ones who got screwed
14 February 2009 The cry goes up, ‘wha’ happened?’ The former boss of HBOS, Sir James Crosby became head of the Financial Services Authority allegedly the ‘watchdog’ of the financial sector and then it emerges that Crosby was one of the architects of what Michael Hudson describes as: “The commercial banks…us[ing] their credit-creating power not Continue reading
The New Dark Age 