BBC
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Media Lens: Killing with Impunity – Nine-Second Coverage For Dozens of Dead Iraqi Women and Children
Last night’s BBC Newsnight programme reported the deaths of 70 “Iraqi militants” in US air raids on the western Iraqi city of Ramadi. The item lasted just nine seconds. This included three seconds of scepticism from an Iraqi doctor who reported that in fact civilians were amongst the dead. Viewers’ attention was then rapidly diverted… Continue reading
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Mantra politics By William Bowles
Once the state acquires such draconian powers it is unlikely to give them up voluntarily. We need only look at countries that have adopted comparable laws whether it be Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, through to the various Latin American dictatorships and how they were removed, not that removing them necessarily guarantees removal of the… Continue reading
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The British (State) Broadcasting Corporation – A Coalition of the Killing? by William Bowles
On May 23, we had an entire day without the BBC’s blanket non-coverage of important events due to a strike by the three main unions over threatened redundancies. A blessing in disguise? Well maybe… And if I may strike a totally au contraire view of the BBC’s plans for the future, perhaps laying off a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Legal Advice for War – Part 2
The following day, this astonishing exposé of government lying and criminality was simply dropped by the broadcast media. There was not one substantive discussion of the legal advice on BBC 18:00 News, the ITN 18:30 News, or the Channel 4 19:00 News. The issue was almost completely invisible in the days that followed. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Burying the Legal Advice for War – Part 1
Marr was clearly using the idea that the Attorney General had not declared the war illegal in his March 7 advice as a reason for dismissing the story as a damp squib. The briefest of glances at earlier media coverage indicates what a mendacious liberal herring this was. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Manufactured Consensus – The Sun and Saddam Hussein
Just over one year ago, British journalists and politicians were fulminating over photographs published in the Daily Mirror that appeared to show Iraqi prisoners being abused by British soldiers. The British military, it was claimed, now possessed incontrovertible proof that the pictures were fake. Mirror editor, Piers Morgan – a fierce opponent of the war… Continue reading
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Re “Terrorist Related Activity” By William Bowles
What is amazing about the Zarqawi saga is how, over time, Western governments (with the able assistance of the media) have managed to keep the pot boiling regarding a man whose existence is far from actually being established as fact (although of late, he, along with Osama seems to have fallen off the front page,… Continue reading
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The BBC Photoshop’s the news By William Bowles
I have been following BBC coverage on both the World Service and BBC Radio 4 as well as the BBC Website over the past few days of the shooting death of the Italian secret serviceman and the wounding of the freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena. The discrepancy between eyewitness accounts of the event and the… Continue reading
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The BBC: premier propagandist for the imperium By William Bowles
So whilst all 299 BBC stories (over 300,000 words in total) that mention Zarqawi hold not a single piece of evidence as to his real as opposed to alleged role in Iraq (or anywhere else for that matter), the overall impression created by the BBC’s coverage forms an integral part of an intensive state-led propaganda… Continue reading
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Iraq: One ‘Election’, Two Different Stories By William Bowles
Over the past week, we have not heard a single dissenting voice on the issue of the legitimacy of the ‘election’. In fact it’s been wall-to-wall praise with words like “miracle” and “a dream made a reality” occurring almost every day and on every BBC ‘news’ programme. A veritable litany of government propaganda spewed out… Continue reading
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The Massage is the Message By William Bowles
A previous alert from MediaLens on Iran serves to remind us of the role of the intelligentsia in creating the ‘right kind’ of space for further imperial adventures as the innocuous-sounding quotes above aptly illustrate. But just who are they talking to? After all, if one is to judge by the surveys of the BBC’s… Continue reading
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Weasel words by the dogs of straw By William Bowles
We have yet to discover the true scale of the slaughter that the US wrought on Fallujah but one thing is clear, if we rely on the British government for the numbers we’ll never know the truth. Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Power of Nightmares and the Real Politics of Fear – Part 1
The idea that past dreams “have failed” so that people “have lost faith in ideologies” is Blairite nonsense. In reality, corporate globalisation has sought to crush meaningful politics – dismissed as “ideological politics” – regardless of the wishes of the public. Opinion polls and global mass protest movements show that vast numbers of people are… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The BBC – Legitimising Mass Slaughter in Fallujah – Part 1
In the case of Iraq, it is of course vital that domestic audiences in the US and UK be persuaded that their governments are killing Iraqis with the support of, even on behalf of, Iraqis themselves. The possibility that Iraqis might be dying in their tens of thousands for Western power and profit must, of… Continue reading
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“Fixing Fallujah”: BBC Radio Orwell Reporting for Duty By William Bowles
Thus “fixing the problem” is the tried and tested method of colonial occupation, destroying everything that stands in the way of installing ‘democracy’ in Iraq. Bombs are now merely “flashes in the night sky” (well it was Guy Fawkes night this past Saturday), the reality has been utterly expunged by the BBC story. The article… Continue reading
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Crunch Time in Caracas By William Bowles
This coming Sunday 15 August, the infamous Recall Referendum takes place in Venezuela. For those of you not familiar with the situation in Venezuela – fifth largest producer of oil on the planet and 10% of it going to that insatiable guzzler of the stuff, El Norté, the US – in 1998, the country voted… Continue reading
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The Power of the Press – to reorder reality By William Bowles
Well you wouldn’t know it from all the tributes to the tenth anniversary in the media, that within two days of the Rwandan tragedy, the US knew not only what was going on but who did it and where and when they did it. The report from the invaluable National Security Archive released via a… Continue reading
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Just the facts Ma’am, just the facts By William Bowles
If nothing else, the farce surrounding Andrew Gilligan’s/Dr David Kelly inadvertent revelations concerning British government’s dissembling and lying over the invasion of Iraq has revealed the true nature of what the British establishment likes to foist on an unsuspecting public as ‘objective’ journalism. But what is objective journalism and is there such an animal? Continue reading
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May Day – May Day! By William Bowles
So apparently the Anarchists and the BBC have joined forces and cancelled May Day at least according to BBC TV News London (24/03/04). The nightly ‘news’ show carried a report that shifted the goalposts on May Day by presenting it as something that ‘belonged’ only to the Anarchists, and to compound this outrageous reordering of… Continue reading
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Franchising the news or how to whitewash a whitewash By William Bowles
In 2002 when I first returned to the UK after many years abroad and started my long period of readjustment to this malignant society, a major part of the process was getting a handle on the media here. I read many of the leading ‘papers, listened to the news and of course watched it on… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 