30 October 2013 — Media Lens
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 enormous reaction on social media and in the press, just as those media gatekeepers who selected Brand to appear would have wished.
14 October 2013 — Media Lens
27 September 2013 — Media Lens
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 up calls’ are issued, we are still headed for climate chaos.
19 September 2013 — Media Lens
In a 2010 alert, ‘Beyond Hiroshima – The Non-Reporting Of Fallujah’s Cancer Catastrophe’, we noted the almost non-existent media response to the publication of a new study that had found high rates of infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city. The dramatic increases in these rates exceeded even those found in survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn was a lone exception in reporting these awful findings.
28 June 2013 — Media Lens
Reports of Washington’s anger directed at surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a basic truth about power. Noam Chomsky has expressed it as the underlying problem for genuine democracy, even in so-called ‘free’ societies: Continue reading
29 May 2013 — Media Lens
Sometimes we get so sick of the phrase ‘history in the making’ that the brain tends to switch off. What is it this time?, we sigh. A new high-tech piece of military technology that will boost US killing power? A big jump in a newspaper’s online advertising revenue? The world’s best footballer, Lionel Messi, joining ‘an exclusive list of adidas athletes to have their own signature product’? Sometimes the ‘history’ in question only stretches back a few years, maybe a century or two. Only very occasionally, if the claim is truly deserved, does it stretch back to the earliest era of written records.
22 May 2013 — Media Lens
Introduction
I caught up with an old friend, after many years, on a muggy afternoon in Camden. Outwardly, he seemed the same wonderfully ebullient character he had always been – I got the usual bear hug and bristly smacker on the cheek. But as we talked, it became clear something had changed.
13 May 2013 — Media Lens
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. The Conservatives ended up with egg on their face after veteran Tory Ken Clarke had labelled UKIP ‘a collection of clowns’.
23 April 2013 — Media Lens
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.
26 March 2013 — Media Lens
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.’
5 March 2013 — Media Lens
It is a prerequisite for corporate journalists that they respect the ideological conventions of their paymasters and of state power – a vital source of ‘news‘ and ‘informed’ comment, after all. At the same time, the corporate journalist likes to project a self-serving image as a valiant investigator, a champion of democracy, and a facilitator of fair and balanced debate. All too often, of course, the public can see through the charade.
26 February 2013 — Media Lens
There is an emptiness at the core of our being. The ego’s great task is to fill that emptiness with evidence that we are ‘someone’ rather than ‘nobody’, that we are ‘special’. But no matter how hard we try, our achievements continue to fall and vanish into the void.
12 February 2013 — Media Lens
A spectacular event captured on film in a new documentary, ‘Chasing Ice’, depicts the stark impact of global warming on the Arctic. The stunning sequence shows the largest glacier calving event ever filmed. An on-screen graphic emphasises the huge scale of the ice collapse: Continue reading
31 January 2013 — Media Lens
A crucial element of pro-Israel political lobbying is the reprehensible smearing of justified criticism of the Israeli state as ‘antisemitic’. Thus, a recent cartoon by Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times provided a convenient target for outrage.
14 January 2013 — Media Lens
One measure of a society’s honesty is what it says about its political and military leaders when they die. Are the deceased leader’s perceived virtues exalted, while any blemishes are airbrushed out of the picture? Recent media coverage following the death of General Norman “Stormin’ ”Schwarzkopf, the Allied military commander during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, is a case in point.
10 January 2013 — Coldtype
In the January issue of COLDTYPE MAGAZINE – download your free copy today
Cover story this month is Tony Sutton’s Las Vegas: Behind The Bright Lights, a photo essay that captures street life away from the gaze of the city that never sleeps. Sharing our spotlight is a 16-page excerpt from Sam Pizzigati’s brilliant new book, The Rich Don’t Always Win, which tells of a time when the rich in the United States paid their fair share of their earnings into the taxman’s coffers.
18 December, 2012 — Media Lens
In an era of permanent war, economic meltdown and climate ‘weirding’, we need all the champions of truth and justice that we can find. But where are they? What happened to trade unions, the green movement, human rights groups, campaigning newspapers, peace activists, strong-minded academics, progressive voices? We are awash in state and <strong class=’StrictlyAutoTagBold’>corporate propaganda, with the ‘liberal’ media a key cog in the apparatus. Continue reading
4 December, 2012 — Media Lens
By: David Edwards
It is said that God plays a joke on every new-born, whispering:
‘You are the special one!’
16 November, 2012 — Media Lens
BBC News is in turmoil. Having last year dropped a report on claims of sexual abuse against the late DJ and television presenter Jimmy Savile, the flagship Newsnight programme this month wrongly implicated Tory peer Lord McAlpine in child abuse. As a result, after just 54 days in his job, the BBC director-general, George Entwistle, ‘stepped down’ on November 10. The BBC’s head of news, Helen Boaden, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell, were then also ‘asked’ to ‘step aside’. Peter Rippon, the Newsnight editor responsible for the Savile decision, had already ‘stepped aside’.
6 November, 2012 — Media Lens
Hi George
It’s good to know that your email is intended in a ‘friendly and constructive spirit’, and not as a follow-up to something you wrote of us three weeks earlier: ‘I could spend my life unpicking their falsehoods. Perhaps I should, cos no one else is.’
The New Dark Age 