David Edwards
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Media Lens: Journalist Or Activist? Smearing Glenn Greenwald By David Edwards
Modern thought control is dependent on subliminal communication. Messages influencing key perceptions are delivered unseen, unnoticed, with minimal public awareness of what is happening or why. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Massacres That Matter – ‘Responsibility To Protect’ In Egypt, Libya And Syria – Part 1 By David Edwards
The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), formulated at the 2005 UN World Summit, is based on the idea that state sovereignty is not a right but a responsibility. Where offending states fail to live up to this responsibility by inflicting genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity on their own people, the international community has… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State By David Cromwell and David Edwards
Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as ‘the international community’, are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden’s exposure of the massive US… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘A Political Ploy’? The Guardian Editors Swallow US Claims On Syrian WMD By David Edwards
‘It’s not just that we can’t prove a sarin attack; it’s that we’re not seeing what we would expect to see from a sarin attack. In a world where even the secret execution of Saddam Hussein was taped by someone, it doesn’t make sense that we don’t see videos, that we don’t see photos, showing… Continue reading
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Media Lens: When The Next Moment Matters More: ‘The Special One’ – Part 3 By David Edwards
And how amazing, we treat the planet exactly as we treat the present moment: as an intrinsically worthless resource to be ridden, used, exploited on the way to ‘better’ and ‘more’. Our world is being made a hell by the pursuit of seven billion personal utopias, rendered uninhabitable by people who never inhabit the present. Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘This Madman Must Be Stopped’ – Syrian Chemical Weapons By David Edwards
This really is astonishing, in the strange world of media propaganda, news reports contradict editorials and headlines contradict content. The guiding ethic: ‘I want to believe!’ It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that media performance is shaped by state-corporate forces that are deeply invested in decades of war and the spoils that go with… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘The Stupidest And Most Extreme Section Of The British Left’
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. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Thatcher’s Tyrants – The Tanks, The Guns, The Christmas Cards By David Edwards
Indicatively, according to Lexis, over the past month, there have been 461 UK national newspaper articles mentioning the word ‘Thatcher’. There have been 29 articles mentioning ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Saddam’. None of these has mentioned that Thatcher armed and financed the Iraqi dictator. Anyone interested in gauging the true extent of freedom of speech in the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘The Special One’ – Celebrity, Comedy And Spiritual Egotism – Part 1 By David Edwards
After I published my first book, I encountered quite a few celebrity writers, journalists and activists. I discovered that some of the planet’s most difficult and arrogant people have devoted their lives to ‘making the world a better place’. They claim to be driven by compassion, but their harshness and hatred of criticism (as though… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cogitation: ‘The Special One’ – Celebrity, Comedy And Spiritual Egotism By: David Edwards
Twitter and Facebook have been cunningly designed to exploit our need to feel ‘special’. To be ‘retweeted’, ‘favourited’ and ‘followed’ on Twitter subtly suckles our ego, generating quiet, short-lived satisfaction. Other users who have 100,000 or 1,000,000, or – God help us! – 20,000,000 ‘followers’, seriously challenge the idea that we are ‘the one’. Negative… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Sworn Enemies’? A Response To George Monbiot
Above all, we’re trying to stimulate debate and participation. Engaging with journalists is certainly part of that, but we have few illusions about influencing media employees who often have little room for manoeuvre and who are deeply dependent on the corporate system. Continue reading
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Media Lens: US Consulate Killings – Spontaneous Religious Or Planned Political? By: David Edwards
On September 11, four Americans, including the US ambassador, were killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The following day, the BBC’s Lunchtime News reported that the killings were part of ‘disturbances’ which were ‘linked to an anti-Islamic video’ (BBC News, September 12, 2012). The BBC’s News at Six explained that… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Libyan Elections – Burying The Amnesty Report By David Edwards
And indeed everyone, of course, knew that ‘democracy’ in Iraq had to be ‘sensitive’ to American concerns, not least in regard to ‘guys with turbans’ (which sounded like a euphemism for ‘towelheads’). It was obvious what ‘acceptable to the Americans’ meant for the claim that the elections were in any real sense ‘free’. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Houla Massacre Update – The UN Report By David Edwards
US and UK politicians were clearly desperate to use Houla to stoke their regime-change agenda. Rehearsing the crude tactics of the Bush-Blair era, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague endlessly repeated their damning judgements: facts were irrelevant, propaganda stunts everything. No holds were barred. The media, as ever, were… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Incinerating Assange – The Liberal Media Go To Work By: David Edwards
The media response to Assange’s asylum request tells us much about the default brutality and reflexive herdthink of elite corporate journalism. We witnessed a rush to be seen to revile Assange as a ‘turd’, ‘weirdo’, ‘narcissist’ and joke. The crucial importance of his achievements, of his cause, was deemed utterly irrelevant beside his allegedly unbearable… Continue reading
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ColdType, March 2012
The cover story of this month’s biggest-ever issue returns to the Middle East where the world is being prepared for a replay of the just-ended war in Iraq. Our seven essays by writers in North America and Europe point out, among other things, that there seems to be a media blackout of the fact that… 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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Media Lens Cogitation: Falling By David Edwards
April Fool’s Day, 1999, and the heart specialist says to me, with the usual twinkle in his eye: ‘It’s not Mickey Mouse territory, but you’ll be okay.’ Continue reading
The New Dark Age 