Iraq
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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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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: Iraq and Zimbabwe – A Tale of Two Elections
In January, we showed how the British print and broadcast media were all but unanimous in celebrating the January 30 elections in Iraq as the country’s “first democratic elections in fifty years”. As we noted, this was an excellent example of how the corporate mass media function as a de facto propaganda system for state-corporate… Continue reading
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Media Lens: No Politics – Only Elections
Issues like the environment, foreign policy, poverty and defence were “all but invisible”. (Golding, email to Media Lens, June 10, 2001) Defence, for example, comprised 0.6 percent of reporting. There was no mention of New Labour’s “ethical foreign policy” deception, of the non-existent “genocide” used as a pretext for Blair’s bombing of Serbia, of his… 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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From Word Play to Gun Play:The legitimacy of the state’s right to rule By William Bowles
Many on the ‘left’ may dismiss the arguments surrounding the ‘legal’ basis that underpins the obviously (to me and most of the planet) illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq as no more than a lot of hot air and obfuscation, preferring to take the ‘political’ road to judgement. But it is the ability of the… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Media Complicity in War Crimes
On February 13, The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an international peoples’ initiative, declared much of the Western media guilty of deception and incitement to violence in its reporting on Iraq. The tribunal, meeting in Rome, made its pronouncement after taking testimony from independent journalists, media professors, activists, and a member of the European Parliament. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Email Reveals BBC Contempt For Public Complaints
What does it say when a senior BBC journalist can dismiss testimony relating to our government’s involvement in war crimes as merely “these sorts of things”? And what does it say that a journalist can suggest that it might be an option to simply ignore a public complaint of such seriousness? Continue reading
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Media Lens: Priorities of Power – The Real Meaning Of Elections In Iraq
In truth it is quite wrong to describe the corporate media as ‘mainstream’. We wouldn’t describe Flat Earthism as mainstream geology, nor would we describe Mein Kampf as mainstream political philosophy. There isn’t a cultural or philosophical tradition on the planet that takes seriously the idea that truth-telling can be reconciled with greed. The idea… 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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Media Lens: Unity in Deceit – The British Media and Iraq’s election
20 January 2005 — Media Lens Introduction – A Simple Question People sometimes tell us we’re too hard on the media. They say: ‘Come on, there +is+ a fair amount of diversity, a range of different views. And the Independent publishes some valuable stuff, so does the Guardian – take a look at the Comments… Continue reading
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AIDing and abetting death in Falluja By William Bowles
14 January 2005 The comedian, writer and actor Terry Jones wrote a letter to the Guardian asking why there had been no move to send aid to the survivors of the USUK destruction of Iraq? The letter ends by posing the questions: Why aren’t our TV companies and newspapers running fundraisers to help Iraqis whose lives have… Continue reading
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Book Review: A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl By William Bowles
By the 1870s the Empire had reached its high point and England began the longest economic depression in its history, one that it was not to recover from until the 1890s. And in the meantime its European competitors, chiefly Germany, now outstripping Britain in industrial production and technological innovation, by the 1890s also had a… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Protest the BBC on Thursday, December 2 – This is Why. Part 2
Like the rest of the mainstream media, the BBC did next to nothing to expose the devastating effects of US-UK war and sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq from 1990 onwards. Ahead of last year’s war, the BBC endlessly echoed and channelled UK government propaganda claims, almost never subjecting those claims to serious challenge. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Protest the BBC on Thursday, December 2 – This is Why. Part 1
The BBC, of course, is not the Nazi media, but there have been real war crimes in Iraq, a real mass slaughter, and the BBC has helped make it possible. Please read the examples below and protest on December 2 out of compassion for the suffering of the men, women and children of Iraq. Continue reading
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Iraq=Vietnam: Misinterpreting the Metaphor By William Bowles
Of course Iraq is not Vietnam and it’s not 1965 either and neither is Iraq a nation of tropical rain forests. If one were to make comparisons based purely on geography, then Algeria would be a better one. But geography only determines the form of the struggle, not what drives it. Continue reading
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The more things change the more they stay the same By William Bowles
Coincidence? The surfacing of a videotape that allegedly shows the execution of Margaret Hassan coming as it does fresh on the heels of the video of the execution of a wounded Iraqi resistance fighter by US Marines seems to be part of a pattern of diverting attention away from embarrassing revelations for the occupiers. Continue reading
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Fallujah: Unpacking the press destroying the myths By William Bowles
Western press coverage of the horror that is Fallujah has with the odd exception been nothing short of outrageous in its distortions and blatant propagandising. Even where it purports to be critical of the US in its destruction of Fallujah and its inhabitants, the sub-text continues to push the Western line of ‘foreign militants’, ‘mistakes’… 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
The New Dark Age 