In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens – remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.
Because the corporate press is about selling products and services to billions of consumers, it is loath to discuss the claim that an authentic, incomparable bliss is located within the human heart, and can be experienced by directing some attention away from external sources of ‘happiness’ to internal feelings in meditation. And yet this has been the assertion of every great spiritual master for thousands of years.
On January 8, Fiona Bruce introduced an item about Syria on BBC News at Ten with the phrase: ‘Syrian government forces, backed by Russia’. Why does BBC News not regularly use the phrase, ‘Saudi government forces, backed by the United States and the UK’ when reporting on bombs dropped on Yemen? The answer should be obvious.
Our point is that if journalists like Monbiot are serious about establishing the truth, they will test the French government and other claims against the arguments and evidence offered by dissidents. They will consider the different claims, and come to some kind of informed conclusion. What is not acceptable is that journalists should simply accept as Truth arguments made by Western governments openly seeking regime change in Syria and that have a spectacular track record of lying about claims supposedly justifying war.
Last week, seven years after the Iraq Inquiry was set up, Sir John Chilcot finally delivered his long-awaited report. Although it stopped short of declaring the Iraq war illegal, and although it failed to examine the real motives for war, the report was not quite the whitewash that had been feared by peace campaigners. Lindsey German, convenor of the Stop […]
From the moment Jeremy Corbyn stood as prospective Labour leader, the Guardian has waged a relentless campaign to destroy this rare shoot of progressive hope. The paper has backed away from the truth about state and corporate power fuelling yet more catastrophic climate change. It has failed to fully and consistently expose the corporate basis to the climate denial campaign and the corporate capture of the ‘mainstream’ media in facilitating this. These are salient horrors, but the list could go on…
We live in disconcerting times. Here at home, a Tory government with the weakest of mandates is waging, on behalf of corporate-financial elites, class war against the poor and vulnerable. Across the world, and particularly in the Middle East, the engines of western imperialism continue to chug remorselessly along, their slaughter and immiseration of millions an irrelevance to western war […]
One of the defining features of the corporate media is that Western crimes are ignored or downplayed. The US bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on the night of October 3, is an archetypal example.
After 14 years of the Media Lens project, it feels quite odd for us to be working in a context of hope. For much of the time we have been ‘jousting with toothpicks’ against the corporate behemoth with no way of knowing if anything really substantial could be achieved. While our gloom over inaction on climate change remains, the surge of radical politics across Europe really is an inspiration.
The overarching framework, Chomsky points out, is the so-called Clinton Doctrine, named after former US president Bill Clinton. The doctrine asserts that United States is entitled to the ‘unilateral use of military power’ to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources’. This entitlement is dressed up as alleged ‘security’ or ‘humanitarian’ concerns.
[W]hen a senior journalist complains of ‘intimidation and bullying’ by the public, making comparison’s to ‘Vladimir Putin’s Russia’, the mind really boggles at the distortion of reality. Those were claims made by Robinson, the BBC’s outgoing political editor, using an appearance at the Edinburgh international book festival to settle a few scores.
‘Israel is a gangster state. It holds the world record in the breach and defiance of international law. It regularly massacres and terrorises the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, which even David Cameron has described as an “open prison”. Its courts uphold racism as state policy. It has re-elected a congenital liar as its prime minister….’
