The late writer, broadcaster and wit Clive James formulated what he called the ‘Barry Manilow Law’: ‘Everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible. But everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great.’ (James, cited Martin Amis, ‘Inside Story,’ Vintage, 2020, e-book, p.74) A Media Lens version of this might read: ‘Everyone you know thinks BBC News is absolutely terrible. […]
The key point, for us, which has nothing to do with lefter-than-thou sniping, is that this indicates the extraordinary extent to which the best, supposedly ‘centre-left’ media are protected from rational criticism.
The emotional impact of the Guardian story is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by the Guardian or the New York Times – but the head of an organisation engaged in espionage for a foreign power.
With Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in Brazil’s presidential election at the weekend, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump’s, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now threaten to bring down the […]
Like the aggressive wars of “humanitarian intervention” the west is waging across the oil-rich areas of the Middle East, the cruelty is actually kindness. Those who object, those who demur, do so only because they are in the financial or ideological grip of the mastermind Putin.
This is the moment when war becomes peace, freedom becomes slavery, ignorance becomes strength.
We don’t normally do movie reviews here at BSNews. In fact, we usually concentrate exclusively on geo-politics and foreign policy, steer clear of sports and let others cover gossip and popular culture. My co-ed occasionally reveals her anthropological fascination and ultimate exasperation with the insidious twins of celebrity culture and the advertising industry but for me, I avoid them both like the plague, I never watch TV and I wouldn’t know a Kardashian if one punched me in the face.
Anti-Russia hysteria reached parodical proportions in the ‘mainstream’ media in the wake of the Sergei Skripol ‘novichok’ incident in recent days but what this burlesque spectacle actually reveals is the toxic interdependence between the corporate state and the corporate media – the operative word there being ‘corporate’ – exposing how they always work together to sweep us all along on a tide of fast-rising nationalistic fervour into the next geopolitically convenient conflict.
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.
Are the White Helmets heroes or villains? The mainstream narrative has them as a neutral, unarmed, grassroots (and Oscar-winning) humanitarian group with no political affiliations, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Independent journalists, notably Vanessa Beeley, Eva Karene Bartlett, Patrick Henningsen, and Khaled Iskef, among a few others, suggest a radically different picture, in which the White Helmets are nothing more than a propaganda front for terrorist groups like the Al Nusra Front.
It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.
The Guardian recently published an article claiming that critical discussion of the White Helmets in Syria has been ‘propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government’. Many readers were dismayed at this crude defence of a – presumably – pro-imperialist perspective, and at the unwarranted smearing of reasoned questioning based on evidence from independent journalists.
I’m worried about George. An admirer of many years standing of his excellent columns charting what John Smith’s even more excellent Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century refers to as “capitalism’s destruction of nature”, I’m dismayed both by his stance on Syria and manner of defending it. His latest Guardian piece, yesterday – A lesson from Syria: it’s crucial not to fuel far-right conspiracy […]
