UKWatch interview with David Edwards and David
Cromwell of Medialens:

Click on the link or read below....

http://www.ukwatch.net/article/1282



The following is an interview with David Edwards and
David Cromwell editors of Medialens and co-authors of
the new book ‘Guardians of Power: The myth of the
liberal media’.

UKWatch: Your new book is called ‘Guardians of Power’
who are the Guardians of Power? Who are they
protecting and why?

Medialens: The guardians are the corporate mass media.
They are protecting the powerful state-corporate
interests on which they depend and of which they are a
part. In this book we specifically focus on the
‘liberal’ guardians of power - the Guardian, the
Observer, the Independent, the BBC and so on. They are
essentially protecting their own interests. For
example, many people consider the BBC a bastion of
honest reporting. On December 2, the media reported
that Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark and her husband
Alan Clements netted £1m each from the sale of IWC
Media, the television production company, to RDF
Media, maker of Wife Swap, for £14m. The other
presenters of Newsnight – Jeremy Paxman, for example –
are also millionaires.

Irish billionaire Sir Anthony O’Reilly, who is chief
executive of Independent News & Media Plc, the
multinational company that publishes the Independent
and Independent on Sunday in London, is estimated to
be worth £1.3 billion, making him the richest man in
Ireland.

A Guardian Weekend supplement in March 2004 consisted
of 128 pages. Of these, 90 were taken up in
advertising, some of it aimed at society’s wealthiest
elites. The “chiffon halterneck dress with metal
sequin overlay” advertised on page 74, for example,
cost £5,890. The country’s leading liberal newspaper
described this as “absolute glamour”. (‘Come dancing,’
Guardian magazine, March 6, 2004)

The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group
(GMG), which has only one bottom line – making money.
The GMG website enlightens anyone who thinks the
Guardian is a dauntless liberal force for truth and
compassion in a money-grubbing world:

“Guardian Media Group has a wide portfolio of media
interests. The flagship titles – the Guardian, the
Observer, the Manchester Evening News, and Auto Trader
– are strengthened and supplemented by a range of
successful businesses which together from one of the
most vibrant media organisations in the UK. Our
investments in the Internet, electronic publishing and
radio give us a broad and successful commercial base.
Guardian Media Group is owned by the Scott Trust.”
(http://www.gmgplc.co.uk)

These are obviously just a few small examples; but
this is an elite media system that has been designed,
and has evolved, over many decades to defend the
interests of the top 5% of the British population who
own 45% of the nation’s wealth and who run the
country. The idea that this system reports neutrally
between the interests of corporate titans like
O’Reilly and impoverished civilians in the Third
World, for example in Iraq, is just absurd.

UKW: The focus of your book is the liberal media. Why
have you chosen this target rather than the right-wing
media which many would consider far worse.

ML: As Joel Bakan notes in his book, The Corporation,
the current status quo is fundamentally psychopathic –
it systematically subordinates people and planet to
profit. Much of the suffering in the Third World is
the result of deliberate military, economic and other
interventions to subordinate the interests of local
people to Western corporate profits. Much of the
destruction of the environment – for example of the
climate – is the result of the same psychopathic set
of priorities. Even now the websites of major business
front groups like the US National Association of
Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce are full
of climate scepticism, Kyoto rejectionism and so on.
Unfortunately, a profit-oriented corporate media
system owned by wealthy people and/or parent
companies, dependent on advertisers, linked with any
number of business enterprises, has every interest in
maintaining this psychopathic status quo. Phil Lesley,
author of a handbook on public relations and
communications, advises corporations:

“People generally do not favour action on a
non-alarming situation when arguments seem to be
balanced on both sides and there is a clear doubt. The
weight of impressions on the public must be balanced
so people will have doubts and lack motivation to take
action. Accordingly, means are needed to get balancing
information into the stream from sources that the
public will find credible. There is no need for a
clear-cut ‘victory’. ... Nurturing public doubts by
demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut situation
in support of the opponents usually is all that is
necessary.”

This is the main function of ‘professional’ news
reporting. The main function of the ‘liberal’ arm of
professional journalism is indicated by Australian
media analyst Alex Carey:

“There is evidence from a major wartime study that,
for the best results, one side only of an issue or
argument should be presented to poorly educated
people. Two-sided presentations, however, are more
effective in influencing better educated people and
those initially opposed to the desired view.” (Alex
Carey, p.159)

The liberal media tell both sides of the story – kind
of. They emphasise the state-corporate version of the
truth, particularly in news reporting. This is then
‘balanced’ by commentary that presents superficial or
trivial counter-arguments that do not seriously
challenge the official view. So, for example, on the
issue of Iraqi WMD, the official view – that Iraq was
a threat that had to be disarmed, by force of
necessary – was countered with a superficial, trivial
view – that this may well be true, but any action
should be endorsed by the UN. The real
counter-argument – that Iraq was clearly not a threat
and that any attack on Iraq, with or without UN
approval, would be the supreme war crime – the
launching of a war of aggression – was almost nowhere
to be seen. The result is what Edward Herman describes
as “normalising the unthinkable”. The liberal audience
– the section of the population that might be expected
to be most compassionate, most fiercely opposed to
government crimes – was subject to endless liberal
propaganda persuading them of the basic reasonableness
and respectability of the US-UK government position.
This consistently has the effect of pacifying and
neutralising the most concerned and motivated section
of society - people drawn to progressive, liberal
ideas. By contrast, the right-wing press preaches to
the converted, people who are happy with the status
quo and keen for it not to be challenged.

UKW: The liberal media do allow some genuine
dissenting voices. The Guardian and the independent
for instance publish articles by principled radicals
such as George Monbiot, Mark Curtis, Naomi Klein,
Robert Fisk amongst others. If the liberal media are
truly “Guardians of Power” why let these dissenting
voices be heard at all?

ML: This is not actually true. The liberal media do
not allow genuine dissent when it comes to analysing
the structural corruption of the corporate media
system. Monbiot, Klein and Fisk have written
essentially nothing about this topic in the Guardian
and Independent. Last time we checked, Curtis had not
mentioned the role of the media at all in his Guardian
articles. Fisk never criticises the Independent – in
fact he praises it, as he does the British media
generally. He does not focus on the appalling
performance of the liberal media – he seems to believe
that the Independent really is independent; an
astonishingly naïve view. Recall that these are our
most honest writers. Serious media analysis is a
completely taboo subject within the mainstream. We
published one article on the issue in the Guardian in
December 2004 but that was a one-off gesture in
response to intense criticism of the Guardian from
Media Lens readers – it took us four months to place
the article and we haven’t been invited back.

The only journalist who has been consistently honest
about the media is John Pilger. It’s interesting to
consider how he’s treated. In our view he’s the
country’s most powerful dissident – his writing is
superb, and the depth and breadth of his insight is
beyond most of the other writers you mention. But it
seems there’s no place for him in any of the quality
papers! People talk about the Guardian comment editor
Seumas Milne as a radical force – but he won’t publish
Pilger. We’ve asked Milne why and he refuses to
answer. So our best living dissident – obviously one
of the all-time greats – is required to write a
fortnightly column in the New Statesman which reaches
a few thousand people. So why is he treated
differently to Klein and Monbiot? Because he’s honest
about the media – he criticises the Guardian, he draws
attention to the vital role of the entire liberal
media establishment in crimes against humanity. So he
is persona non grata. The same is true of Chomsky.
American dissidents are traditionally much more honest
about the media – here it’s just understood that you
don’t talk about it – and so they are not welcome in
our press. It couldn’t be more obvious. By the way,
the media in other countries are sometimes far more
honest. Papers in places like South Korea and the
United Arab Emirates publish material that is
sometimes far more critical of the media. It matters
more here – we’re closer to centres of real power – so
it’s more tightly controlled.

Readers are not stupid. In the USSR it was obvious to
much of the public that the media was heavily
controlled and censored. As a result most people
realised they were not free and so they sought out
honest sources of information (like Samizdat) and
energetically pushed for greater political freedom –
the clear fact of media oppression motivated
progressive change. By contrast, in the West,
occasional examples of honest commentary and reporting
create the powerful illusion that we have access to an
open, independent press. It is like a vaccine that
inoculates people against the truth of thought
control.

UKW: Why do you think the UK media does not behave
more like the United States media where dissenting
voices are almost totally excluded? Which system do
you think is more effective in controlling the
domestic population?

ML: Bush and Blair are both currently in office rather
than in jail, so we conclude that both systems must be
extremely effective. The US is an unusual and extreme
case. Historically, US corporate elites have waged a
very intense and conscious kind of class warfare –
really huge, centrally directed campaigns of
propaganda manipulation and political control designed
to stifle opposition. The British public are largely
unaware of this, but the very large and popular
socialist movements in the US in the first half of the
20th century were deliberately targeted and destroyed
by business power. The propaganda campaigns were like
something out of Stalinism or Maoism (see Elizabeth
Fones-Wolf’s remarkable work Selling Free Enterprise
for details) – really vast attempts to brainwash
society.

Things were initially not that different here. From
the early days of the nineteenth century, business and
government were resolutely determined to stamp out the
free expression of ideas. The first resort were the
seditious libel and blasphemy laws, which essentially
outlawed all challenges to the status quo. When these
failed to have the desired effect, elites turned to
newspaper stamp duty and taxes on paper and
advertisements to price radical journals out of the
market. Between 1789 and 1815, stamp duty was
increased by 266 per cent, helping to ensure, as Lord
Castlereagh put it, that “persons exercising the power
of the press” would be “men of some respectability and
property”; the point being that these more
“respectable” owners of the press “would conduct them
in a more respectable manner than was likely to be the
result of pauper management”, as Cresset Pelham
observed at the time.

The rise of a parliamentary socialist opposition –
which was never successful to the same extent in the
US - naturally supported a left-leaning press. This
has been under remorseless attack ever since. With the
convergence of Labour and Tory parties in the style of
the US political system, the pressure on left elements
within the media has increased markedly. There are
signs that the press, too, is converging – the
Observer is now essentially a right-wing propaganda
organ. The Guardian also makes no bones about
rejecting radical causes in favour of “the centre
ground”. The centre, now, in fact is the hard,
corporate right. It is ruthless realpolitik dressed as
humanitarian intervention. It’s noticeable that,
despite being proved right in almost everything they
said, several high-profile anti-war journalists and
politicians have lost their jobs since 2003 – cruise
missile columnists like Aaronovitch, Cohen and Hari
have not been touched. That’s surely a sign of the
times.

UKW: Tell us a bit about Medialens. How did the
project begin? What were your hopes for it?

ML: We had both published books on radical
politics/media analysis. We had also managed to
publish a few articles and book reviews in the
mainstream press. But it was agonising work – it was
clear that tests of servility were being set up, hoops
were being held out, punishment for honesty was being
administered. Naturally, we were expected to play the
same game as everyone else – notably, don’t even dream
of subjecting the corporate media system to serious
criticism. DC had set up a website for his book,
Private Planet , and DE suggested a similar website on
media analysis. Our initial thought was to just send
out useful analysis and information to a small circle
of interested friends – the idea of how to reach more
people than did not initially occur to us. We assumed
we’d be ignored and blanked, and remain pretty much
unknown.

We thought it would be interesting to conduct an
experiment – what happens if you give no thought to
the sensitivities of mainstream commissioning editors
and just tell the truth, as we see it, about the
media? So we very consciously decided to burn any
media career bridges we might have, to abandon any
thought of making money from writing, and just write
what seemed most important. We consciously set out to
reject all forms of compromise. We are both strongly
drawn to the idea that motivation is crucial – we
believe that it is vital that our work should be
rooted in a compassionate motivation rather than in a
personal concern for career security, status, and so
on.

UKW: An important part of what you do is getting
people to regularly challenge journalists and editors.
Do you think these challenges have had an impact on
the way the news is reported?

ML: It’s very difficult to judge, and maybe we’re not
the best people to give an opinion. There have been
clear examples where readers have changed outcomes in
the media – questions have been asked of senior
politicians on BBC radio and TV that otherwise would
not have been asked.

UKW: Medialens has understandably focussed on the
crimes of the media and on raising consciousness on
this issue. To turn to another side of the problem
what kind of media would you like to see? In what ways
should the media change and how is change to be
achieved?

ML: We are an example of the media we would like to
see. Forget for a moment issues of structure and so on
– what is it we really need? We need individuals
motivated by compassion for suffering rather than
greed – people who are willing to write honestly about
the causes of that suffering. We need journalists who
are not compromised by their aspiration for money,
status, respectability and power – people who find the
idea of rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous
repulsive if it means they have to subordinate the
interests of the impoverished and defenceless to their
own career progression. We need journalists who
understand that personal happiness and social welfare
are ultimately rooted in concern for others - in
personal qualities of kindness, generosity,
compassion, patience and non-violence. We are not
trying to pretend we are exemplars of these qualities,
but we do aspire to be motivated by them, and we do
think they should be at the heart of honest
journalism. It’s reasonable to say that one-half of
our focus is on challenging greed, hatred and
ignorance with facts and arguments. The other half is
to maintain and increase a compassionate motivation
for what we’re doing.

UKW: What do you think of the state of alternative
media in this country? Is it capable of ever
supplanting the mainstream?

ML: It already has for some people to some extent.
Quite a few people who want to understand the truth of
Haiti, Colombia, Iraq and so on turn to alternative
media rather than seek confusing, misleading,
compromised accounts in the mainstream. We have
written often of how we hope that increased public
awareness of the limits of political and media freedom
will generate truly democratic, alternative media with
the power to impose a news agenda on the mainstream,
or to replace it as source of news. Ideally, beyond
even this, powerful alternative media should aspire to
inform and motivate large popular movements, and even
new, libertarian political parties, which might then
be in a position to reform media structures to limit
the influence of corporate interests.

UKW: What are your hopes for the book? What do you
want people to take away from it?

ML: People will never seek liberation from a situation
of oppression if they believe they are already free.
The illusion of media freedom is incredibly potent. It
is backed up by high-tech power, endorsed by endless
celebrities and global heroes telling us, or implying,
that the media system is fundamentally benign, free,
open and honest. It’s very difficult to step outside
this propaganda and think for ourselves. We have
collected the most powerful and relevant examples we
can find showing how even the best media
systematically impose a false, controlling, pacifying,
oppressive and lethal version of the world on the
public. Of course, we have read this stuff 100 times,
so we assumed the impact on us personally would be
pretty minimal, even tedious. We were both pleasantly
surprised to find that, after reading the book in
proof and final form, we came away with an unusually
clear sense of just how obviously compromised and
destructive the media system is. It opened our eyes!
If the book has a similar effect on other readers,
that would be a positive result.

Medialens is a free service. However, financial
support is vital. Please consider donating to Media
Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate

Visit the Media Lens website:
http://www.medialens.org__

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