Hello,

The latest Media Lens media alert may be of interest...

Best wishes

David Cromwell
(co-editor, Media Lens, www.medialens.org<http://www.medialens.org>)


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MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

October 22, 2008


MEDIA ALERT: PROPPING UP PROPAGANDA – IRAQ, CLIMATE AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA’S FEAR OF THE PUBLIC


Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.

In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:

“Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005)

In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html; 'Update on Iraqi casualty data', Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88)

In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:

“What a lot of balls ... do you read the paper old friend? ... ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street...’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003)

Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:

“because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008)

The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca<http://www.rabble.ca>), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to +expose+ methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.

Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.

/Full version at: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/081022_propping_up_propaganda.php