Media Lens
Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site's editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media's coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately".
Media Lens is financed by donations from website visitors. The editors issue regular "Media Alerts" concentrating on mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and Channel 4 News which are legally obliged to be impartial or on outlets such as The Guardian and The Independent which are usually considered left-leaning. The site's editors frequently draw attention to what they see as the limits within which the mainstream media operates, and provide "a riveting exposé of the myth of liberal media based on a variety of empirical case studies", according to Graham Murdock and Michael Pickering.
Media Lens is admired by John Pilger, who has called the website "remarkable" and described the writers as "the cyber guardians of honest journalism". Other journalists, in particular Peter Oborne, have also made positive comments about the group, although it has come into conflict with other journalists. The Observers foreign editor Peter Beaumont asserted that the group ran a "campaign" against John Sloboda and the Iraq Body Count for underestimating the number of deaths in Iraq. George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens was "belittling the acts of genocide" in their defence of Edward S. Herman, who had questioned the number of deaths in the Srebrenica massacre.
Foundation and influences
By the late 1990s, David Edwards had concluded that there was a "media suppression of the truth about the effect of the sanctions" against Iraq, and an indifference to climate change: "the media were still celebrating the idea that Britain might soon be blessed with a Mediterranean climate". Another motivation came from interviewing Denis Halliday, former head of the UN’s humanitarian aid program, after concluding its actions in Iraq were "genocidal".Meanwhile, David Cromwell had found coverage of certain issues to be "paltry", and had gained a negligible response from the newspapers to which he had written. The two men first met in 1999, and Edwards suggested beginning a collaborative website.
Central to Media Lens analysis is the Propaganda model, first developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in their book Manufacturing Consent. The theory posits that the way in which news media is structured creates an inherent conflict of interest which leads to systemic bias and propaganda for undemocratic forces. Edwards has also cited Erich Fromm, who thought "a society that subordinates people and planet to profit is inherently insane and toxic", and his practice of Buddhism as influences.
Media Lens has expressed admiration for Australian born journalist John Pilger on several occasions. Around 2006, Media Lens said The Guardian would not publish Pilger "because he’s honest about the media" and "draws attention to the vital role of the entire liberal media establishment in crimes against humanity. So he is persona non grata". In a 2007 interview, Media Lens said Pilger was a "huge inspiration" and, while discussing his work in the mainstream media, stated that "on the one hand, his work has a tremendous effect in enlightening a lot of people. On the other hand, his work is used to strengthen the propaganda system‘s false claims of honesty and openness".
Writing in Z Communications in May 2014, Elliot Murphy said that Media Lens pay careful attention to the writings of George Orwell, "noting the prevalence of clichés which should arouse suspicion in any reader of the press or listener of parliamentary debates. These include 'at a time when', 'demands difficult choices', 'pivotal moment', 'towards', 'inextricably linked', 'courage', 'human being', 'some people say that', 'left of centre', and 'history tells us'. Cromwell and Edwards observe that 'it is not important to make sense in the media; it is important only to be able to bandy the jargon of media discourse in a way that suggests in-depth knowledge: Iran-Contra, IMF, G8, the "roadmap to peace", "UN resolution 1441", and so on' ".
Activities and main arguments
In 2001, Media Lens began issuing regular online Media Alerts, scrutinising media coverage, the arguments used, source selection, and the framing of events to highlight bias, omissions and direct lies. The media alerts are distributed without charge by email to an international readership. According to Media Lens, the readership was around 14,000 people in 2009. Funding is through reader subscriptions and donations.The editors engage in email and Twitter exchanges with British journalists and editors. They also invite their readers to challenge journalists, editors and programme producers directly via email, specifically discouraging abusive contact.
According to Cromwell and Edwards, journalists in the mainstream media articulate an "'official' version of events... as Truth. The testimony of critical observers and participants" and "especially those on the receiving end of Western firepower – are routinely marginalised, ignored and even ridiculed". The editors "reject all conspiracy theories. Instead, we point to the inevitably corrupting effects of 'market forces' operating on, and through, media corporations seeking profit in a society dominated by corporate power... Media employees are part of a corporate system that, unsurprisingly, selects for servility to the needs and goals of corporate power". They believe that mainstream journalists gradually absorb an unquestioning corporate mindset as their careers progress, becoming unwilling to question their occupations or governments claims, but not consciously lying. They also say that the limitations of the corporate media are not unexpected as "e did not expect the Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist Party, why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power?"
In Cromwell and Edwards' opinion, western government actions have followed an "historical pattern of deception" going back several centuries, and "the corporate media is the source of some of the greatest, most lethal illusions of our age". Edwards wrote that, because of these corporate distortions, "we believe, society is not told the truth about the appalling consequences of corporate greed for poor people in the Third World, and for the environment".
According to Cromwell and Edwards, the centre-left wing of the mainstream media are gatekeepers "of acceptable debate from a left or Green perspective, 'thus far and no further'" and that dissenting views have difficulty gaining attention in a corporate system. They have contrasted positive comments the mainstream media make about western leaders, with the epithets used to describe politicians such as Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's former President.
In 2013, Media Lens described the corporate media as "an extremist fringe" from which progressives should completely dissociate themselves.
In May 2011, and more extensively in January 2015, Media Lens advocated "a collective of high-profile writers and journalists willing to detach themselves from corporate and state media, and to place themselves entirely at the mercy of the public" with their output freely available "from a single media outlet" and financed by donations. "The support would be vast, if the initiative was posited as an alternative to the biocidal, corruption-drenched corporate media", they said in an interview with The Colossus website in January 2016.
Cromwell wrote in 2016 that, to find coverage of the Yemeni Civil War, "ot unusually, one has to go to media such as" the Russian television network RT and the Iranian news network Press TV, which are "so often bitterly denigrated as 'propaganda' operations by corporate journalists".
Reception
In December 2002, eighteen months after the site's creation, Australian journalist John Pilger described Media Lens as "becoming indispensable". In a New Internationalist interview in 2010, Pilger said Media Lens "has broken new ground with the first informed and literate analysis and criticism of the liberal media". Regarding their work on the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, he wrote that "Without meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism's first draft of bad history". In a 2007 article about them, John Pilger mentioned their first collaborative book, Guardians of Power, and wrote that "not a single national newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can remember", including the left-wing Morning Star. The Morning Star did review their second book, Newspeak In The 21st Century, in 2009.Peter Barron, former editor of the BBC's Newsnight commented in 2005: "In fact I rather like them. David Cromwell and David Edwards, who run the site, are unfailingly polite, their points are well-argued and sometimes they're plain right."
In June 2006, Peter Beaumont wrote in The Observer that Media Lens "insist that the only acceptable version of the truth is theirs alone and that everybody else should march to the same step", and described them as "controlling Politburo lefties". He likened the group's email campaigns to "a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin". Media Lens responded that "Beaumont was unwilling to challenge even one of the thousands of arguments and facts published in 2,000 pages of Media Alerts and in our book Guardians Of Power – so, instead, our 'nastiness' was the focus of attention".
The journalist Peter Wilby, wrote in January 2006 that "their basic critique is correct" and he occasionally commissioned Cromwell and Edwards while he was editor of the New Statesman. He also wrote that "the Davids are virtually unknown; as leftist critics, they are marginalised." Writing in The Guardian in July 2008, Wilby described Media Lens as "formidably researched. It avoids easy targets, such as the Mail and Sun, and criticises the Guardian, Independent, Times and Telegraph, arguing the "liberal media" isn't as liberal as it thinks it is. Edwards and Cromwell might be described as early examples of citizen journalists".
In his 2007 book The Triumph of the Political Class, journalist Peter Oborne wrote that while researching media coverage of the Iraq war, he had found the site "extremely useful". Media Lens are "often unfair but sometimes highly perceptive".
On 2 December 2007, Edwards and Cromwell were awarded the Gandhi International Peace Award. The award was presented by Denis Halliday, the former United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq, and himself a recipient of the award in 2003.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett, an academic specialising in Communications Studies, said in 2010 that Media Lens possess a "relentless commitment" to assessing the media "on criteria of rationality and humanity, for what they write and fail to write, and doing so in a tone that is determinedly polite and respectful, even when the content is highly critical".
In February 2011, John Rentoul wrote about his interactions with what he called Media Lens "adherents". He said an email exchange,
"may continue until journalist is too busy to reply or until the snarl of Chomskian-Pilgerism is unwittingly betrayed and journalist realises he or she has not been engaging with a reasonable person. At this point, Media Lens adherent then posts the email chain on the sect's website, without notice or permission . This is supposed to embarrass the apologist for the corporate media/torture/Tony Blair and expose him to ridicule by other sect members".
In January 2012, The Guardians Michael White, accused Media Lens of suggesting the newspaper's two most left-wing writers, Milne and George Monbiot "trim their sails and pull their punches to accommodate their paymasters". He added: "Media Lens doesn't do subtle. Nor do its more acceptable heroes, such as John Pilger or Robert Fisk". Media Lens responded that corporate journalists did more than merely “trim sails”. There were “whole areas of thought and discussion are demonstrably off the agenda” and “the corporate nature of the mass media tends to produce performance that defends and furthers the goals of the corporate system”. In May 2016, White wrote that their work suggests "their own editing priorities may be as partisan and un-self-aware as the corporates they so severely condemn".
In February 2012, the philosopher Rupert Read criticised Media Lens' use of Michel Chossudovsky and articles by Robert Dreyfuss and Aisling Byrne as sources for the situation in Syria.
In May 2014, Elliot Murphy wrote in ZNet that Media Lens "have carefully exposed the shortcomings and lies of the press" and "their Alerts are invariably well researched, well argued, and often entertaining". He described their book Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media as a brilliant assessment of the "balance of reporting when it comes to ‘our’ crimes versus ‘theirs’". He criticised them for generally confining their suggested actions to email campaigns rather than "direct action, non-violent civil disobedience, or even the odd promotion of an upcoming rally or lecture" and suggested that they "rethink their tactics when trying to influence, typically through electronic means, the actions and thoughts of other political writers and their general readership". Regarding Media Lens’ criticism of left-wing sources, Murphy wrote: "Writing detailed critiques of corporate media reports is admirable, but isolating yourself from those who could not only help you out, but who may in fact also need your help in undermining the very corporate media forces you’re attempting to expose as fundamentally subservient to power, is not the action of an organisation trying to improve the world".
In August 2015, Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman wrote about an interview she had with Yvette Cooper. Media Lens messaged Lewis on twitter asking why she had not mentioned that Cooper had voted in favour of wars that "wrecked" Iraq and Libya. Media Lens said that Lewis did not reply but New Statesman columnist Sarah Ditum wrote an article in which she said Media Lens are "largely engaged in an endless project of separating the anti-war sheep from the goats to be purged". In response to Ditum, Edwards wrote: "Cooper’s voting record of course has grave implications for the near-certainty of future wars waged on more states around the world. Any reasonable commentator understands the need to pay careful attention to the candidates’ record and thinking on war".
David Wearing, writing in openDemocracy in September 2015, commented that while the group has "a vocal, dedicated following", it also has "a long record of alienating potential allies with their purity tests and aggressive oversimplifications".
In February 2016, Oliver Kamm described Media Lens as a "far-left pressure group" who are "doughty defenders of Venezuela's revolutionary regime".
In March 2016, journalist Owen Jones wrote that the editors' "attack me with even more force than writers who actually defend the status quo. Those writers confirm their analysis, after all: my presence disrupts it, and therefore I’m actually arguably worse", accusing them of "once tweeting a paragraph I wrote summing up the arguments of those who attacked critics of Obama, and pretending those arguments were what I actually thought".
Padraig Reidy wrote in an August 2016 piece for Little Atoms, that Media Lens "is only ever asking questions it thinks it already knows the answer to".
When one of the Media Lens' editors suggested on twitter in 2018 that young writers should "follow your bliss" and contribute "what you absolutely love to write to inspire and enlighten other people" rather than bothering about prestige or financial reward, extensive responses were posted on the social media platform. Journalist James Ball responded that writers should try the mainstream first to gain attention for their work as "virtually all of the best journalism comes out of 'corporate' or 'mainstream' media", such as the parliamentary expenses scandal, "the exposure of offshore leaks", "Iraq War Logs", "Libor rigging", and "dozens of other major pieces of accountability stories".