Articles by Media Lens
We found 71 results.
Spain’s Climate Catastrophe – a Glimpse into the Near Future
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Nov 2024
11 Nov 2024 – What are we trying to avert by focusing on climate change/global warming? The catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain offer a sample of how human societies will ultimately be dismantled and destroyed in the absence of a drastic action that is nowhere on the horizon.
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Part of the Mechanism of Genocide in Palestine: The Complicity of ‘Mainstream’ Media
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Oct 2024
9 Oct 2024 – Netanyahu justified Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza in a speech to US Congress in July: ‘It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization; between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.’ The BBC did not provide an editorial warning that many would find such words ‘abhorrent.’
→ read full article‘Everyone in Gaza Is Sick, Injured, or Both’ – Israel’s 2.1 million Victims
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Sep 2024
24 Sep 2024 – More than 70% of Gaza’s housing has been damaged, along with schools, hospitals and businesses. Israeli air strikes have left more than 42 million tonnes of debris across the Strip, enough to fill a line of trucks stretching from New York to Singapore. Most dead bodies remain under the debris.
→ read full articleDid the West Provoke the Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jul 2024
26 Jun 2024 – Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system–every newspaper, website, TV channel–to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.
→ read full article‘This Is a Sharp Time’ – Israel’s ‘Day of Joy’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Jun 2024
20 Jun 2024 – No-one saw more clearly than Pilger that the West’s use of ultra-violence to impose its brutal, zero-sum version of ‘international order’ is now completely out in the open. Even the blurred obfuscations of the state-corporate media lens are no longer able to hide the reality of who ‘we’ are.
→ read full article‘Extremely Harrowing’: British Surgeon’s Gaza Testimony Buried by the ‘MSM’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 May 2024
20 May 2024 – When Genocide Is Merely ‘War’ – Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement.
→ read full article‘Genocide Enablers’: Gaza and the Corporate Media
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Apr 2024
5 Apr 2024 – A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. It is no accident that they supply news that covers up the crimes of elite power. However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal.
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Elite Fear of the Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Feb 2024
22 Feb 2024 – It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored–or suppressed.
→ read full articleGenocide – The Gaze from the Abyss
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Dec 2023
7 Dec 2023 – In October, we discussed the corporate media invention of so-called ‘disinformation experts’. Although journalists are ‘working within profit-maximising, billionaire-owned, advertiser-dependent, government-subsidised media, they are nevertheless exposing “disinformation” without the slightest trace of bias’.
→ read full article‘Are Hamas a Terror Group? Are They a Terror Group? Answer the Question!’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Nov 2023
17 Nov 2023 – The actual meaning of ‘terrorism’ was explained by Noam Chomsky: ‘It’s very simple: if “they” do it, it’s terrorism; if “we” do it, it’s counterterrorism. That’s a historical universal.’ In reality, ‘terrorism’ is a propaganda label that is slapped solely on Official Enemies and never ‘us’.
→ read full articleGaza – ‘A Graveyard for Children’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Nov 2023
8 Nov 2023 – Israel’s murderous bombardment of Gaza was described by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen as Israel ‘still pushing forward’. Bowen noted: ‘Palestinians call this genocide’. It is not just the Palestinians though, as Bowen well knows.
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The Achilles’ Heel of Propaganda – Julian Assange, Nick Cohen and Russell Brand
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Oct 2023
11 Oct 2023 – In the second decade of the 21st century, after much empty talk of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, it was discovered that people weren’t even capable of governing their own media consumption. Huge, artificially intelligent computers revealed…
→ read full articleThe Mass-Media Memory Hole – Blair, Ukraine and Libya
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Sep 2023
20 Sep 2023 – A key function of the ‘mainstream’ state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power. Knowledge on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly.
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Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence of Our Leaders
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Sep 2023
14 Sep 2023 – None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of worldwide extreme weather like in this summer. Canadian wildfires, a Hawaiian town incinerated, a Greek island devastated by rainfall, a Libyan town washed into the sea leaving 20,000 dead, killer hurricanes fueled by climate change, heatwaves, floods…
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Capitalist Ethics
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Jul 2023
Jul 2023 – No Joke –> Black Humor
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Climate Breakdown, Extinction and ‘the Most Stupid Boast’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 May 2023
16 May 2023 – Politics and ‘democracy’ are broken. It is now up to us, the public, to save ourselves.
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Souls for Sale – The Times Interviews Noam Chomsky
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 May 2023
4 May 2023 – In a society built on lies, the search for truth is a game.
→ read full article‘It May Be in No One’s Interest to Reveal More’: Cancelling Facts That Challenge Establishment Power
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Apr 2023
Journalists Pushing For Less Transparency
→ read full article‘The Dwindling Band of Iraq Obsessives’ – Endless War and Media Complicity
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2023
27 Mar 2023 – The 20th anniversary of the illegal US/UK-led invasion of Iraq has demonstrated once again the subservience of state and corporate media to Western power.
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Harry the ‘Traitor’ and Lynch ‘the Grinch’: The Corporate Media’s Automatic Smear Machine
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Jan 2023
19 Jan 2023 – Whatever we think of the Harry and Meghan Markle saga, it matters when the son of the current king and brother of the future king writes in his new book, ‘Spare’: “Does the Crown generate tourism income that benefits all? Of course. Does it also rest upon lands obtained and secured when the system was unjust and wealth was generated by exploited workers and thuggery, annexation and enslaved people? Can anyone deny it?”
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‘Nearly Every War Has Been the Result of Media Lies’: Julian Assange, State-Corporate Media and Ukraine
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2023
14 Dec 2022 – Julian Assange once observed that, ‘Nearly every war has been the result of media lies.’ For daring to publish evidence of US war crimes, Assange now sits in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, at risk of being extradited to the US within the next few weeks. The prospects for a fair trial range from miniscule to zero.
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‘On the Highway to Climate Hell’ – The Climate Crisis, Activism and Broken Politics
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2022
14 Nov 2022 – Last month, the UN Environment Agency issued its starkest warning yet about the climate crisis. The failure by governments around the world to cut carbon emissions means there is ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’. Limiting the rise of global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was the international agreement at COP21, the UN Climate Summit in Paris in 2015.
→ read full articleWicked Leaks (Part 1): How the Media Quarantined Evidence on Nord Stream Sabotage
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 Oct 2022
26 Oct 2022 – It is easy to understand why the Observer would prefer to quarantine the possibility of US involvement in a terror attack that would make a nonsense of the editors’ lofty rhetoric about a ‘postwar consensus’ based on ‘international law’.
→ read full articleWicked Leaks (Part 2): How the Media Quarantined Evidence on BP and Cancer in Iraq
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 Oct 2022
28 Oct 2022 – In Part 1, we described how state-corporate media non-reporting of sabotage at the Nord Stream pipelines was an example of truth increasingly quarantined by ‘mainstream’ media. At first sight, our second example might appear to contradict this claim.
→ read full articleOver the Rainbow–Disneyfied News and the ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion of Ukraine
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Oct 2022
30 Sep 2022 – It was unclear why Orwell would have been made ‘proud’ by examples of ‘Newspeak’. But anyway, imagine Maitlis, or any BBC presenter, referring to comparable Western propaganda on Afghanistan (‘Operation Enduring Freedom’), Iraq (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), Syria, or Ukraine, as ‘the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud’.
→ read full articleImposed Insanity – Royalty, Propaganda and the Coming Catastrophe
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Sep 2022
14 Sep 2022 – If every journalist, politician and priest is currently expressing devotion to Britain’s deceased monarch, it is not because she ‘served’ her country for 70 years. The powerful interests that determine Britain’s political and media agenda are not sentimentalists; they do not impose ‘managed democracy’ as a kind of game. Propaganda blitzes are always pragmatic.
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Don’t Extradite Assange
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Jun 2022
22 Jun 2022 – Last Friday’s decision by Priti Patel to authorise the extradition of Julian Assange to the US is both shameful and unsurprising. Her action paves the way for Assange to be tried under the 1917 Espionage Act, with a sentence of 175 years. The US wishes to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports the truth about the US.
→ read full articleDoubling Down on Double Standards – The Ukraine Propaganda Blitz
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Mar 2022
4 Mar 2022 – What a strange feeling it was to know that the cruise missile shown descending towards an airport and erupting in a ball of flame was NOT fired by US or British forces. This was Russia’s war of aggression, not ‘ours’. This was not an approved orgy of destruction and emphatically not to be celebrated.
→ read full article‘A Crime against Humanity’: The ‘Greenwash Festival’ of COP26
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Nov 2021
‘There’s a huge gap between our promises and where we need to be. We don’t talk about that gap coz that would entail a complex process called “Being Honest”. Being Honest would mean admitting that we’re failing. And we can’t do that coz then we’d have to stop failing. That would mean ending fossil-fuel subsidies and banning all new gas, coal and oil projects.’ — Juice Media
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Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping the Public away from Power
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Oct 2021
22 Oct 2021 – Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actual societal purpose ‘on matters that are of significance for established power’ is to avert any ‘danger’ that the public can ‘assert meaningful control over the political process’ (Herman and Chomsky, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Vintage, 1988/1994, p. 303).
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A Remarkable Silence: Media Blackout after Key Witness against Assange Admits Lying
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Jul 2021
1 Jul 2021 – A fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again. A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the WikiLeaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper.
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Two Centuries of ‘the Imperialist, Warmongering, Hate-Filled Guardian’
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Jun 2021
2 Jun 2021 – Guardian reader on Twitter: ‘My comment comparing the detention of the journalist in Belarus with what is being done to Craig Murray and Julian Assange in the UK has been deleted by The Guardian within seconds.’ Awkward readers like this are simply ostracised and no longer deemed part of the ‘Guardian’s community’.
→ read full article‘The Savage Punishment of Gaza’: Israel’s Latest Assault on Palestine’s Open Prison
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 May 2021
25 May 2021 – Recent media coverage of Israel incursions into Gaza has been full of the usual deceptions: Israel is ‘responding’ or ‘reacting’ to Palestinian ‘provocation’ and ‘escalation’; Palestinian rockets ‘killed’ Israelis, but Palestinians ‘have died’ from unnamed causes; Israel has ‘armed forces’ and ‘security forces’, but Hamas has ‘militants’. Reality: 248 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombardment in Gaza, including 66 children. Palestinian rocket fire killed 12 in Israel, including one child.
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Shocking Omissions: ‘Capitalism’s Conscience–200 Years of The Guardian’ – John Pilger and Jonathan Cook Respond
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Apr 2021
‘One man does not assert the truth which he knows, because he feels himself bound to the people with whom he is engaged; another, because the truth might deprive him of the profitable position by which he maintains his family; a third, because he desires to attain reputation and authority, and then use them in the service of mankind; a fourth, because he does not wish to destroy old sacred traditions; a fifth, because he has no desire to offend people; a sixth, because the expression of the truth would arouse persecution, and disturb the excellent social activity to which he has devoted himself.’ (Tolstoy, ‘What Then Must We Do?’, Green Classics, 1991, p.118)
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Propaganda by Omission: Libya, Syria, Venezuela and the UK
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Mar 2021
29 Mar 2021 – We live in a war-like society that supports and is in league with the world’s number one terrorist threat: the United States of America. Corporate media propaganda plays a key role in keeping things that way. Ten years ago this month, the US, UK and France attacked oil-rich Libya under the fictitious cover of ‘humanitarian intervention’. In this era of Permanent War, potential nuclear Armageddon and climate breakdown, the enormous cost to victims of UK and Western state-corporate policy around the world is incalculable.
→ read full article‘A Ghastly Future’? Israeli Apartheid, Biden, Starmer, Assange and Mass Extinction
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Jan 2021
20 Jan 2021 – ‘Paying attention fully to what is around us and in front of us, even though it hurts, is to be fully alive. Once we accept that anxiety and grief will be constant companions in this struggle, we can respond accordingly. We can help each other stay fully present, we can try to reduce harm, save what we can and plant some seeds for what might come next.’ A good start would be to reject the corporate media.
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‘None of It Reported’: How Corporate Media Buried the Assange Trial
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Oct 2020
7 Oct 2020 – One of the most imposing features of state-corporate propaganda is its incessant, repetitive nature. Over and over again, the ‘mainstream’ media have to convince the public that ‘our’ government prioritises the health, welfare and livelihoods of the general population, rather than the private interests of an elite stratum of society that owns and runs all the major institutions, banks, corporations and media.
→ read full articleRacism, Sexism, Classism – The Necessary Incoherence of ‘Mainstream’ Ethical Debate
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Aug 2020
30 Jul 2020 – If the killing of George Floyd was racism, how shall we describe US- and UK-led UN policy that ‘was more humane with its dogs’? How to describe corporate media that rail against domestic racism while perennially cheerleading the infinitely more violent international version? Why are we not taking a knee for Iraqis and Libyans? Why is no-one toppling Orwellian monuments to a ‘free press’ supporting global oppression, like the statue of George Orwell outside BBC Broadcasting House?
→ read full article‘Can I Keep You Safe? Your Future Is Uncertain’: Climate and the Fate of Humanity
Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Apr 2020
31 Mar 2020 – In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the most immediate objective is to slow its spread, minimise the death toll and help people through the crisis. But, despite government promises to support citizens who are now losing their jobs and income, the underlying establishment concern will be as it always has been: to preserve the global inequitable system of wealth and power. Private interests, including airlines, fossil fuel industries and sinister-sounding ‘businesses crucial to national security’, have been busy lobbying governments for taxfunder-paid bailouts.
→ read full article‘And Then – Nothing. Silence’: The Deadly Facade of ‘Democracy’
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Mar 2020
19 Feb 2020 – If you were mad enough to judge the state of the world by the daily outpourings of ‘mainstream’ media, you would have no real understanding of the perilous state of the human race. The glaring phenomenon of tightly managed ‘mainstream’ news and permissible commentary – on climate breakdown, capitalism and foreign policy – indicates one inescapable truth: there will not, and cannot, be major changes in society without genuinely public media. Human survival, quite literally, depends upon it.
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‘Burned at the Stake’ – The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Demolishes the Fake Claims Targeting Julian Assange
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Feb 2020
13 Feb 2020 – Vested interests may appear to hold all the cards – they work hard to give that impression – but this is only an appearance. The very fact that they work so relentlessly to shape public opinion indicates the precarious nature of their dominance. The problem is inherent, structural – a ‘democratic’ society that subordinates the needs of the many to the needs of the few is a society based on lies. Propaganda obfuscating those lies can be disseminated endlessly, day and night, but it will always be vulnerable to individuals and groups with genuine expertise motivated by genuine concern for others.
→ read full article‘Mirthless Laugh’ – The Persecution and Torture of Julian Assange
Editorial | Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2019
11 Jun 2019 – As Melzer says, corporate media have an astonishing power to influence what we think. We are all vulnerable to the impact of numerous, apparently independent and impartial journalists all insisting that Assange is a vile narcissist, that Jeremy Corbyn is a dangerous anti-semite, that Nicolas Maduro is a brutal dictator, that Gaddafi is planning a vast massacre, that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction that pose a genuine threat to the West, that Iran is working on a ‘nuclear trigger’, and so on.
→ read full articleBuried in Broad Daylight: The ‘Free Press’ and the Report from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on Douma, Syria
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2019
14 Jun 2019 – A defining feature of the propaganda system is that facts supporting the agenda of Western power are pushed to the forefront of the ‘mainstream’ media, while inconvenient facts are buried. A prime example is the shameful media silence in response to a devastating document leaked from the OPCW. ‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’
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40,000 Dead Venezuelans under US Sanctions: Corporate Media Turn a Blind Eye
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 May 2019
30 Apr 2019 – A new report on April 25 co-authored by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs for the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has estimated that US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in August 2017 have caused around 40,000 deaths. This atrocity has been entirely blanked by the ‘mainstream’ media. Additional sanctions imposed in January 2019 are likely to lead to tens of thousands of further deaths.
→ read full articleAssange Arrest (Part 1): ‘So now he’s our property.’
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Apr 2019
16 Apr 2019 – If ‘journalism’ meant what it is supposed to mean– acting as the proverbial ‘fourth estate’ to challenge power and to keep the public informed – then Julian Assange and WikiLeaks would be universally lauded as paragons. So would Chelsea Manning, the brave former US Army whistleblower who passed on to WikiLeaks more than 700,000 confidential US State Department and Pentagon documents, videos and diplomatic cables about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
→ read full articleAssange Arrest (Part 2): ‘A Definite Creep, a Probable Rapist’
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Apr 2019
18 Apr 2019 – As discussed in Part 1, the nub of this ‘mainstream’ scorn was the belief that Assange’s concerns about extradition were a cowardly excuse for fleeing possible sex crimes – fears of extradition were a nerdish, paranoid fantasy. It is a bitter irony, then, that Assange is currently trapped in the high-security Belmarsh Prison, which has been described as ‘Britain’s Guantanamo Bay’.
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The Destruction of Freedom: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and the Corporate Media
Media Lens | Editorial – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Mar 2019
19 March 2019 – The corporate media is institutionally opposed to the interests of the vast majority of the public; that is why we reject the label ‘mainstream’. The corporate media including BBC News, systematically promotes imperialist and exploitative state interests, together with private power in the form of big business, financial speculation, military forces, the arms industry, the fossil fuel lobby, destructive agribusiness, unsustainable food production and rampant global consumerism that is destroying ecosystems, ramping up mass loss of species and endangering human survival through climate chaos.
→ read full articleVenezuela Blitz (Part 1): Tyrants Don’t Have Free Elections
Editorial | Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Feb 2019
5 Feb 2019 – A ‘Propaganda Blitz’ is a fast-moving campaign to persuade the public of the need for ‘action’ or ‘intervention’ furthering elite interests. Affecting great moral outrage, corporate media line up to insist that a watershed moment has arrived – something must be done! A classic propaganda blitz was triggered on January 23, when Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself ‘interim President’.
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Democracy or Extinction
Media Lens | Editorial – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Jan 2019
22 Jan 2019 – What will it take for governments to take real action on climate? When will they declare an emergency and do what needs to be done? How much concerted, peaceful public action will be required to disrupt the current economic and political system that is driving humanity to the brink of extinction? Meanwhile, climate records continue to tumble. 2018 was the hottest for the world’s oceans since records began in the 1950s, continuing a deeply worrying trend. Moreover, the last five years were the five hottest.
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Remembrance – The Dehumanised Human
Media Lens | Editorial – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jan 2019
“From infancy, by every possible means–class books, church services, sermons, speeches, books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments– the people are stupefied in one direction: unquestioning patriotism.” — Leo Tolstoy
“The average individual does not permit himself to be aware of thoughts or feelings which are incompatible with the patterns of his culture, and hence he is forced to repress them.” — Erich Fromm
Limits of Dissent – Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian
Editorial | Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Dec 2018
6 Dec 2018 – Even a comparatively honest, Chomskyite journalist like Greenwald is either not willing or not able to tell the whole truth about a paper that has done enormous harm in promoting Perpetual War with endless nonsense about ‘our’ supposed ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians in oil-rich countries like Iraq and Libya. The Guardian has, at last, begun responding to the climate extinction crisis, but it has long downplayed the gravity of the crisis and the truth of corporate denialism, while promoting high status consumerism and fossil fuel advertising.
→ read full articleThe Filter Bubble: Owen Jones and Con Coughlin
Editor | Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Nov 2018
14 Nov 2018 – There is something dreamlike about the system of mass communication sometimes described as ‘mainstream media’. Why are defence editors, defence correspondents, diplomatic editors and the like so often biased in favour of the Western defence and diplomatic establishment they are covering? And why are they allowed to demonstrate this bias without anyone so much as commenting? The filter bubble ensures that these questions can never be asked, much less answered.
→ read full articleHow to Be a Reliable ‘Mainstream’ Journalist
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Nov 2018
8 Nov 2018 – There are certain rules you need to follow as a journalist if you are going to demonstrate to your editors, and the media owners who employ you, that you can be trusted. Being a reliable ‘mainstream’ journalist entails: propagating the myth that ‘we’ are the good guys; conforming to the requirements of wealth and power; keeping one’s head down and never challenging authority; and refraining from any public discussion about these rules.
→ read full article‘Follow Your Bliss’ – The Tweet That Brought Corporate Journalism to the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown
Editor | Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Mar 2018
‘Forget it. Don’t write for the “mainstream”. Don’t write for money. Don’t write for prestige. Just “follow your bliss” by writing what you absolutely love to write to inspire and enlighten other people. Write what seems interesting, important and true, and give it away for free.’
→ read full articlePreferred Conclusions: The BBC, Syria and Venezuela
Media Lens | Dissident Voice – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Sep 2017
13 Sep 2017 – As the late media activist Danny Schechter wrote, when it comes to the corporate broadcast media: ‘The more you watch, the less you know.’ Schechter’s observation only fails in one key respect: ‘mainstream’ output does tell us a lot about which foreign governments are being lined up for regime change.
→ read full articleFake News about “Fake News”: The Media Performance Pyramid
Media Lens | Editorial – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Dec 2016
5 Dec 2016 – In the wake of Brexit and Trump, “mainstream” media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’.
→ read full articleFiltering the Election
Media Lens | Editorial – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2016
When the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Assad, and now Donald Trump, are declared the latest ‘New Hitler’, we learn little except that they are enemies of the establishment. It means the ‘On’ button has been pressed on a propaganda machine designed for maximal demonisation, leaving no room for public doubt.
→ read full articleYemen Vote – The Responsibility to Protect Profits
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Nov 2016
State-corporate propaganda is full of ‘shoulds’, all rooted in ‘our’ alleged ‘responsibility to protect’. Why ‘us’? Why not Sweden or Iceland? Because ‘we’ care. ‘We’ just care more. A key task of the corporate media is to pretend this is something more than a charade.
→ read full articleMenwith Menace: Britain’s Complicity in Saudi Arabia’s Terror Campaign against Yemen
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Sep 2016
13 Sep 2016 – The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.
→ read full articleAnatomy of a Propaganda Blitz: “Hitlergate”
Media Lens – Dissident Voice,
23 May 2016
Elites have openly advocated the ‘manufacture of consent’ for decades. In 1932, highly influential US foreign policy adviser Reinhold Niebuhr wrote of the need for ’emotionally potent oversimplifications’ and ‘necessary illusion’ to overcome the threat to elite control posed by ‘the stupidity of the average man’.
→ read full articleAnatomy of a Propaganda Blitz
Media Lens – Dissident Voice,
16 May 2016
We live in a time when state-corporate interests are cooperating to produce propaganda blitzes intended to raise public support for the demonisation and destruction of establishment enemies. Below, we will examine five key components of an effective propaganda campaign of this kind.
→ read full articleThatcher’s Tyrants – The Tanks, The Guns, The Christmas Cards
David Edwards – Media Lens,
31 Aug 2015
“Tyrants willing to serve the West are sent tanks, guns and Christmas cards. Their crimes are buried out of sight, protected from censure at the United Nations. Likewise, outrage at dissidents’ alleged ‘support’ for tyranny is mostly a device used to attack voices threatening power and profit. The state-corporate moral compass is not malfunctioning or broken – there is no moral compass.” – Howard Zinn
→ read full articleWhen Free Speech Becomes Dead Silence – The Israel Lobby and a Cowed Academia
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Apr 2015
8 Apr 2015 – The sudden cancellation of an academic conference on Israel, as well as the lack of outcry from ‘mainstream’ media, demonstrates once again the skewed limits to ‘free speech’ in ‘advanced’ Western democracies. ‘Je suis Charlie’ already feels like ancient history. It certainly does not apply when it comes to scrutiny of the state of Israel.
→ read full articleThe Purpose and the Pretence – Bombing Isis
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Sep 2014
Traditionally, claims that an Official Enemy is uniquely Evil rise to a deafening crescendo just prior to an attack on that enemy. The USA does not bomb countries for humanitarian objectives. Humanitarianism is the pretense, not the purpose.
→ read full articleSome Deaths Really Matter – The Disproportionate Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Killings
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Jul 2014
Israeli deaths matter much more than Palestinian deaths. This has long been a distinguishing feature of Western news media reporting on the Middle East. The recent blanket coverage afforded to the brutal killing of three Israeli teenagers highlights this immutable fact.
→ read full articleJournalist Or Activist? Smearing Glenn Greenwald
David Edwards – Media Lens,
28 Oct 2013
Modern thought control is dependent on subliminal communication. Messages influencing key perceptions are delivered unseen, unnoticed, with minimal public awareness of what is happening or why. For example, journalists tell us that Hugo Chavez was ‘divisive’, that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are ‘narcissistic’, that George Galloway is ‘controversial’. But beneath their literal meaning, these adjectives communicate a hidden message: that these individuals are acceptable targets for negative media judgement; they are fair game.
→ read full articleWhere Journalism Collides With State ‘Security’: BBC News, MI5 and the Mantra of ‘Keeping People Safe’
David Cromwell – Media Lens,
21 Oct 2013
We make no apology for again citing the American writer H. L. Mencken: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
→ read full articleThe Illusion of Democracy
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Dec 2012
We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilizations will blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites, who successfully convinced us that we no longer possessed the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe, will use their resources to create privileged little islands where they will have access to security and goods denied to the rest of us. (p. 197)
→ read full articleTargeting Syria – The ‘Bad News’ For The Guardian
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Oct 2011
Afghanistan and Iraq may still be in flames. A bloodbath may continue to flow from Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Libya. No matter, mainstream journalists are appalled that a double Russian and Chinese veto at the UN has thwarted Western efforts to do more good in Syria. The two powers rejected the latest draft of a UN Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government and preparing the way for international sanctions. In the Guardian, Middle East editor Ian Black wrote last week:
→ read full articleBad News from the BBC: ‘Replete with Imbalance and Distortion’
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 May 2011
One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, ‘Violence erupts at Israel borders’. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC ‘impartiality’ decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.
→ read full article“Put the Palestinians on a Diet”
Media Lens – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Nov 2010
Media Bury Documents Revealing Israel’s Deliberate Policy of Near Starvation for Gaza: Israel has been forced to reveal what Palestinians and other observers on the ground have known for a long time: that the blockade of Gaza is state policy intended to inflict collective punishment, not to bolster Israeli “security”…. The released documents, whose existence Israel had denied for eighteen months, reveal that the state approved “a policy of deliberate reduction” of basic goods, including food and fuel, in the Gaza Strip.
→ read full article