Media Lens

David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens receive the Gandhi Foundation Peace Award, 2007

Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. The site is financed by donations from its supporters.

The stated aim of the website is to draw attention to what they regard as "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately". The editors produce regular 'Media Alerts' whose intention is to expose what they consider to be serious examples of bias, omission or deception in the British mainstream media, with an emphasis on media outlets legally obliged to be impartial (the BBC and Channel 4 News) or considered liberal like The Guardian and The Independent. Media Lens frequently disputes the impartiality of the BBC and draws attention to what it sees as the limits within which the liberal press operates. The editors invite their readers to challenge journalists, editors and programme producers directly via email, specifically discouraging abusive contact.

Media Lens is admired by John Pilger, who has written about their "remarkable website", Other journalists, not necessarily identified with the left, have also made positive comments about the group, but it has come into conflict with others. In mid-2008, journalist Bronwen Maddox, then with The Times, complained about "threatening emails from visitors to Media Lens", although very few were quoted.

Others have claimed the group had a "campaign" against John Sloboda and the Iraq Body Count. George Monbiot has also criticised Media Lens for their apparent defence of Edward S. Herman Oliver Kamm has been blunt, Media Lens "stands with genocide deniers" in its connection with Herman and his colleague, David Peterson.

History and methodology

By the late 1990s, David Edwards had gradually come to the conclusion that a "media suppression of the truth about the effect of the sanctions against Iraq existed, and media indifference to climate change: "the media were still celebrating the idea that Britain might soon be blessed with a Mediterranean climate." Meanwhile, Cromwell had found the coverage of certain issues "paltry" and had received a negligible response from the newspapers he had written to.

The two men first met in 1999, and Edwards suggested beginning a collaborative website. The website is maintained by webmaster Oliver Maw, and is financed through voluntary subscription and donations from grant-funding bodies. Jonathan Cook, a sympathetic journalist who covers the Middle East, has also contributed articles. Their media alerts are distributed without charge by email to a reported international readership of around 14,000 people.

The editors of Media Lens assert that "the corporate media is the source of some of the greatest, most lethal illusions of our age". Central to Media Lens analyses is the 'Propaganda model' identified with Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, developed in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988). This attempts to demonstrate systemic bias in the media in terms of structural economic causes proposing that news passes through five conceptual filters before publication. Chomsky himself has commended Media Lens, who have "performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight and care". 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.

In Cromwell and Edwards' opinion, western government actions have followed "a historical pattern of deception that dates back" for several centuries. According to them, journalists 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 though explicitly reject accusations that their arguments take the form of conspiracy theories. According to Cromwell: “there is, of course, no conspiracy. It is more subtle, powerful and pervasive than that”. A former supporter though, the philosopher Rupert Read, has criticised their reliance on source material written by academics such as Michel Chossudovsky, who Read argues is a conspiracy theorist, an opinion shared by Times journalist Oliver Kamm.

In the opinion of the Media Lens editors, mainstream journalists gradually absorb an unquestioning corporate mindset as their careers progress, becoming unwilling to question their own occupations or governments claims, rather than consciously lying. In a statement 'About Us' they observe: "We all have a tendency to believe what best suits our purpose; highly paid, highly privileged editors and journalists are no exception." In their view, the liberal wing of the mainstream media are gatekeepers "of acceptable debate from a left or Green perspective, 'thus far and no further.'" They assert that in a corporate system dissidenting views have difficulty gaining attention. In a twitter exchange, Times journalist David Aaronovitch commented that Glenn Greenwald's support for the group would be the equivalent of "Your funeral" in the impact it would have on his career.

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor of The Observer, on the other hand considers them "controlling Politburo lefties who insist that the only acceptable version of the truth is theirs alone and that everybody else should march to the same step and sing the same (old party) song". In Beaumont's opinion Media Lens does not engage in dialogue with their targets, rather they exploit the media to create a virtual soap box for their opinions.

In regular Media Alerts, the editors (and other contributors) highlight what they see as incidents of bias, encouraging email campaigns from their supporters. The editors frequently engage in email exchanges with British journalists. Media Lens hosts a message board and a discussion forum, used for political and media issues. According to Peter Beaumont though, their email campaigns amount to contact from "a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin". Guardian journalist Michael White at the end of an article in January 2012 addressed Media Lens directly: "Times are tough for all media, including the liberal media. Bear it in mind, comrades: who would you have to attack if we weren't there?"

Coverage

Iraq

Media Lens argue that in 2003, the BBC's reporting on the Iraq war was "Boys' [sic] Own war pornography". They have cited a rhetorical question posed by BBC correspondent Bridget Kendall in 2006 about whether the Iraq war was "justified" or a "disastrous miscalculation" as a demonstration of personal bias, which they see as being the "norm", rather than impartiality. They argue this excludes the opinions of the anti-war movement, and ex-UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who are considered to have seen the war as "an illegal war of aggression".

Media Lens has argued that journalists regularly present inflated assessments of the accomplishments of western politicians. They cite comments made by Andrew Marr in 2003, while the BBC's political editor, a journalist they consider overtly sympathetic to the former prime minister: "[Blair] said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right". The Media Lens editors asserted in 2003 that "there never was an Iraqi threat" and "If Tony Blair and George W. Bush are not guilty of war crimes, who is?" They contrast the positive comments the mainstream media make about western leaders with the epithets used to describe other politicians such as Hugo Chávez, the former President of Venezuela. In 2004 they complained about the limited media references to Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whiom resigned from the UN over the sanctions they administrated, and Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq.

Peter Beaumont accused the group in 2006 of a campaign intended to silence John Sloboda and his Iraq Body Count project, because it produced a victim count lower than the academic surveys on the casualties during the Iraq War published in The Lancet by academics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In 2006, David Fuller, a journalist on Newsnight, covered their critique of Sloboda and the IBC's methods and also summarised his findings on the BBC website. The Media Lens editors considered Fuller's attack "the most distorted and damaging smear of our work" up to that point but the editors' decision not to accept invitations to appear on Newsnight led Fuller to accuse them of "[refusing] to engage in any way that does not allow them total control of the interaction." Sloboda said Media Lens "are a pressure group that use[s] aggressive and emotionally destructive tactics". Media Lens in turn have accused Sloboda of not being an epidemiologist and therefore not qualified to do a study on deaths in Iraq or criticize other studies done by real epidemiologists. John Sloboda himself has described IBC as amateurs.

In August 2009 Znet, an American radical website which has reprinted the editors' media alerts, published an article by Robert Shone which accused the group of errors in its critique of the IBC, not least in its assumption that the IBC only used western media sources in counting the number of fatalities in Iraq. Asked in an interview for Green Left Weekly, Cromwell said they had responded to Shone "long ago", but their rebuttals had "dropped off the bottom" of the group's message board. About Shone’s ZNet article: "We learned a long time ago that constantly responding to unreasonable critics just feeds their obsession and inner turmoil. It’s why we stopped."

Srebrenica: Chomsky and others

Concerning the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, the Media Lens editors' asserted in November 2009, "Apart from affirming that a massacre did take place, we have written virtually nothing about Srebrenica". The sources of conflict with their critics have been the distinction between a massacre and the act of genocide and the freedom to contest generally accepted evidence for historical events.

The Guardian newspaper published on 31 October 2005 an interview with Noam Chomsky conducted by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained about the interview in a letter to Ian Mayes the readers editor on 3 November 2005, after which Media Lens quickly responded with their first article on this issue on 4 November. The Guardian apologised within a few weeks concluding that they had misrepresented Chomsky's views on the Srebrenica massacre and his support for Diana Johnstone. Neither of them "have ever denied the fact of the massacre" it was concluded. Media Lens responded to The Guardian's change of mind in a second article posted on 21 November.

The historian and Balkans specialist Marko Attila Hoare, supporting Brockes against her employers, questioned the validity of Chomsky and Herman's rejection of the claims of their genocidal denial, and cited the letter by Chomsky's (and others) defending the book by Diana Johnstone (Fools’ Crusade) as evidence which goes beyond the sole issue of free speech by calling it "an outstanding work". The fall out from the Brockes interview continued for some time. Ian Mayes, then the readers' editor of The Guardian, wrote on 12 December 2005 about "several hundred" emails from Media Lens followers, who were campaigning in support of Chomsky, to Mayes himself and Brockes.

In June 2011 George Monbiot accused Media Lens of "maintain[ing] that [Edward S.] Herman and [David] Peterson were 'perfectly entitled' to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica". (Media Lens editors had written in 2009: "[Herman and Peterson] also do not accept the figure cited by [Oliver] Kamm and others, but that they are perfectly entitled to do.") Monbiot accused Herman, and Media Lens, of taking "the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers". Media Lens in turn accused Monbiot of making serious errors in quoting from the work of Herman and Peterson. Journalist Jonathan Cook thought Monbiot was being censorious in his criticism of Media Lens and the others.

Aside from Holocaust denial, which Media Lens finds particularly insidious "because of the extreme racism and hatred motivating the doubt in this particular instance", they have written:

To be clear, we reject the right of any court, any government, indeed anyone, to apply labels like 'genocide' to historical events and then, not merely argue but demand that they be accepted. The assumption that human institutions are in possession of Absolute Truth belongs to the era of The Inquisition, not to serious debate.

The Times commentator Oliver Kamm, ("[o]ne of our most relentless critics"), has suggested that their apparent denial of genocidal acts utilises the same methods used by Holocaust deniers such as David Irving. Kamm wrote in October 2012: "The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has revealed the identity of 6,598 people missing since the fall of Srebrenica, through DNA analysis of human remains in mass graves. It estimates the total number of victims as around 8,100. If ML maintains that deniers [Herman and Peterson] are “perfectly entitled” to their position, it must believe that the ICMP has faked that analysis".

Media Lens claim that all they have done is "defend Noam Chomsky" against the Guardian's claims in the rescinded interview by Brockes.

Syria

Rupert Read, an academic and Green Party politician, has claimed that Media Lens tends to talk up the numbers of victims from western actions, but minimise those of regimes in conflict with the west, such as those of Milošević and Bashar al-Assad in Syria. He has accused them of using dubious source material on fatalities in the 2012 Syrian crisis from Aisling Byrne and Robert Dreyfuss. David Edwards responded that Pilger and David Peterson,and others, responded positively to their alerts on Syria. and asserted "We have received literally one negative response – from Rupert Read". David Edwards responded that they had received a "tremendously positive response" to the alerts on Syria, but only a single "negative response – from Rupert Read".

The cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson in June 2012 suggested they indulge in "shilling for tyrants" following an exchanges with them on Twitter in which the editors accused him of depicting a bloodstained Bashar al-Assad after the Houla massacre without having evidence of the Assad regime's responsibility for the atrocity and for using only his "'cartoonist's hunch'" as proof. They asked Rowson on Twitter: "Would you rely on a 'hunch' in depicting Obama and Cameron with mouths smeared with the blood of massacred children?" According to Rowson though, accusing them of advocating literalness in his work: "despite my repeated requests, they still won’t or can’t tell me why they don’t also demand my evidence for alleging that Merkel [Angela Merkel] and Lagarde [Christine Lagarde] have really truly desecrated corpses".

Legal threat from The Times

On 7 July 2008 Peter Wilby reported in The Guardian that The Times' legal manager Alastair Brett had written to Edwards threatening legal action. He had asked the editors of Media Lens, on copyright grounds, to remove emails received from Bronwen Maddox which they had incorporated into an article on her writings concerning Iran. This was complied with.

Brett added that Maddox had received "vexatious and threatening emails from visitors to Media Lens" and threatened an application for a high court injunction to prevent their users from contacting Maddox. Although Maddox reported receiving dozens of comments, the only email directly quoted by Brett and Maddox was from "the second coming of Jesus Christ" with a threat to fire Maddox, which had been sent in similar form to dozens of other journalists and to Media Lens itself. Wilby quoted Edwards asking "what world do these people live in that they have to be so protected from the rough and tumble of political debate?"

Reception

Media Lens has occasional received positive responses from the mainstream media. Peter Barron, former editor of the BBC's Newsnight, commented in 2005 on Media Lens lobbies over the programme's content. He added: "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."

John Pilger believes Media Lens has "had such an extraordinary influence since" their work began "that, without their 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". Media Lens though are critical of dissenting voices, like Pilger, who work in the mainstream media. While considering the Australian-born journalist a "huge inspiration", they argue that Pilger's "work is used to strengthen the propaganda system‘s false claims of honesty and openness".

The journalist Peter Wilby ("their basic critique is correct"), who occasionally commissioned them while he was editor of the New Statesman lamented in a review of their book Guardians of Power (2006) that: "The Davids are virtually unknown; as leftist critics, they are marginalised." Writing about the same work Pilger commented: "Not a single national newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can remember", including the left-wing Morning Star, although the newspaper did review their second book in 2009.

On 12 December 2007, Edwards and Cromwell were awarded the Gandhi International Peace Award. The award was presented by Denis Halliday, former United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq and himself a recipient of the award in 2003.

Further reading

The editors of Media Lens have co-authored two books:

• Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, Pluto Press (London), 2006 ISBN 978-0-7453-2483-8
• Newspeak in the 21st Century, Pluto Press (London), August 2009 ISBN 978-0-7453-2893-5]

David Cromwell's Why Are We The Good Guys? (September 2012, Alresford: Zero Books, ISBN 978-1780993652) also draws on Media Lens' contact with journalists.

See also

• Media Matters for America
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

External links

• Media Lens website
• Gandhi International Peace Award acceptance speech