The Media Lens Chamber Of Propaganda Horrors – An Appeal For Support

Media Lens

Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.

It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now.

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But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky commented:

‘Part of the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they have essentially no international support. For a good reason – they don’t have wealth, they don’t have power. So they don’t have rights. It’s the way the world works – your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.’

It is indeed the way the world works. It is also the way the medieval world worked. (...)

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Tags: #news #propaganda #censorship #corporate_media #gaza #israel #iran #palestine #palestinians #russia #ukraine #news #media #news_media #journalism #journalist

The Mass-Media Memory Hole – Blair, Ukraine and Libya

Media Lens

A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.

Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda. (...)

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In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control. (...)

If we broaden the scope to British military interventions around the world since 1945, there are as many as 83 examples. (...)

The criminal history of the US in terms of overthrowing foreign governments, or attempting to do so, was thoroughly documented by William Blum, author of ‘Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II’ and ‘Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower’. (...)

These multiple invasions, coups and wars are routinely sold to the public as ‘humanitarian interventions’ by Western leaders and their propaganda allies of the ‘mainstream’ media. (...)

Ukraine
The mass-media memory hole is proving invaluable in protecting the public from uncomfortable truths about Ukraine. Western leaders’ expression of concern for Ukraine is cover for their desire to see Russian leader Vladimir Putin removed from power and Russia ‘weakened’, as US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted earlier this year. (...)

Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone noted recently that:

‘Arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.’

Pointing out that the West ‘provoked’ Russia is not the same as saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, we were clear in our first media alert following the invasion:

‘Russia’s attack is a textbook example of “the supreme crime”, the waging of a war of aggression.’ (...)

‘We know that western actions provoked the war in Ukraine because many western foreign policy experts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine.’

But, ultimately, the US blocked the peace efforts. Sachs paraphrased Bennett’s explanation as to why:

‘They [the US] wanted to look tough to China. They were worried that this could look weak to China.’

Incredible! The US’s primary concern is to look strong to China, its chief rival in world affairs. This recalls the motivation behind the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War as a show of might to the Soviet Union. (...)

Libya
The memory-hole phenomenon is a huge factor in media coverage of Libya which, as we wrote last week, has suffered terribly in recent flooding and the collapse of two dams. The city of Derna was washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours, leaving 20,000 people dead.

But vital recent history has been almost wholly buried by state-corporate media. In 2011, NATO’s attack on Libya essentially destroyed the state and killed an estimated 40,000 people. The nation, once one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education, became a failed state, with the collapse of essential services, the re-emergence of slave markets and raging civil war. (...)

More on this, and the propaganda blitz that enabled NATO’s attack on Libya, can be found in our 2016 media alert, ‘The Great Libya War Fraud’. (...)

Very little of the above vital history and context to the recent catastrophic flooding in Libya is included in current ‘mainstream’ news reporting. At best, there is token mention. At worst, there is deeply deceitful and cynical rewriting of history. (...)

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Tags: #media #news_media #bbc #propaganda #govrenment_propaganda #the_guardian #regime_change #red_line #nato #humanitarian_interventions #military_interventions #ukraine #libia #blair #starmer #us #united_states #iraq

The media needs to cover the climate crisis as seriously as it covered Covid

The Guardian

With some exceptions, the news industry is still not responding to the true scale and danger of global heating. (...)

Despite our living through the hottest summer in history, as well as wildfires, tropical storms and crazy-hot oceans, the news media continues to be outdone by the rest of popular culture when it comes to covering the most urgent story of our time.

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‘With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution.’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Inexplicably, climate crisis remains a niche concern for most mainstream news outlets. In the US, most TV coverage of this summer’s hellish weather did not even mention the words “climate change” or “climate crisis”, much less explain that the burning of oil, gas and coal is what’s driving that hellish weather. Too many newsrooms continue to see climate as a siloed beat of specialists. (...)

Dramatic changes in climate have made increased news coverage of extreme weather unavoidable. But explaining the climate connection to extreme weather is a different task. Linking changes in the weather to the decisions being made by industry and government, that have overheated the planet is where news coverage needs to end up. (...)

In every newsroom in every community, climate crisis needs to be thought of not as a beat, but as a through-line involving everything we do. No corner of the newsroom is exempt – not business or culture, not sports or city hall. (...)

Can politics reporters and editors scale back their fixation on horse-race coverage and instead provide the kind of coverage that voters need to make informed choices? Election coverage should help audiences understand what the candidates will do about the climate crisis if elected, not just what they say. It should hold candidates accountable by asking them not (as Fox did at the first US Republican debate last month) whether they believe in climate change but rather, “What is your plan to deal with the climate crisis?”

Overall, we also need much more and better coverage of climate solutions. (...)

What else does “more and better” climate coverage mean? We expect some answers to emerge this week at Climate Changes Everything: Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation, a conference at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. (...)

With the planet on fire, more and better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Only when the general public understands what is happening, why and what needs to be done, can large enough numbers of people compel governments and corporations to change course. (...)

But the news industry as a whole is still not matching the scale of the crisis with the kind of coverage that’s required. (...)

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> See also: Climate Collapse – The Grim Silence Of Our Leaders (Media Lens)

Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #fossil_fuels #co2 #pollution #air_pollution #global_warming #extreme_weather #forest_fires #flooding #heat_waves #health #climate_deniers #propaganda #fake_news #disinformation #capitalism #industrial_capitalism #media #news #news_media #journalist #journalism #Covering_Climate_Now

Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future

The Guardian

The abuses the Guardian helped him bring to worldwide attention go on: the authorities have merely made it harder to expose them. (...)

[O]ne story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.

The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens. (...)

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‘Edward Snowden, like so many whistleblowers, has paid a heavy personal price for what he considered as an act of public service.’ Snowden in Hong Kong, June 2013. Photograph: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras/AP.

It led to multiple court actions in which governments were found to have been in breach of their constitutional and/or legal obligations. It led to a scramble by governments to retrospectively pass legislation sanctioning the activities they had been covertly undertaking. And it has led to a number of stable-door attempts to make sure journalists could never again do what the Guardian and others did 10 years ago. (...)

So do not hold your breath for future Edward Snowdens in this country. The British media is, by and large, not known for holding its security services rigorously to account, if at all. (...)

[T]here has been little more than a whisper of protest over the new national security bill or the threatened extradition of Julian Assange.

This is curious. The notion that the state has no right to enter a home and seize papers was established in English law. (...) (1765) (...)

Please spare a thought for Snowden, who, like so many whistleblowers, has paid a heavy personal price for what he (and many others around the world) considered an act of public service. (...)

“The press,” as the editor of the Times wrote in 1852, “lives by disclosure … The statesman’s duty is precisely the reverse.” Amen.

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Tags: #news #press #newspaper #media #news_media #journalist #journalism #snowden #edward_snowden #censorship #surveillance #mass_surveillance #privacy #nsa #National_Security_Agency #secrecy #government #secret_service #state_spying

Souls For Sale – The Times Interviews Noam Chomsky

Media Lens

(...) Recall the context in which news and commentary appear: the tsunami of 24/7 corporate advertising that is subject to no discussion whatever regarding its bias. Unless we accept that these adverts should be balanced by a counter-tsunami of anti-corporate advertising, there is no question of media impartiality for this reason alone.

But this is still just scratching the surface. In our corporate society, the greatest triumph of the corporate monoculture is not the filtered content of the daily newspaper or nightly newscast; it is us, our conception of who we are, of what it means to be human. We may mock the Sun and lament the Mail, but look in the mirror – we are the ultimate product of propaganda. (...)

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if millions of corporate men and women fundamentally perceive themselves as products to be sold on the job market, the question of non-conformity, of challenging corporate society, does not even arise. (...)

When Fromm says ‘nothing is too serious’, he means that we are fundamentally indifferent.

Can we point to evidence? Last week, it was reported that the highest April temperature ever recorded in Spain – the kind of record that might, historically, have been broken by a fraction of a degree – had been blown away by a rise of 5C.

This latest sign of impending climate catastrophe was reported briefly and then forgotten. It received a tiny fraction of the merited attention and concern – not just from the press but also from the public. It was just one more example of how ‘modern man exhibits an amazing lack of realism for all that matters. For the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought’. (Fromm, p.166) (...)

We learn a lot when the likes of Chorley encounter Chomsky and other dissidents whose souls are not for sale; not because the Chorleys have much to say, but because we are witness, not just to a clash of ideas and values, but of ways of being. It is a clash between sincerity and fakery, clarity and obfuscation, engagement and indifference, compassion and egotism. (...)

‘We’re racing towards a precipice of environmental destruction. We’ve got a couple of decades in which we could mitigate or control it, but we’re racing in the opposite direction – nothing could be more dangerous than that. That means reaching irreversible tipping points, at which stage, just steady decline to the destruction of human life on Earth. We’ve never faced that before. Actually, we’ve been facing it in a way since August 6th, 1945, but never at this level of danger.’

Typically for this kind of disengaged journalism, Chorley responded to this awful assertion as if he hadn’t truly heard what had been said, responding: ‘It’s interesting that; I was going to ask you…’. ‘It’s interesting’ was not a serious response to the gravity of what Chomsky had said. Chorley blandly recognised that politicians didn’t seem very interested in responding to the climate crisis. As for the rest of us, he said, ‘we spend our time talking about trivial things’. (...)

Chomsky mentioned some non-trivial crises that are discussed: the Ukraine war, the Yemen war, ‘the total destruction of Iraq, going on still; these are all very serious issues’.

He noted, further, that, last year, fossil fuel production had increased. (...)

Chorley then raised the issue of Ukraine:

‘Certainly, in the UK, the left – actually under people like Jeremy Corbyn – argued that it wasn’t Russia that was the enemy, it was the US that was destabilising the world. (...)

Chomsky responded:

‘Well, the invasion of Ukraine is plainly a war crime. You can’t put it in the same category as greater war crimes, but it’s a major one.’

Which crimes did Chomsky have in mind? He noted that the UN and Pentagon estimate that about 8,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine:

‘That’s a lot of people, what the United States and Britain do overnight.’

Of course, the 8,000 figure is ‘presumably an underestimate’, Chomsky added, before offering a series of thought experiments:

‘Let’s say it’s twice as much – that would put it at the level of the [1982] US-backed, Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 20,000 people. Let’s say it’s off by a factor of ten… that would put it in the category of Reagan’s terrorist atrocities in El Salvador, roughly on the order of 80,000. Of course, Iraq is just another dimension.

‘So, it’s serious, a terrible crime. But you can understand why the Global South does not take very seriously the eloquent protestations of Western countries about this “unique episode in history”. They’ve been victims of far more. (...)

These, indeed, are simply facts – the approximate death tolls are well-known, highly credible. The killers are known. There is no ideological bias in these observations. There is ideological bias in the notion that these facts are somehow ‘leftist’. (...)

Chorley again fell back on the ‘equivalence’ theme:

‘But you’re then drawing comparisons between Nato and China and Russia; you see an equivalence between…’

Again, Chomsky rejected the claim:

‘No, I don’t; Nato is a much more aggressive alliance. Nato has invaded Yugoslavia, invaded Libya, invaded Ukraine – backed up the invasion of Ukraine – backed up the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s an aggressive military alliance. Everybody outside the West can see it. In the West, we’re not allowed to think it because we’re deeply controlled by adherence to the party line. But everybody else can see it.’ (...)

In a final, remarkable question indicating just how disengaged and indifferent he had been throughout the interview, Chorley asked:

‘Finally, then, let’s round this off; let’s try and be a bit more optimistic… Will the next century be better than the last?’

Again, it was as if Chorley hadn’t heard what Chomsky had said. Heroically, Chomsky retained his patience for a few seconds longer:

‘There won’t be organised human life a century from now, unless we reverse the course the leadership is now taking towards racing over the precipice on climate destruction.’

By way of a final little joke, Chomsky added:

‘You read the latest IPCC report, I’m sure.’

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Tags: #media #news_media #censorship #propaganda #coporate_media #bbc #the_guardian #advertising #fromm #erich_fromm #new_statesman #Mehdi_Hasan #jonathan_freedland #times_radio #noam_chomsky #chomsky #murdoch #rupert_murdoch #chorley #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #climate_destruction #global_warming #ipcc #extinction

‘There Is No Way To Fool Physics’: Climate Breakdown And State-Corporate Madness

Media Lens
In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. (...)

This month, an intense heatwave did indeed hit northern India with temperatures reaching a record high of 49.2C in parts of Delhi. This was the fifth heatwave in the Indian capital since March. (...)

Meanwhile, the highest daily level of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere was recorded. (...)

Scientists are warning that the 1.5C global heating limit set by governments is about to be breached. (...)

On top of all that, climate scientists recently reported that global warming could cause the most cataclysmic extinction of marine life in the past 250 million years.

If the news media were not owned and run for the benefit of state-corporate elites, all this would be huge headline news – day after day, month after month. There would be vigorous debate across all the main media outlets, building pressure on governments to implement the urgent radical changes required to avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis. (...)

For example, Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit research and campaign group which monitors and exposes corporate lobbying on EU policy making, recently warned that:

‘Fossil fuel giants are shaping the EU’s response to the energy crisis.’

Six big energy companies were named: Shell, BP, Total, ENI, E.ON and Vattenfall. (...)

In the never-ending corporate quest for profit, even as the planet’s life support systems are failing, oil and gas corporations ‘are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal.’ If governments allow the projects to proceed, these ‘carbon bombs’ will ‘trigger catastrophic climate breakdown.’ (...)

In this country [UK], the madness extends to all three of the main political parties – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Conservative – calling for climate protesters to be ‘cracked down on’ and for their rational demands to be rejected. (...)

Veteran climate scientist James Hansen, who warned the US Congress of the dangers of global warming as early as 1988, injected some reality missing from ‘mainstream’ reporting:

‘There is no indication that incumbent governments are even considering the fundamental actions that are needed to slow and reverse climate change.’

As we wrote at the time, last year’s UN Climate Summit in Glasgow was a greenwashing festival, full of empty rhetoric. Last month, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was ‘now or never’ to save humanity. (...)

Nasa climate scientist Peter Kalmus (...) warned:

‘Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk.’ (...)

It will take truly massive, sustained public activism – perhaps on a scale never seen before in human history – to shift course away from climate catastrophe. (...)

The historical record also shows that improvements in society are rarely, if ever, bestowed as gifts from above. Power typically only ever makes concessions when it is forced to do so by pressure from below.

Time is running out too rapidly to fundamentally reform society and create a real democracy that people deserve. The immediate priority is to exert insurmountable pressure on existing power structures, not least our own governments, to change course away from climate catastrophe. If we cannot do that, there will be no human civilisation to reform or restructure.

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Tags: #climate #clamte_change #climate_crisis #climate_beakdown #climate_protest #global_warming #heat_wave #india #media #corporate_media #news #news_media #journalist #journalism #Corporate_Europe_Observatory #Shell #BP #Total #ENI #E_ON #Vattenfall #fowwil_fuel #eu #european_union #ipcc #un #guterres #Extinction_Rebellion #Just_Stop_Oil

The Media Lens Book Of Obituaries – Deleting Tutu’s Criticism Of Israel

Media Lens

(...) Following his death in 2004, we described how Ronald Reagan’s eight years as US President (1981-89) had resulted in a vast bloodbath as Washington poured money and weapons into client dictatorships and right-wing death squads across Central America. The death toll: more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, and 30,000 killed in the US Contra war waged against Nicaragua. Journalist Allan Nairn described the latter as ‘One of the most intensive campaigns of mass murder in recent history.’ (Democracy Now, 8 June 2004)

On the BBC’s flagship Newsnight programme, Gavin Esler said of Reagan:

‘Many people believe that he restored faith in American military action after Vietnam through his willingness to use force, if necessary, in defence of American interests.’ (Newsnight, 9 June 2004) (...)

The basic rule: Official Friends of State are greeted by ostensibly independent corporate media with a wry, knowing, ultimately approving smile. Official Enemies of State are greeted with a sneer or a snarl.

In the immediate aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s death on 8 April 2013, we found 461 UK national newspaper articles mentioning the word ‘Thatcher’. Of these, 29 articles mentioned ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Saddam’. None mentioned that Thatcher had armed and financed the Iraqi dictator. Links to torture and mass murder that would have been front and centre in reviewing the life of any Official Enemy were airbrushed from history. (...)

Also in 2013, following the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (...)

The corporate media version of events was nutshelled by an editorial in the Independent titled:

‘Hugo Chávez – an era of grand political illusion comes to an end’

This of a leader who had reduced poverty by half, having sparked a regional move towards greater independence from the ruthless superpower to the North. The editorial continued:

‘Mr Chávez was no run-of-the-mill dictator. His offences were far from the excesses of a Colonel Gaddafi, say. What he was, more than anything, was an illusionist – a showman who used his prodigious powers of persuasion to present a corrupt autocracy fuelled by petrodollars as a socialist utopia in the making. The show now over, he leaves a hollowed-out country crippled by poverty, violence and crime. So much for the revolution.’

For the oligarch-owned Independent, then, Chávez – who had won 15 democratic elections, including four presidential elections – was a ‘dictator’. (...)

A further example of five-scythe filtering was provided by recent media coverage following the death of Desmond Tutu, the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. Tutu was one of the great leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, but he protested many other forms of oppression. In 2002, the Guardian published an opinion piece in which Tutu commented:

‘I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.’ (...)

Tutu even drew attention to the power of the pro-Israel lobby in smearing criticism of Israel as ‘anti-semitism’:

‘to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?’ (...)

Elsewhere, Tutu wrote:

‘The withdrawal of trade with South Africa… was ultimately one of the key levers that brought the apartheid state – bloodlessly – to its knees… Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of “normalcy” in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice.’

In December 2020, Tutu added:

‘Apartheid was horrible in South Africa and it’s horrible when Israel practises its own form of apartheid against the Palestinians, with checkpoints and a system of oppressive policies. Indeed another US statute, the Leahy law, prohibits US military aid to governments that systematically violate human rights.’

In a stirring example of just how low the Guardian has sunk under the editorship of Katharine Viner, the same newspaper that published Tutu’s comments made no mention whatever of Palestinians or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its obituary on 6 December 2021.

In response, a Change.org petition, signed by more than 3,250 people, sent a searing open letter to Viner:

‘Tutu’s repeated criticism of Israeli apartheid policies, and his commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people, are all simply omitted.’ (...)

The BBC made no mention of the issue here, here and here. (...)

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer responded to the death of Tutu:

‘Desmond Tutu was a tower of a man, and a leader of moral activism. He dedicated his life to tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed. His impact on the world crosses borders and echoes through generations. May he rest in peace.’

As the website Skwawkbox noted accurately in response:

‘But if Tutu had been a Labour member, Starmer would probably have expelled him, at least if he had the spine to do it, for comments in support of Palestinians and of boycotts and sanctions against Israel…’

Clearly, our media guardians of power were keen to say as little as possible about Tutu’s criticism of Israel without exposing themselves as outright totalitarians by blanking the issue 100% – 99% is a much better look, especially when reviewing the life of a courageous anti-fascist. (...)

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Tags: #obituary #desmond_tutu #tutu #reagan #ronald_reagan #central_america #el_salvador #guatemala #nicaragua #contra #thatcher #margareth_thatcher #media #journalism #journalist #news #interational_politics #fireign_relations #power #bbc #the_guardian #inependent #newspapers #news_media #venezuela #chaves #hugo_chaves #israel #anti-semitism #apartheid #pro-israel_lobby #labour #keir_starmer