On Media Lens, lying and the Balkans

This is a long story.

Since 2003, I have been a reader of Media Lens, whose work I’ve written about here and here. It’s a media criticism website, run by David Edwards and David Cromwell, who argue that journalists aren’t swordsmen of truth, but hostage to the powerful.

I support their stated aim, to “democratise the setting and content of news agendas, which traditionally reflect establishment interests”, and have outlined my views on how this might be pursued here, and in this essay in the British Journalism Review, which explored how to change how news is framed. At present:

[most] reporters see their role as relaying what influential people say and do. This means they tend to foghorn received wisdom, while narratives that contradict it are rarely aired. Even when they are, they’re barely heard, because they don’t get recycled even as background, unlike the assumptions of big business and government, which routinely reappear to help put comments from officialdom “into context”.

However, I think Media Lens overstates this, arguing dogmatically that because others set the limits to what journalists write, the corporate mass media are neither free, nor redeemable (despite reporting many of the facts on which their critiques are structured). They say that radical journalists who publish their work in mainstream newspapers are “fig leaves” for corrupting corporate power, because they don’t devote their writings to criticising the media that print them. When pressed on this, and confronted with evidence that it’s both irrelevant and hypocritical (since they didn’t do it themselves when they had a New Statesman column), Media Lens say this isn’t what they’re suggesting at all, although it is.

When responding to critics, which they rarely do except to restate dogma, they like to use the word “smear”, because it sidesteps the question of accuracy, and allows them to suggest that they, or those they support, are being unfairly victimised by agents of “state-corporate power”, and its propaganda organs. These are by definition Bad, whereas unsalaried Internet pundits are Good, especially if “motivated” by compassion. Buddhism and other spiritual influences are a guiding star for the work of Media Lens, along with their deference to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who co-authored a book called Manufacturing Consent.

Obama Nobel Lecture draft leaked

TOP SECRET: The speech Barack Obama won’t deliver
As dictated to Daniel Simpson

EMBARGOED UNTIL DECEMBER 10, 2009

(Check against delivery)

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Dear Friends around the world, My fellow Americans.

I stand here today humbled, more than ever, by the task before us, grateful for the honour you’ve bestowed, and mindful of the sacrifices we must make to do it justice.

Twenty Americans before me have lent their names to this most eminent of prizes, among them three presidents, two sitting. Though challenged by the upheavals of fractious eras, their skill and vision hewed faithfully to the spirit of our forebears, who travelled across an ocean to seek sanctuary, and declared all who made their home there to have been created equal. Where possible, they worked to stem those tides in humankind that would drown us in the storms of violent conflict. And so we recall these efforts, and their fruits, praising Theodore Roosevelt for brokering peace, not chiding him for wielding his trademark stick to subjugate Cuba and the Philippines.

Others were inspired by a higher calling, rising above themselves to speak truths we shirk from hearing. Of these transformative figures, none was more righteous, more perspicacious, than Dr Martin Luther King, who accepted this award 45 years ago. I was surprised to be asked to follow him, and shared with you my doubts that I deserved to be doing so. But I’ve come here on the understanding that this ceremony is a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century, and for America to lead.

Putting America first should not require us to put the lives of other peoples second. When our nation became mired in Vietnam, sacrificing millions to its quest to contain Communism, Dr King called us “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”. A year to the day after speaking those words, he was murdered.