We are seeing today a surge in heretical media outlets including Novara, Doubledown News, Drop Site, Byline Times, Middle East Eye – and of course Declassified UK.
We have emerged thanks in part to a growing appreciation that the mainstream media is broken, cannot be trusted, and is far more likely to disseminate falsehood than tell the truth.
So it is only fair to wish a happy 25th birthday to the earliest of these dissident outlets – Media Lens .
Media Lens first published in July 2001. The timing was perfect, with George W Bush starting to mobilise ahead of the Iraq invasion.
Media Lens recorded how Bush’s United States softened up reporters and editors as Tony Blair made the ‘moral case’ for war.
It showed how journalists had played down the mass deaths of Iraqi children from sanctions and ignored the devastating effects of bombing infrastructure (such as the wrecking of schools and power plants).
The Daily Telegraph dismissed the impact of sanctions as an ‘allegation’ dreamt up by “Left-wing activists, Arab nationalists and Muslim extremists”.
Vindication?
When foreign secretary Jack Straw and US President Bill Clinton claimed that Saddam Hussein had booted the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, with few exceptions British reporters went along with the lie.
Authoritative sources, such as the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, strongly challenged the official narrative. They were ignored.
And when the tanks finally rolled into Baghdad, British journalists worked overtime to hail the ‘vindication’ (the term used by Mark Mardell and Nicholas Witchell of the BBC as well as John Irvine of ITN) of Tony Blair.
Andrew Marr stood outside Downing Street to proclaim that Tony Blair “stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.”
Media Lens recorded all of this (and much more) in regular bulletins. It also wrote emails to reporters asking for an explanation of why their reports had omitted relevant facts, promoted obvious falsehoods or told only one side of the story.
These letters were polite and thoughtful, and all the more deadly for that. Some recipients failed to answer, some engaged (they tended to lose the argument) and others resorted to abuse.
In 2007, Media Lens won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award. John Pilger explained that “Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion and to bad history.”
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declassifieduk.org/tag/libya/">Libya , including the unevidenced claim from US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice that Colonel Gaddafi was supplying viagra to his troops to facilitate a campaign of mass rape, and the discredited warning that the Libyan dictator was planning a genocide in Benghazi.
When the Gaddafi regime fell, mainstream journalists duly noted that David Cameron, architect of the fiasco alongside Nicholas Sarkozy, had been ‘vindicated’ (the inevitable term deployed Ian Pannell and Norman Smith of the BBC).
The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson voiced the same sentiment as Andrew Marr, though with different language: “Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Col Gaddafi his first foe. Today his first real taste of military victory.”
Media Lens went on to expose the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy employed by British journalists against Jeremy Corbyn. It documented the smear campaign against Julian Assange .
Media Lens has been accused of being ‘useful idiots’ for taking the side of dictators. They responded that although “we hold no candle whatever for Gaddafi, and had never expressed a scintilla of support for him, [it] mattered not at all.”
Exposing liberal bias
Media Lens mainly ignored the blatantly biased reporting of the right-wing press repeating official propaganda.
Instead of these easy targets like the Daily Mail , they focussed on progressive or centre left media which boasted of its objectivity and impartiality, especially the Guardian and the BBC.
Here, Media Lens was performing an important function. Mainstream media plays an important role in shaping public understanding of events, yet there has long been an unwritten rule (“dog does not bite dog”) that journalists do not challenge colleagues.
For quarter of a century Media Lens has held sloppy or biased reporting to account. This made it very unpopular.
Its work has never been more relevant than today in the wake of the momentous reporting failures of the Gaza war and the US/Israeli attack on Iran that have left many British broadcasters and newspapers complicit in war crimes.
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David Edwards is a former teacher while his colleague David Cromwell holds a doctorate in solar physics, is an expert in oceanography and at one stage worked for oil giant Shell.
His scientific knowledge gives special credibility to a long standing focus of Media Lens work; climate change.
It has long sought to challenge the media failure to take the existential threat posed by climate change at all seriously, or to expose the financial backers of campaigns for climate change denial.
As usual one prime target has been the Guardian. As with foreign affairs, Media Lens has been, to coin a phrase, vindicated.
I want to acknowledge a personal debt to Edwards and Cromwell. When they started out I was an occasional target of their courteous but deadly bulletins.
There is a good rule in life that while praise is pleasant, you can learn from criticism.
So I studied their analysis carefully and concluded that, more often than not, the rebuke was well-deserved.
Over time Media Lens has educated me to become more sceptical and reexamine my instinctive belief that Britain was a force for good.
Recent history shows they have been correct about most of the great issues of our age. From the Iraq War to Climate Change, from Assange to the NHS, Media Lens has made the right call.
Meanwhile the British media, security and political establishment have made a habit of being calamitously wrong.
Thank you, Messrs Edwards and Cromwell, for paving the way.
The post How Media Lens forged a path for independent journalism appeared first on Declassified UK .
How Media Lens forged a path for independent journalism
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at DeclassifiedUK.