Media Lens

Foundation and influences

By the late 1990s, David Edwards had concluded that there was a "media suppression of the truth about the effect of the sanctions" against Iraq, and an 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 coverage of certain issues to be "paltry", and had gained a negligible response from the newspapers to which he had written. The two men first met in 1999, and Edwards suggested beginning a collaborative website.

Central to Media Lens analysis is the Propaganda model, first developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988). The theory posits that the way in which news media is structured (through advertising, media ownership, government sourcing and others) creates an inherent conflict of interest which leads to systemic bias and propaganda for undemocratic forces. In the opinion of Elliot Murphy, a PhD candidate at University College London, Cromwell and Edwards have "taken to heart" the hypothesis of Herman and Chomsky "probably more than any other writers in Britain". 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.

Activities

Since 2001, in regular online Media Alerts, the editors scrutinise media coverage, the arguments used, source selection, and the framing of events to highlight what they see as incidents of bias, omissions, or direct lies. Their media alerts are distributed without charge by email to an international readership, according to Media Lens in 2009, of around 14,000 people. The website is financed through voluntary user donations.

The editors engage in email and Twitter exchanges with British journalists and editors, encouraging their readers to do the same. A blog article about Media Lens by Elliot Murphy of UCL was republished by the American radical website Z Net in May 2014. To the query "What can I do?" about a "corporate journalist who's reporting" a subject "in a skewed or reactionary way" he wrote that the group gives the "one familiar answer", for example, to contact Nick Robinson "to let him know we’re onto him". Murphy suggested that a "potential leftist" convert might see them as "more concerned with being correct than doing right".

General arguments

According to Cromwell and Edwards, journalists in the mainstream media 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." They assert that mainstream journalists gradually absorb an unquestioning corporate mindset as their careers progress, becoming unwilling to question their occupations or governments claims, rather than consciously lying. In Cromwell and Edwards' opinion, western government actions have followed "a historical pattern of deception" going back several centuries, while they assert that "the corporate media is the source of some of the greatest, most lethal illusions of our age". Edwards has written, that because of these corporate distortions, "we believe, society is not told the truth about the appalling consequences of corporate greed for poor people in the Third World, and for the environment." In an interview with the New Left Project website in August 2011, they thought journalist Seumas Milne "hints in this direction, but that's all. And he is the Guardian's chief 'dissident' figleaf – he is as good as it gets". Peter Beaumont argued in June 2006 that Media Lens "insist that the only acceptable version of the truth is theirs alone and that everybody else should march to the same step", and described them as "controlling Politburo lefties". According to Padraig Reidy, in a piece for Little Atoms, Media Lens "is only ever asking questions it thinks it already knows the answer to".

The editors reject accusations that their analysis depends on conspiracy theories, arguing that the patterns of bias they identify are the predictable consequence of media corporations subject to market forces operating within a profit driven system. According to Cromwell: "there is, of course, no conspiracy. It is more subtle, powerful and pervasive than that". A former supporter, the philosopher Rupert Read has criticised their use of "extremely dubious" source material including Michel Chossudovsky, whom he calls a conspiracy theorist, "Not unusually, one has to go to media such as" RT and Press TV "to find any coverage", Cromwell wrote in September 2016 (referring to coverage of the Yemeni Civil War), which are "so often bitterly denigrated as 'propaganda' operations by corporate journalists".

According to Cromwell and Edwards, the liberal wing of the mainstream media are gatekeepers "of acceptable debate from a left or Green perspective, 'thus far and no further'" and insist that in a corporate system dissenting views have difficulty gaining attention. They have contrasted positive comments the mainstream media make about western leaders, with the epithets used to describe politicians such as Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's former President. Oliver Kamm has written that the "far-left pressure group" are "doughty defenders of Venezuela's revolutionary regime", while the journalist and academic John Rentoul has accused them of being defenders of the government of North Korea.

Media Lens has been critical of dissenting voices, like John 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". On this issue, journalist Owen Jones has written that the editors' "attack me with even more force than writers who actually defend the status quo. Those writers confirm their analysis, after all: my presence disrupts it, and therefore I’m actually arguably worse", accusing them of "once tweeting a paragraph I wrote summing up the arguments of those who attacked critics of Obama, and pretending those arguments were what I actually thought".

In their view, "the corporate media is an extremist fringe" with which progressives should completely dissociate themselves. In January 2015, they advocated "a collective of high-profile writers and journalists willing to detach themselves from corporate and state media, and to place themselves entirely at the mercy of the public" with their output freely available "from a single media outlet" and financed by donations.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, an academic specialising in Communications Studies, has said that they possess a "relentless commitment" to assessing the media "on criteria of rationality and humanity, for what they write and fail to write, and doing so in a tone that is determinedly polite and respectful, even when the content is highly critical."

Guardian journalist Michael White, conceded in May 2016 that Cromwell and Edwards "do diligent and thoughtful work". However, at the end of an article in January 2012, he 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?"

Other responses

David Wearing, writing for openDemocracy in September 2015, commented that while the group has "a vocal, dedicated following", it also has "a long record of alienating potential allies with their purity tests and aggressive oversimplifications." "Alienating potential allies does not produce an effective affront to parliamentary or corporate power", wrote Elliot Murphy in May 2014. "At best makes a few hundred people (or sometimes thousands...) that bit more cautious and sceptical about what they read in the papers." According to Murphy in the same article, Media Lens "claim to be driven by compassion, but their harshness and hatred of criticism (as though their very souls have been scalded) suggest otherwise." Michael White in May 2016 thought their work suggests "their own editing priorities may be as partisan and un-self-aware as the corporates they so severely condemn". According to Sarah Ditum in August 2015, Media Lens are "largely engaged in an endless project of separating the anti-war sheep from the goats to be purged." Edwards in response to Ditum wrote: "We, of course, have neither the power nor the desire to 'purge' anyone for anything".

John Rentoul has also been unimpressed with the approach of Media Lens' campaigners. An email exchange, he wrote in 2011

"may continue until journalist is too busy to reply or until the snarl of Chomskian-Pilgerism is unwittingly betrayed and journalist realises he or she has not been engaging with a reasonable person. At this point, Media Lens adherent then posts the email chain on the sect's website, without notice or permission [beginning a thread]. This is supposed to embarrass the apologist for the corporate media/torture/Tony Blair and expose him to ridicule by other sect members."

The email campaigns, according to Peter Beaumont in The Observer, amount to contact from "a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin".

The journalist Peter Wilby, is of the opinion that "their basic critique is correct" and occasionally commissioned Cromwell and Edwards while he was editor of the New Statesman, In an article about them, John Pilger mentioned their first collaborative book, Guardians of Power (2006), and wrote that "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, Newspeak In The 21st Century, in 2009. Wilby wrote in 2006 that "the Davids are virtually unknown; as leftist critics, they are marginalised."

On 7 July 2008, Wilby reported in The Guardian that The Times legal manager Alastair Brett had written to Edwards about "vexatious and threatening emails from visitors to Media Lens" received by journalist Bronwen Maddox, then with The Times, and threatened an application for a high court injunction to prevent their users from contacting Maddox. In a case of alleged copyright infringement, Brett managed to gain the removal of emails from Maddox which had been incorporated into a Media Lens article concerning Iran. Although Maddox reported receiving dozens of comments, the only email directly quoted by the complainants was from "the second coming of Jesus Christ" with a threat to fire Maddox, which had also been sent in similar form to dozens of journalists and to Media Lens itself. According to Wilby, Edwards asked "what world do these people live in that they have to be so protected from the rough and tumble of political debate?"

On 2 December 2007, Edwards and Cromwell were awarded the Gandhi International Peace Award. The award was presented by Denis Halliday, the former United Nations Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq and himself a recipient of the award in 2003.

Justification for war

Prior to the Iraq War in 2002, Media Lens argued that it was fraudulent for the UK and US government to claim justification for a war on the basis that Iraq still possessed a credible Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threat and had an active WMD program. Media Lens cited the work of former chief UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who had stated 4 years previously, after thorough investigation by UN inspectors, that Iraq had been found to have "fundamentally disarmed" with 90–95 percent of its WMD capability eliminated. The editors further cited Ritter's opinion that it would have been impossible for Iraq to rearm "from scratch" within the four years since the UN had left given the level of scrutiny they were under.

A 30 April 2003 Media Lens database search, covering the period leading up to and including the invasion of Iraq found that of the 5,767 articles published by The Guardian and its sister paper The Observer only 12 made any mention of Scott Ritter. According to Edwards, this constituted "a shocking suppression of serious and credible dissident views", which he said were "soon to be entirely vindicated". This is a view shared by Eddie Girdner, who cites Media Lens as among those who drew this conclusion before the war began.

According to Richard Alexander, writing in 2010 about the Iraq war, Edwards and Cromwell "trenchantly dissected the servant role the British media played in bolstering the lies to the British public purveyed by the UK government". After referring to the "mountain of evidence" assembled by Cromwell and Edwards for their argument, John Jewell wrote for The Conversation website: "It must be remembered that the press was not completely united in its support for Blair" pointing to the opposition of the Daily Mirror to the invasion of Iraq as an example. Jewell's assertion about the "anti-war" Mirror was not entirely shared by Media Lens who criticised its respect for Blair's "patent sincerity".

Reporting of conflict

Media Lens in 2003 compared the BBC's reporting on the Iraq war to "Boys' Own war pornography". They 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 meeting the requirement for reporting to be impartial. In their opinion, this excluded the arguments 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".

To sustain their argument that journalists regularly present inflated assessments of the accomplishments of western politicians, they have cited comments made by Andrew Marr in 2003, while he was the BBC's political editor. They consider Marr to be overtly sympathetic to the former prime minister. Cromwell and Edwards 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?"

Casualty figures

Media Lens have challenged the mainstream press coverage of the extent of killings during the conflict. An example is the treatment of data from several academic surveys on the casualties during the Iraq War published in The Lancet by academics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated that 655,000 excess deaths had occurred since the invasion, than would have been expected in the absence of conflict. Despite the survey using recognised statistical methods, its findings were rejected by US and UK governments, who cited a much lower figure, a position which was largely supported in US and UK media coverage. Media Lens contrasted the media response to the Iraq study, with uncritical coverage of a similar study by the same researchers, using the same methods, which had estimated 1.7 million deaths in the Congo. Following criticism from Media Lens over an article written for The Guardian, mathematician John Allen Paulos acknowledged he had been wrong to use a "largely baseless personal assessment", to call into question the findings of the Lancet study.

Media Lens challenged The Independent's Mary Dejevsky to explain an editorial comment in the paper that, "by extrapolating from a small sample... While never completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted". Dejevsky responded that, while the sample may have been standard, it seemed small from her "lay perspective". Her main point "was less based on my impression than on the fact that this technique exposed the authors to the criticisms/dismissal that the govt duly made, and they had little to counter those criticisms with, bar the defence that their methods were standard for those sort of surveys". The response was considered incoherent by Edward Herman who stated it was "Massive incompetence in support of a war-apologetic agenda". According to Mukhopadhyay, the exchange was evidence that journalists, who do not have the statistical expertise to evaluate technical reports, "do not always take the obvious step of seeking expert advice". Reviewing Media Lens' engagement with press coverage of The Lancet study, Arvind Sivaramakrishna drew a similar conclusion stating, "Political correspondents are clearly ignorant of sampling frames and techniques, confidence limits, significance levels, likelihood estimators, and so on."

Peter Beaumont accused the group in April 2006, of a campaign apparently intended to silence John Sloboda and his Iraq Body Count project, because it produced a victim count lower than the Lancet study. Iraq Body Count published a paper at this time, which accused Media Lens in particular of its opponents, of work which is "inaccurate and exaggerated, personal, offensive, and part of a concerted campaign to undermine IBC's reputation among those who use our data".

In the same month 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 unqualified to undertake, or criticise, studies on unexpected mortalities in Iraq. Sloboda acknowledged that Iraq body count were "amateurs" but strenuously denied this should have any negative connotations on their work.

In August 2009, Z Net, the website has reprinted Media Lens alerts, published an article by Robert Shone accusing the editors of errors in its critique of the IBC, particularly its assumption that IBC only used western media sources in counting fatalities in Iraq. Cromwell confirmed in a Green Left Weekly interview that they had responded to Shone "long ago", but their rebuttals had "dropped off the bottom" of the group's (then active) 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."

"Without their meticulous and humane analysis", wrote John Pilger of Media Lens "the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism's first draft of bad history". In his book The Triumph of the Political Class (2007), the conservative journalist Peter Oborne wrote that while researching media coverage of the Iraq war, he had found the site "extremely useful". Media Lens are "often unfair but sometimes highly perceptive".

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. (See Historical negationism#Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars.) In a 2006 alert, which took the form of an open letter responding to the BBC's correspondent John Simpson, who had reported from Belgrade during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, they wrote that "our argument is that the kind of points made by" Chomsky, Herman, Diana Johnstone, and Pilger, among others, "were almost never seen in the mainstream media, the BBC included".

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 responded with their first article on this issue on 4 November. The Guardian apologised within a few weeks concluding that Brockes had misrepresented Chomsky's views on the Srebrenica massacre and his support for Diana Johnstone. According to The Guardian, neither of them "have ever denied the fact of the massacre". Media Lens responded to The Guardian's change of mind in a second article posted on 21 November.

The repercussions of 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 December 2009, Oliver Kamm wrote in his blog for The Times newspaper that Media Lens had removed from their website a reprint of open letter to Amnesty International by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in which the authors, Kamm asserted, repeated false claims about Serb-run detention camps in Bosnia which had led in 2000 to a successful libel action brought against LM magazine (originally Living Marxism) by ITN.

In June 2011 George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens of "maintain[ing] that Herman and Peterson were 'perfectly entitled' to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica". (Media Lens editors had written in 2009: "Herman and Peterson, then, are not denying that mass killings took place at Srebrenica. They also do not accept the figure cited by [Oliver] Kamm and others, but that they are perfectly entitled to do.") Monbiot wrote that Herman and Media Lens had taken "the unwarranted step of belittling the acts of genocide committed by opponents of the western powers". Media Lens responded that their argument had been that Herman and Peterson were "perfectly entitled" to debate the facts not that "they are entitled to falsify, mislead, wilfully deceive, or whatever 'talk down' was intended to suggest". Jonathan Cook agreed. Cook, a journalist specialising in the Middle East who has contributed to their website.

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 wrote in August 2011:

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") 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". In his opinion, Media Lens "stands with genocide deniers" in its connection with Herman and his colleague, David Peterson, both of whom he linked in their assertions about Srebrenica with Holocaust deniers. The Media Lens editors wrote in November 2009, that they had only written "defending Noam Chomsky" against the Guardian's claims in the rescinded interview by Brockes.

Syria

Rupert Read, an academic and Green Party politician, has written 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 written that the editors use dubious source material on fatalities in the conflicts in Syria from Aisling Byrne and Robert Dreyfuss, which serves "tacitly to increase the credibility of Assad's black propaganda". David Edwards responded that Pilger, David Peterson and others, responded positively to their alerts on Syria and that "We have received literally one negative response – from Rupert Read". This issue was also raised by Oliver Kamm later in 2012.

The cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson in June 2012, suggested in Tribune that the Media Lens editors indulge in "shilling for tyrants", following an exchange 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".

In February 2017, Media Lens wrote that Assad "has been UK journalism's number one hate figure for years" who is treated as being "on a par with earlier enemies like Slobodan Milosevic, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi (arguably, Assad is essentially the same archetypal 'Enemy' in the minds of many corporate journalists)".