Media Lens: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

January 23, 2006

In Part 1 of this alert we reviewed Robert Fisk’s observation that “more and more people are trying to find a different and more accurate narrative of events in the Middle East. It is a tribute to their intelligence that instead of searching for blog-o-bots or whatever, they are looking to the European ‘mainstream’ newspapers like The Independent, the Guardian, The Financial Times”.

A couple of weeks back, trapped in someone else’s car, I was forced to endure the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio Two. Nauseating as it was, this prolonged period of exposure was illuminating. An excellent illustration of how propaganda works in a free society.

One point Media Lens makes repeatedly is that while the British media is better than that of the U.S., it’s often still horrible. And this sadly includes the U.K. “liberal” outfits that drive our right wing into a teeth-gnashing, pants-wetting frenzy, such as the BBC, Guardian, and Independent.

Media Lens: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

January 12, 2006

Robert Fisk On The British Media – Part 1

In the 1960s, psychologist Lester Luborsky used a camera to track the eye movements of subjects asked to look at a set of pictures. Some of the pictures were sexual in content – one showed the outline of a woman’s breast, beyond which a man could be seen reading a newspaper. The response of some subjects was remarkable. They were able to avoid letting their eyes stray even once to the sexual content of the pictures. When later asked to describe the pictures, these subjects remembered little or nothing sexually suggestive about them.

Media Lens: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

January 9, 2006

On October 20, 2005, we published a Media Alert, Real Men Go To Tehran.

We detailed media reactions after an anonymous British official had accused Iran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that had killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May, 2005. Tony Blair commented at an October 7 press conference:

“There is no justification for Iran or any other country interfering in Iraq.” (Adrian Blomfield and Anton La Guardia, ‘Stop meddling in Iraq, Blair tells Teheran,’ Daily Telegraph, October 7, 2005)