In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger pays tribute
to the influence of an extraordinary British website Medialens.org
whose creators David Edwards and David Cromwell have challenged the
declared objectivity and other myths of the liberal media. On 2
December, they will receive the Gandhi International Peace Prize.
What
has changed in the way we see the world? For as long as I can remember,
the relationship of journalists with power has been hidden behind a
bogus objectivity and notions of an “apathetic public” that justify a
mantra of “giving the public what they want”. What has changed is the
public’s perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and
see and hear, people in western democracies are questioning as never
before, particularly via the internet. Why, they ask, is the great
majority of news sourced to authority and its vested interests? Why are
many journalists the agents of power, not people?
Much of this bracing new thinking can be traced to a remarkable UK website, www.medialens.org.
The creators of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, assisted
by their webmaster, Olly Maw, have had such an extraordinary influence
since they set up the site in 2001 that, without their meticulous and
humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and
Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism’s first draft of
bad history. Peter Wilby put it well in his review of Guardians of
Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media, a drawing-together of Media Lens
essays published by Pluto Press, which he described as “mercifully free
of academic or political jargon and awesomely well researched. All
journalists should read it, because the Davids make a case that demands
to be answered.”
That appeared in the New Statesman. Not a single
major newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can
remember. Take the latest Media Lens essay, “Invasion – a Comparison of
Soviet and Western Media Performance”. Written with Nikolai Lanine, who
served in the Soviet army during its 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan,
it draws on Soviet-era newspaper archives, comparing the propaganda of
that time with current western media performance. They are revealed as
almost identical.
Like the reported “success” of the US “surge”
in Iraq, the Soviet equivalent allowed “poor peasants [to work] the land
peacefully”. Like the Americans and British in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Soviet troops were liberators who became peacekeepers and always acted
in “self-defence”. The BBC’s Mark Urban’s revelation of the “first real
evidence that President Bush’s grand design of toppling a dictator and
forcing a democracy into the heart of the Middle East could work”
(Newsnight, 12 April 2005) is almost word for word that of Soviet
commentators claiming benign and noble intent behind Moscow’s actions in
Afghanistan. The BBC’s Paul Wood, in thrall to the 101st Airborne,
reported that the Americans “must win here if they are to leave Iraq . .
. There is much still to do.” That precisely was the Soviet line.
The
tone of Media Lens’s questions to journalists is so respectful that
personal honesty is never questioned. Perhaps that explains a reaction
that can be both outraged and comic. The BBC presenter Gavin Esler,
champion of Princess Diana and Ronald Reagan, ranted at Media Lens
emailers as “fascistic” and “beyond redemption”. Roger Alton, editor of
the London Observer and champion of the invasion of Iraq, replied to one
ultra-polite member of the public: “Have you been told to write in by
those cunts at Media Lens?” When questioned about her environmental
reporting, Fiona Harvey, of the Financial Times, replied: “You’re
pathetic . . . Who are you?”
The message is: how dare you
challenge us in such a way that might expose us? How dare you do the job
of true journalism and keep the record straight? Peter Barron, the
editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, took a different approach. “I rather like
them. David Edwards and David Cromwell are unfailingly polite, their
points are well argued and sometimes they’re plain right.”
David
Edwards believes that “reason and honesty are enhanced by compassion and
compromised by greed and hatred. A journalist who is sincerely
motivated by concern for the suffering of others is more likely to
report honestly . . .” Some might call this an exotic view. I don’t.
Neither does the Gandhi Foundation, which on 2 December will present
Media Lens with the prestigious Gandhi International Peace Award. I
salute them.
