Beyond the Headlines: an Interview with Media Lens

The Media Lens media analysis service was established in 2001 by political writers David Cromwell and David Edwards. The service aims to raise awareness of the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately, and to increase rational awareness, critical thought and compassion. Its output includes news analyses in the form of media alerts.

In 2007, Media Lens received the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Prize. Mark Kauri spoke with Media Lens on its work, philosophy and perspective on the media landscape…

OCCUPIED TIMES: For more than a decade, the Media Lens project has been working to analyse media bias. How, if at all, has your perception of mainstream and corporate media changed since the start of this project?

MEDIA LENS: Just to begin with a point of clarification: we also sometimes use the expression ‘mainstream’ media but it’s a bit misleading. The dominant news media are corporate news organisations; they do not represent mainstream interests, if by that we mean the concerns and priorities of the general population.

If our perception has changed, it has been a deepening awareness of just how entrenched are state-corporate interests in determining news agendas. We have observed, for example, that corporate news coverage of climate change has actually got worse: both in terms of quantity of coverage (which has been documented; see our alert) and also the actual content. If anything, you are now even less likely to see any discussion of the fundamental blockages to sensible action to avert climate chaos; or to see any critical debate about how disastrous corporate-led global capitalism is for the planet.

Also, as we noted at the start of our most recent alert on Iran – just how bad do Western crimes have to be before corporate news media question propaganda emanating from Washington, the Pentagon or Downing Street? You would think that after the continuing nightmare inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan, that it should be nigh on impossible to target any more countries for Western ‘intervention’. But somehow the journalistic slate is wiped clean yet again, and we are supposed to imagine that state objectives are essentially benign and to forget about past crimes. Even though we’ve observed this closely since Media Lens’s inception in 2001 – and, in fact, for many years before – we still find this shocking.

OT: The founding philosophy of Media Lens stems from concerns of propaganda within the media. Has your experience of monitoring the media ratified, challenged or debunked these founding concerns?

ML: This question really overlaps with the first one. It’s not so much that we had, or still have, ‘concerns of propaganda within the media’. The corporate media is essentially a system of propaganda and thought control: an old and well-established notion, predating even Orwell, but put on a thorough footing by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 classic book, Manufacturing Consent. Talking of ‘propaganda within the media’ suggests that it might be possible to significantly weed it out. But the important point is that the corporate media is structurally biased towards the channelling and amplification of ‘news’ that boosts the interests of state power and big business. Propaganda is an endemic feature of a corporate media system that is made up of corporations linked to even bigger conglomerates with ties to the arms trade and planet-devouring businesses, heavy reliance on corporate advertising, close ties to powerful political interests, and so on.

OT: Drawing on your findings, in what sense can we say that the media landscape is ‘occupied’?

ML: The media ‘landscape’ is almost totally dominated by elite state and corporate interests. It is not monolithic: there are little chinks of light here and there that can be exploited for marginal gains that may, in themselves, be worthwhile. But we should also be alert to the ‘fig leaf’ effect – the regular or sporadic appearance of a tiny handful of dissidents who provide the illusion of wide-ranging debate. Jonathan Cook, formerly a reporter for both the Guardian and the Observer, puts it this way:

‘The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.

“The paper’s role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.”

OT: How have mainstream and corporate media platforms responded to your Media Alerts?

ML: There has been a variety of responses tending towards the negative: ranging from silence through to irritation or condescension, and very occasionally outright abuse (Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, being a notable source). In 2008, we were even threatened with police and legal action by News International after we’d critically appraised The Times’ warmongering on Iran (see our media alert on this). More positively, we have anecdotal evidence from media insiders that we have been a ‘rallying point for dissent’ in organisations like the BBC and the Observer. There are a surprising number who strongly, if covertly, support what we’re doing.

OT: Developments in social media seem to promise the means to bypass a corporate ‘middleman’ in reportage, such as through direct citizen journalism. Do you believe social media could offer the means for communication to subvert or bypass propaganda in the media?

ML: Direct citizen journalism does have a role, and could have a major role, to play in subverting or bypassing propaganda. There are strong indications that social media played an important role in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The use of Twitter and Facebook, for example, enabled people at grassroots level to challenge the propaganda of their own governments and to organise resistance to these – typically, Western-supported – authoritarian regimes. Of course, there will always be a vital role for insightful, specialist reporting and commentary on foreign affairs, the economy, climate change, human rights and so on. But these experts are citizens too, yes? So ‘citizen’ journalism needs to incorporate these perspectives and work closely with them. The internet offers an excellent means for establishing and boosting responsible journalism that truly challenges power – something we address in our answer to your related question later on.

OT: What are the potential pitfalls to reportage through citizen journalism? Is there a base of journalistic expertise that cannot be found outside of mainstream media platforms such as broadsheets and broadcasting networks?

ML: Essentially there need to be open, publicly-supported networks linking people with the skills and insight to comment knowledgeably on current affairs. ‘Journalistic expertise’ within current corporate news organisations all too often means limiting news frameworks to what powerful interests are saying. There is plenty of expertise outside those constricting frameworks – voices of rationality and humanity – that are all too often marginalised or excluded by current news media. So there is no dearth of alternative, non-corporate expertise for honest journalism to draw upon.

OT: How can activists hope to ‘occupy’ the media as part of their drive towards social, economic and environmental justice?

ML: We believe that as long as the internet remains relatively open, there is a tremendous opportunity for activists and journalists not to ‘occupy’ the corporate media, but to bypass the corporate media, and to set up networks of honest, responsible journalism supported by the public. We are inspired by the examples of Jonathan Cook and Glenn Greenwald, for example. Surely there is scope for insightful writers like these to be funded to work as independent journalists?

In his book, ‘The Return of the Public’, Dan Hind proposes that a new system of state-sponsored public commissioning of journalism should be introduced which would ‘replace the power of owners and superiors with the power of citizens at crucial points of decision’. Hind suggests that:

‘Journalists working to public commissions can hope to build careers by addressing matters of common concern; they can specialize, they can develop a deep understanding of their subject and build stable networks of sources; they will not be subject to simple veto or more subtle forms of coercion from their employers; they will be more directly answerable to the audiences they serve.’

As Hind notes, the BBC currently sets aside 3.5% of the £3.4bn raised annually from the licence fee to pay for the switch from terrestrial (analogue) to digital provision of TV channels this year. He proposes that at least some of this money thereafter ‘should be controlled by the population as a whole, through a system of participatory commissioning.’ He sees this funding 3,000 journalists and researchers at a basic annual salary of £24,000 ‘to work full time on matters of interest and concern to the general population.’ There would undoubtedly be many details to be worked out in practice; but it seems an idea that is worth exploring.

OT: In Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, you suggest that a revolution in media towards a more compassionate foundation is in the hands of both the public and journalists. In what sense can the public help to revolutionise media?

ML: The internet really has broken the corporate media monopoly on global outreach. You no longer have to be a major corporation, or a member of the 1%, to instantly communicate with a global audience. More honest, non-corporate voices can now reach a massive audience at low cost – a very positive development. If people understood just how positive, we suspect they would be far less willing to pay for corporate media and much more willing to support non-corporate alternatives like The Real News Network and Democracy Now! It’s a truly historic opportunity.

We need to work hard to challenge corporate media, to promote marginal improvements. But the real hope lies in public-supported, non-corporate media freed from the structural constraints of elite ownership and control. That may be achievable; it’s up to us. We need media driven by an authentic interest in understanding and solving human problems. Currently, we are stuck with a greed-driven media that actually benefit from obscuring the causes of, and exacerbating the extent of, problems. The corporate system, including the media, has no interest in our understanding that Western state-corporate power uses its monopoly in high-tech violence to exploit Third World peoples and resources beneath a veneer of ‘security concerns’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. Compassionate journalism can only emerge out of media that are not profit-driven and not beholden to interests overwhelmingly motivated by greed.

OT: What do you believe would be the properties of a healthy, socially beneficial media?

ML: One driven by concern for human and animal suffering, rather than one structurally (indeed legally) obliged to subordinate people and planet to profit.