Customer Reviews

NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century

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This is a brilliant study of Britain's media and their general support for the ruling class. The authors David Edwards and David Cromwell are two co-editors of MediaLens [...] which carries regular analysis of the media.

Chapters cover the fiction of BBC balance; the climate change debate; the Downing Street memo on Iraq's (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction; the media rubbishing of the 2004 and 2006 Lancet reports into the numbers of Iraqi deaths; the bombings in Britain, Spain and Iraq; Israel and Palestine; targeting Iran; the allegations of Iranian interference in Iraq; Venezuela and the media lies about Hugo Chavez; behind the scenes at the Independent and the Guardian; the practices of snarls and smears; and the need for honest journalism.

Edwards and Cromwell note the article by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts, Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, Lancet, 2006, 368, 9545, pages 1421-8. They describe the media's treatment of this peer-reviewed article as `the most shocking and outrageous example of media servility to power we have yet seen'.

They note that the US war of aggression against Vietnam killed 3.8 million people [...], wounded 4.4 million and harmed 2 million with toxic chemicals.

They note that the question, `What can we do about it all?' all too often means, `Tell me something that's quick and easy, or I won't bother.'

David Edwards and David Cromwell, the authors of this book, are the editors of Media Lens, a small UK-based organisation set up to show up and combat the systematic biases of the corporate media. Media Lens, in their words, is "a response based on our conviction that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world". You can find out more at the Media Lens Web site. Warning! If you dislike or distrust Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, or Michael Moore, you may also find you dislike this book - because its authors tend to be in sympathy with those three and others of similar viewpoint. But this is less because the authors have any pronounced left wing leaning themselves than because those particular writers are representative of opinions routinely "screened out" by the establishment media.

While "Newspeak" contains a wealth of examples cited in detail, its main thesis is that the picture of the world most of us get from the standard corporate media - newspapers, radio, TV, etc. - is filtered, prejudiced, and to a considerable extent untruthful. The authors quote former Guardian editor C. P. Scott's famous dictum, "Comment is free, but facts are sacred", and explain why it is "as naive as it is misleading". Facts, after all, have to be selected before they are offered up as news. "To choose 'this' fact over 'that' fact is already to express an opinion. To highlight 'this' fact over 'that' fact is to comment". (Compare, for example, the lengthy and emotional reporting of a single US or British soldier's death in Iraq or Afghanistan to the way the killing of dozens of civilians is routinely ignored). This crucial insight is quite similar to that which lies at the core of Steven Poole's equally good book, "Unspeak".

As Edwards and Cromwell see it, there is no conspiracy to blind or mislead the British (and American) people. Instead, there is a self-sustaining system that rewards those who keep their heads down and their noses clean - those who don't offend our political or commercial overlords (who increasingly tend to be the same people, or at least connected by common interests). In a relatively open society such as ours, they explain, it would look suspicious if all dissenting opinions and inconvenient facts were suppressed. So a small quota of independent journalists such as Pilger, Robert Fisk, and George Monbiot can still be published in the mainstream media. They are clearly labelled as mavericks, however, and their views are vastly outweighed by the torrent of "establishment" news and opinion.

Chapters are devoted to the BBC's lack of balance, the dogmatic imposition of climate change orthodoxy, the Downing Street Memo that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq, the systematic rubbishing of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet report on Iraqi excess deaths, the coverage of terrorism and the "war on terror", Israel and Palestine ("An Eye for an Eyelash"), the demonisation of Iran and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and the "Liberal Press Gang: Behind the Scenes at the Independent and the Guardian".

The final chapter "Compassion, Awareness and Honest Journalism" may strike some as the most touching and personally relevant part of the whole book; others may see it as an exercise in self-indulgence. The authors present some Buddhist ideas that they have found helpful, in the hope that practices such as meditation can help journalists and others develop more empathy and thus report more fairly on the problems of distant people and places.

If you are interested in the problems of keeping people informed and aware of important issues in a democracy - and if you are not a neocon or, perhaps, a New Labour diehard - this book will educate and fascinate you. Some of the facts and stories revealed may also make your blood boil.

Know your enemy: see through news manipulation, on screen and in newspapers.
Great book, many fine articles by *real* journalists.

This mighty book looks at well known US and British journalists, and at their newspapers, at their TV news networks, and news stations, peeling back the layers to find their control-sources, the 'news' filtering cartels, parts of multinationals that indirectly influence and filter the news their journalists speak or write about; to distort truth in favor of a version of the truth that serves neither you nor I; that serves only the political or business ends of their private interests.

The book uses well-known US and GB television news personalities' dismissals - key anchor-men and -women, like former MSNBC star Phil Donahue, dismissed for asking awkward questions about Bush's war on Iraq (much like CNN's own star, Dan Rather!) and Katie Couric and Jessica Yellin, both pressured by NBC bosses to drop stories and shut-up; and newspaper journalists' firings or gaggings, like that of Martin Tierney of Saturday Herald, for simply reviewing a book, "Going to Extremes" by the author of This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich ... to name but a few!

The authors also pursue TV journalists who follow the corporate line, and relentlessly pursue their reasons for spouting risible propaganda on behalf of Downing Street or The Whitehouse, notably The BBC's Andrew Marr and Channel 4 TV's news anchor Jon Snow, men who came to the top of their field presenting themselves as balanced and fair journalists. This book shows they are anything but ... and its pages are crammed full of evidence! It will make you mad but you will never be a fool to those media cartel mouthpieces again; you will be much better armed to defend yourself when the propagandists and apologists that fill BBC, CNN, NBC, ITV, and the huge swathe of News Corporation's (and others') newspapers tell you what to believe next time round.

You still do not believe it; or you do, and now you want more books like this? If, after reading this amazing, contemporary companion to seeing how truth is buried by the lies in our mainstream media, you are still unconvinced, or you cannot wait for more info like this, you may find reading this (or any of their annual "censored" news books rewarding (they are always amazing!):
Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09
Available in book or Ebook formats. Check out the last 10 years' of stories you knew nothing about!