Media Lens Read Aloud

Last week, Andy Burnham, the new Labour leader and UK Prime Minister, addressed the Labour party conference in Liverpool: ‘All Together Now. That’s my rallying call to the country today. When we pull as one, there is nothing we can’t do. ‘Today we draw a line on a decade of division. We stop doomscrolling on posts running Britain down. And we put the country on a new path.’ Burnham continued: ‘Bri...

In response to news that we are this year celebrating 25 years of Media Lens we have received many kind comments from readers, some of them sympathising that it must be ‘awful’ to live with the knowledge that we are ‘so despised by mainstream journalists’. But, in fact, it has been surprising just how much support we have received - often expressed privately, for fear of consequences - from journa...

Audio narration by Matt Alford English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is a megastar. With over 128 million followers on Spotify, he ranks as the platform’s second most-followed artist, surpassed only by Taylor Swift. Sheeran’s official YouTube channel has more than 50 million subscribers. His shows are among the highest-attended live music events in history, often setting attendance records across N...

Audio narration by Matt Alford If you need an indication of how divorced the ‘mainstream’ media is from reality, consider this: the possibility of at least 4 billion deaths resulting from 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050 made barely a dent in news headlines. Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report , ‘Planet...

‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’ This has to be a serious candidate for the most foolish comment ever made publicly by a British newspaper editor. Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, opined : ‘We’ve lost the war against global warming - so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather.’ One might wonder which trench Heath occu...

Audio narration by Matt Alford This month marks the 25th anniversary of Media Lens. Still in short trousers, we sent our first media alert to a handful of readers on 9 July 2001. For a long time, our alerts focused on challenging journalists directly by email, publishing their responses, and encouraging readers to politely respond with their own views. One of the most positive exchanges involved t...

On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was given a largely respectful farewell by the ‘mainstream’ media, portraying him as a ‘decent’ man who put his country first. And now the same news organisations are burnishing Andy Burnham’s credentials to enter 10 Downing Street without actually submitting his record or policies to proper scrutiny. Starmer’s appalling record as Prime Minister was barely touched upon...

We, of course, post on all kinds of emotive and controversial issues on social media: genocide in Gaza, the war of aggression on Iran, the weaponisation of anti-semitism to undermine democratic choice and defend Israel, and so on. Perhaps because we don’t post out of anger and hate, we don’t generally receive a lot of hostility in response. Remarkably, the one issue that is all but guaranteed to g...

Audio narration by Matt Alford Any aliens who have been monitoring radio and television transmissions streaming outwards into space from Planet Earth over the past few decades will likely be intrigued, bemused or simply horrified at humanity’s headlong drive towards climate catastrophe. No matter the urgent warnings from climate scientists, the power of billionaires, financial speculators and corp...

Audio narration by Matt Alford. Historian Ian Kershaw titled the two volumes of his definitive biography of Adolf Hitler, ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’. (Allen Lane, 1998 and 2000) Inevitably, it seems, great power comes with great hubris. For a brief, glorious moment, brick walls appear as doorways, everything seems possible. Nemesis lies in wait. Having taken just six weeks and one day to conquer all o...

I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically moustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spi...

Given the ‘mainstream’ structural filters that reflexively whitewash the crimes of ‘The Good Guys’ - ‘us’, by doctrinal fiat - we have often wondered how the great and the good of corporate politics and media would react if the US or Israel ever decided to use nuclear weapons. Could they, even then , break out of their lock-step deference to power, reclaim their souls and say something humanly hon...

On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’ , the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK: ‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of th...

Commenting last week on the build-up of US military forces targeting Iran, Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, got it right : ‘This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strike...

These are exceptional times. The United States has been threatening to take over Greenland, an aggressive move against Europe. Now, and only now, are political leaders and compliant news media publicly acknowledging that the ‘international rules-based order’ is no more. Of course, it was only ever a convenient myth, blown wide open by the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Trump man...

After declaring his second presidential victory on 6 November 2024, Donald Trump said of his first term: ‘You know, we had no wars for four years. We had no wars. Except we defeated ISIS, we defeated ISIS in record time. But we had no wars. They said, “He will start a war.” I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’ On New Year’s Eve, 2025, with Gaza in ruins, Trump’s anti-war fervour...

A significant feature of the propaganda system is the suppression of clearly important, credible books which are nevertheless deemed unfit for review in the ‘respectable mainstream’. In 2025, two important – indeed, groundbreaking – bestselling books about British politics were published which were almost entirely ignored by the state-corporate media. These were ‘The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan Mc...