Product Description

Since 2001, Media Lens has encouraged thousands of readers to challenge the filtered and distorted version of the world provided by major newspapers and broadcasters. The media responses, collected in Newspeak, are an exposé of the arrogance and servility to power of our leading journalists and editors. Picking up where the highly acclaimed and successful Guardians of Power (2006) left off, Newspeak is packed with forensic media analysis, revealing the lethal bias in 'balanced' reporting. Even the 'best' UK media -- the Guardian, the Independent, Channel 4 News and the BBC -- turn out to be cheerleaders for government, business and war. Alongside an A-Z of BBC propaganda and chapters on Iraq and climate change, Newspeak focuses on the demonization of Iran and Venezuela, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the myth of impartial reporting and the dark art of smearing dissidents.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18191 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth. --John Pilger

Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care. --Noam Chomsky

Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. It is fun as well as enlightening to watch their representatives, while sometimes giving straightforward answers to queries, often getting flustered, angry, evasive, and sometimes mistating the facts. This won't change the media very much, but it will make them a bit more careful and honest, and it will help educate the public, which will have its own useful spinoff. --Edward S. Herman

About the Author
David Edwards is co-founder/co-editor of Media Lens (www.medialens.org) for which he works full-time. He is author of Free to be Human (1995), The Compassionate Revolution (1998) and co-author of Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto, 2006). David Cromwell is co-founder / co-editor of Media Lens (www.medialens.org) and a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. He is author of Private Planet (2001) and co-author of Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto, 2006). In 2002, he co-founded the Crisis Forum (www.crisis-forum.org.uk) with fellow Southampton academic Mark Levene. Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, edited by Cromwell and Levene, was published in 2007 by Pluto.

Customer Reviews

Exceptional critique of media bias and propaganda in the UK
This is a vital and exceptionally good book, both well researched and backed up with correspondence between Media Lens and key figures in the UK's 'liberal' media. So in the end you are free to make your own mind up.

It highlights the contradictions, filters and pressures at the heart of our media and enables the thinking person to further analyse the polluted media culture we live in and make more sense of it.

Ultimately its a inspiring read that offers us hope for correcting grave and gaping common distortions and gives us hope for constructing more reliable news analysis in the future through non corporate, non profit Internet based services such as Media Lens and Znet.

One hopes that the BBC, Guardian, Observer and Channel 4 are able to lift themselves out of the pit of the corporate government mindset and truly invite intellectual reason and free thought.

A vital exposure of the mainstream media
This is a devastating expose of how our mainstream media operates in a corporate world. This book explains how consensus reality is so wildly at odds with the actuality in front of our eyes. Outstanding. This should be required reading for trainee journalists, media students and political scientists. A tour de force.

A glimmer of light in the corporate fog
These exceptionally dedicated and talented journalists are a credit to their profession. Their book gives a glimpse into what life could be like if people had access to what is really behind world events and what really motivates those with the power to set the media agenda.Anybody who cares about democracy or his fellow man should read this book.