Propaganda Blitz

David Cromwell, David Edwards

Description

Do you trust the liberal media? While the tabloid and right-wing press - the Sun, The Times, the Mail and the Express - are constantly criticised for dangerous bias, outlets like the BBC and the Guardian are trusted by their readers to report in the interests of the public. However, the reality is that all corporate media is systematically filtered by the powerful interests that own, manage and fund it.

Propaganda Blitz shows that the corporate media does not just 'spin' the news - it fundamentally distorts everything it touches, hiding the real issues from public view, and often completely reversing the truth. This book uncovers a storm of top-down campaigns behind war reporting from Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as well as the destruction of the credibility of figures on the left, including Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez.

Exposing propagandists at the top levels of the BBC, as well as their reporting on the Scottish independence referendum, the dismantling of the NHS and looming climate chaos, Propaganda Blitz explains the real meaning of 'objective' journalism, exposes the fake news about 'fake news' and outlines a model for anti-business media activism.

Foreword by John Pilger

Preface: The Devil's Greatest Trick

1. Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz

2. Killing Corbyn

3. Smearing Assange, Brand and Chavez

4. Israel and Palestine: 'We Wait in Fear for the Phone Call from the Israelis'

5. Libya: 'It is All About Oil'

6. Syria: Instant Certainty Promoting War

7. Yemen: Feeding the Famine

8. The BBC as a Propaganda Machine

9. Dismantling the National Health Service

10. Scottish Independence: An 'Amazing Litany' of Bias

11. Climate Chaos: An Inconvenient Emergency

12. 'Fake News', Objective Journalism and the No-Business Model

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Human Rights
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Industries
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Telegraph
• Reino Unido
• BBC
• Syria
• Nick Robinson
• Jonathan Freedland
• David Aaronovitch
• Jeremy Corbyn
• United Kingdom
• Telegraphy
• Russia
• Journalism
• Noam Chomsky
• Julian Assange
• George Monbiot
• Great Britain
• Independent
• The New York Times
• The Daily Telegraph
• David Cameron
• The Times
• Donald Trump
• Guardian
• Barack Obama
• Hillary Rodham Clinton
• British Broadcasting Corporation
• Industrie
• Royaume-Uni
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786803313
• Langue: English

Extrait

Propaganda Blitz
Propaganda Blitz
How the Corporate Media Distort Reality
David Edwards and David Cromwell Foreword by John Pilger
First published 2018 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright David Edwards and David Cromwell 2018
The right of David Edwards and David Cromwell to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3812 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3811 8 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0330 6 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0332 0 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0331 3 EPUB eBook



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
We ve been slandered, libelled, trashed and traduced, ridiculed and reviled by much of mainstream journalism for two decades. And yet, simultaneously, surreally, we have received the unfailing support of someone whose opinion matters more to us than all the rest of them combined. Knowing that the finest political journalist of our time believes in what we re doing has made a huge difference to us. We dedicate this book to John Pilger. Onwards!
Contents
Foreword by John Pilger
Preface: The Devil s Greatest Trick

1. Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz
2. Killing Corbyn
3. Smearing Assange, Brand and Ch vez
4. Israel and Palestine: We Wait in Fear for the Phone Call from the Israelis
5. Libya: It is All About Oil
6. Syria: Instant Certainty Promoting War
7. Yemen: Feeding the Famine
8. The BBC as a Propaganda Machine
9. Dismantling the National Health Service
10. Scottish Independence: An Amazing Litany of Bias
11. Climate Chaos: An Inconvenient Emergency
12. Fake News , Objective Journalism and the No-Business Model
Notes
Index
Foreword
John Pilger
When I sat down to write this, Robert Parry had just died. One of America s finest reporters, Parry was, wrote Seymour Hersh, a trailblazer for independent journalism . Hersh and Parry had much in common; Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they each produced evidence that disputed the claim that the Assad government in Syria had used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.
Driven from the mainstream , Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website where, in a final piece following a stroke in December 2017, he wrote, Whether they would admit it or not, [Western journalists] believe in a guided democracy in which approved opinions are elevated - regardless of their absence of factual basis - and unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.
This is not how many journalists see themselves. They imagine they set the public record straight and check the excesses of power, which Edmund Burke called a fourth estate . The BBC goes further and ordains itself a divinity on earth, speaking truth to power : an exquisite nonsense that has endured since its founder secretly wrote propaganda for a Tory prime minister during Britain s General Strike.
Although journalism - the media - was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a historic shift, with journalists themselves policing the new groupthink , as Parry wrote, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.
Witness the witch-hunts, the campaigns against refugees and immigrants, the anti-Russia and Brexit hysteria, a growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of public discussion of a beckoning world war.
With many independent journalists ejected from the mainstream , a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: what some would call true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org , consortiumnews.com , wsws.org , truthdig.com , globalresearch.org , counterpunch.org , informationclearinghouse.com and zcomm.org are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life regress behind a media facade of spectacle and propaganda.
In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens - remarkable because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism - the BBC, the Guardian , Channel 4 News.
Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they email a journalist to ask why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths. The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.
My impression is that they have shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent , they represent a Fifth Estate, questioning, deconstructing and ultimately demystifying the media s monopoly.
What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards was a teacher, David Cromwell is a former scientist. Yet, their understanding of the morality of real journalism - a term rarely used; let s call it true objectivity - is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.
In 2007, they were awarded the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award. I was asked to contribute to the citation. Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq, I wrote, the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion, and to bad history.
Such is the importance of their work, which I think is heroic. I would place a copy of this book in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.
How does the system work? Chapter 9 , Dismantling the National Health Service , describes the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain s pioneering health service.
The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as austerity , with its weasel language of efficiency savings (the BBC term for the slashing of public expenditure) and hard choices (meaning the wilful destruction of many of the premises of civilised life in Britain).
Austerity is a political and media construct, an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed not by its people but by crooked banks. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service are stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.
The publicly-funded health service is being deliberately run down by free-market zealots, to justify its selling-off. The Conservative Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, is one such zealot.
This is sometimes alluded to in the media, but rarely explained.
Edwards and Cromwell do what journalists should have done: they dissect the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free healthcare: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now take over NHS infrastructure, insinuating their piracy, piece by piece.
Where, ask Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while the bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to providing a breadth of view and properly to inform the public of matters of public policy , the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation s most cherished institutions. BBC News reported, Bill which gives power to GPs passes . This was pure state propaganda.
There is a striking similarity with the BBC s coverage of the build-up to Tony Blair s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and millions more dispossessed. A study by Cardiff University, Wales, found that the BBC reflected the government line overwhelmingly while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of Western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation s much-vaunted principle of impartiality was never a consideration.
One of the most telling chapters describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistle-blowers. The Guardian s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian , was abandoned when he was no longer useful, then subjected to a vituperative onslaught. With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a damaged personality and callous . They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.
With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy,