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bilbili's review against another edition
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Physical abuse, Gun violence, Genocide, Death, Child death, Violence, and War
ronanmcd's review against another edition
4.0
Books of this type are necessary. The media account for so much of how we think and process the world around us: what we take exception to, what we deem permissible, how we align ourselves; so much is down to the media we follow. We ought to know what state they are in, how truthful they are, how much integrity they have.
I'm just not certain this is the book to do it. The writers correctly identify left-leaning, more liberal media as being less recognised in being invested in the status quo. We see them as disrupters even if, as the book proves, they aren't.
Hence the book deals little with the right wing press, who are unabashed in what they do.
My problems with the book mostly stem from what it doesn't do and what can be extrapolated from that. It lionises Assange as a force for good in complicit media and politics. Maybe he once had that role, but in carrying the workload for Clinton's hacked emails he has a clear axe to grind. As afar as I know he was not exonerated in the rape case, but the Swedes simply said it was too difficult to pursue.
John Pilger is deified. At one point, yes, this would have been true, but not now. Not when he goes on RT and claims the Skripal poisoning was a piece of British stagecraft.
Corbyn too is upheld as the honest future, and yes, like the others he has redeeming qualities; people-led policies are not one of those. The book does not even mention his determination to go against his supporters' wishes and take UK out of the EU, which will be at the personal expense of his voters. Likewise his ill-conceived calls after the Skripal poisoning (for what he was disgracfully denigrated by the BBC) have not been corrected. Both Corbyn and the BBC came out poorly from this.
There is much good in the book, and it offers a new view. But it is exactly what it accuses others of: it editorialises by being selective and overlooking compromise. On balance, it is worth reading, for exactly that purpose: balance.
**
I made some notes are made as I went; far from fully formed thoughts.
To begin, I expected more of a wide-angle media critique than what essentially amounts to a collection of potshots.
As a regular Guardian reader this book is a challenge to what i have held true. That's ok, that's why I'm reading it. However, I do feel the authors are a bit gung ho with nitpicking.
For example they point out the truth of the false equivalency that in denying Western reports against balkan dictators they are not supporting those dictators. Yet they make the same false equivalency themselves. Attacking those who attack Corbyn they view all attacks on him together as being of equal value.
They harp on about the press being unfair to corbyn, but they say nothing of his not believing reports on the Skripal poisoning or his undermining of his own party's opposition to Brexit.
They talk of Assange's "dire plight" as though he is exonerated. He isn't, the accusations were not withdrawn by the rape victim. The swedish police simply decided a case could not be successfully pursued against an embassy's mantelpiece ornament.
The Khan Sheikoun piece on Syria is deeply unconvincing, picking a few experts and going against what the UN reports have said. Their point is that the media is full of certainty without evidence. This is exactly the charge i would level at the writers; they express the utmost certainty based on the testimony of a few experts and against that of multi-national teams. The Syria chapter highlights the authors' own blindspot further - they rightfully accuse the media of deciding without sufficient evidence, but there was no mention in the Corbyn chapter of his own refusal to accept evidence (Brexit, Skripal, anti-semitism) which the media did pick up on.
So far a vast spectrum of the media has been demonised, while Assange has been lionised. There has been no mention of the Labour party's anti-semitism problems which Corbyn seems not to have successfully addressed.
The book claims there was no mention of Libya in coverage of Hilary Clinton. I seem to remember a lot of Benghazi shouting.
Pilger accuses the US of supporting a coup in Ukraine, which gave the Russians their excuse for annexing the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But that's tripe. Yanukovich was chased from office because he was installed by Russia. Whether or not the US helped chase him out is not the beginning point in this story as Pilger alleges, and incidentally Manafort also helped install Yanukovich.
Excellent quote from Greg Dyke in book, "the BBC is part of a 'conspiracy' preventing the 'radical changes' needed to UK democracy".
The entire NHS and Climate change chapters are sobering and terrifying.
I'm just not certain this is the book to do it. The writers correctly identify left-leaning, more liberal media as being less recognised in being invested in the status quo. We see them as disrupters even if, as the book proves, they aren't.
Hence the book deals little with the right wing press, who are unabashed in what they do.
My problems with the book mostly stem from what it doesn't do and what can be extrapolated from that. It lionises Assange as a force for good in complicit media and politics. Maybe he once had that role, but in carrying the workload for Clinton's hacked emails he has a clear axe to grind. As afar as I know he was not exonerated in the rape case, but the Swedes simply said it was too difficult to pursue.
John Pilger is deified. At one point, yes, this would have been true, but not now. Not when he goes on RT and claims the Skripal poisoning was a piece of British stagecraft.
Corbyn too is upheld as the honest future, and yes, like the others he has redeeming qualities; people-led policies are not one of those. The book does not even mention his determination to go against his supporters' wishes and take UK out of the EU, which will be at the personal expense of his voters. Likewise his ill-conceived calls after the Skripal poisoning (for what he was disgracfully denigrated by the BBC) have not been corrected. Both Corbyn and the BBC came out poorly from this.
There is much good in the book, and it offers a new view. But it is exactly what it accuses others of: it editorialises by being selective and overlooking compromise. On balance, it is worth reading, for exactly that purpose: balance.
**
I made some notes are made as I went; far from fully formed thoughts.
To begin, I expected more of a wide-angle media critique than what essentially amounts to a collection of potshots.
As a regular Guardian reader this book is a challenge to what i have held true. That's ok, that's why I'm reading it. However, I do feel the authors are a bit gung ho with nitpicking.
For example they point out the truth of the false equivalency that in denying Western reports against balkan dictators they are not supporting those dictators. Yet they make the same false equivalency themselves. Attacking those who attack Corbyn they view all attacks on him together as being of equal value.
They harp on about the press being unfair to corbyn, but they say nothing of his not believing reports on the Skripal poisoning or his undermining of his own party's opposition to Brexit.
They talk of Assange's "dire plight" as though he is exonerated. He isn't, the accusations were not withdrawn by the rape victim. The swedish police simply decided a case could not be successfully pursued against an embassy's mantelpiece ornament.
The Khan Sheikoun piece on Syria is deeply unconvincing, picking a few experts and going against what the UN reports have said. Their point is that the media is full of certainty without evidence. This is exactly the charge i would level at the writers; they express the utmost certainty based on the testimony of a few experts and against that of multi-national teams. The Syria chapter highlights the authors' own blindspot further - they rightfully accuse the media of deciding without sufficient evidence, but there was no mention in the Corbyn chapter of his own refusal to accept evidence (Brexit, Skripal, anti-semitism) which the media did pick up on.
So far a vast spectrum of the media has been demonised, while Assange has been lionised. There has been no mention of the Labour party's anti-semitism problems which Corbyn seems not to have successfully addressed.
The book claims there was no mention of Libya in coverage of Hilary Clinton. I seem to remember a lot of Benghazi shouting.
Pilger accuses the US of supporting a coup in Ukraine, which gave the Russians their excuse for annexing the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. But that's tripe. Yanukovich was chased from office because he was installed by Russia. Whether or not the US helped chase him out is not the beginning point in this story as Pilger alleges, and incidentally Manafort also helped install Yanukovich.
Excellent quote from Greg Dyke in book, "the BBC is part of a 'conspiracy' preventing the 'radical changes' needed to UK democracy".
The entire NHS and Climate change chapters are sobering and terrifying.
okayashe36's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
Wow! I was talking to someone about their undergrad dissertation. The topic of media and how it is used to spread news was one of the main points for their project. This book just outdid it for myself. Highly recommend for a different look inside media, and how old is reflected!
unisonlibrarian's review against another edition
5.0
"Fake news" and "main stream media" are epithets that are not really new but have been much more prominent in our collective lexicon over the last couple of years. They are, as phrases, politically ambivalent until you understand the angle of the person taken to wield them and both, but moreso the former, have been misused greatly. The phrase became famous when Donald Trump used it to describe any and everything that he disagreed with, and his followers gleefully took up the catchphrase whereby it is now the go-to defence of the political right when faced with an inconvenient truth. However, we are now seeing this peculiar axiom being used by a wholly new interlocuter, and that is where the main stream media, or MSM come in.
Newspapers, particularly so-called quality newspapers, current / former broadsheets and such see themselves as papers of record, their integrity unquestionable and their honesty unimpeachable. On examination this high-minded self-promotion holds no water. Nowadays the vast majority of newspaper income comes not from sales but from advertising and affiliation space sold over to huge corporations to reach a wide audience. How can the Guardian’s credentials as a progressive organ on, say, climate change maintain alongside a willingness to hand over daily space to BP or Shell to tell us how wonderful they are. As soon as the Guardian wants to write a piece on the unethical behaviour of the oil industry, naming and shaming corporations involved, they are unable due to the threat of advertising revenue being pulled by those companies.
But something much darker is happening in media circles than underreporting, and it is the targeting of smaller independent minded organisations and journalists by the corporate media, and fake news is the route they are taking to do that at the behest of senior editors and the financial backers of these institutions. In response the fake news epidemic that has plagued large scale national and global campaigns in recent years Google released an update which was supposed to remove untrusted pages from the first set of results a user got back from a basic search; this new algorithm was programmed to promote “trusted” news sources, or to put it another way, mainstream media. A result of this was that progressive independent news organisations reported massive drops in the amount of people clicking on, and so seeing, their stories. World Socialist Web Site and Counterpunch feature award winning progressive journalists from around the world and their traffic dropped by hundreds of thousands as soon as this Google update was brought in; among the websites that remain in the “trusted” bracket are things like The Sun, The Express and the Daily Mail along with the other daily newspapers; their longevity should not signify trustworthiness.
If we look at the social media output of star columnists for the Times, Guardian etc we see that they are littered with slanderous comments aimed at small organisations that haven’t the budget to fight back. Journalists who work for MediaLens, Truthdig or any other progressive organisation are called out time and again by six-figure salaried writers who they dare to question. Doxing and gaslighting has been a part of this as has the denial of people’s qualifications to write in their chosen field, despite photographic evidence to the contrary, and it is with this chapter on the state of corporate media today, the BBC included, that this new book from Cromwell and Edwards of MediaLens shines. Much of it is an update on the previous two books about the latest in a long line of state propagandising on behalf of big business or the military industrial complex; very valuable in itself but what is new is this coordinated assault by the biggest companies in the world against small outfits that seek truth and justice and aren’t beholden to advertising revenue so can’t be bought. The corporate world is jumpy; they see how Momentum pushed Jeremy Corbyn to almost becoming British Prime Minister while the whole artillery of the press was opposed to him to almost no avail. They realised their smears were not sticking as people actually had the ability to find out for themselves what was true and what was not, they have started to be able to tell the fact from the fiction and if people start to do that the whole edifice of corporate / government / media threesome comes crashing down as they all exist to sustain one another, and a threat to one is a threat to all.
MediaLens is one of those vital parts of journalism; it watches the watchers and lets us know what the watchers aren’t telling us. This book is a collection of evidence against the more trusted side of the corporate media that they are just as bad, and at times worse in giving us the full picture. It Is hard to conclude at the end of this book that a rightist ideology has not grabbed our media, top to bottom, in a vice like grip of control; at times overt and at times subtle but always there but at no point does this theory enter conspiracy claims. The point of how our media sustains itself is that a conspiracy doesn’t need to take place; the ideology is already shared between the actors who just play their role as they always would have, but in doing so they advance more than those who don’t play by or understand “the rules”. This is a most valuable volume and critical at a time when our politicians seem to be able to lie with impunity without anyone holding them to account, when big business, quite literally in terms of Grenfell tower for instance, gets away with murder and when our hitherto most trusted news organisations have started drinking from the same well as those they are meant to hold to account. I would urge anyone who wants to understand how the media manipulate their readers and viewers to read this book.
Newspapers, particularly so-called quality newspapers, current / former broadsheets and such see themselves as papers of record, their integrity unquestionable and their honesty unimpeachable. On examination this high-minded self-promotion holds no water. Nowadays the vast majority of newspaper income comes not from sales but from advertising and affiliation space sold over to huge corporations to reach a wide audience. How can the Guardian’s credentials as a progressive organ on, say, climate change maintain alongside a willingness to hand over daily space to BP or Shell to tell us how wonderful they are. As soon as the Guardian wants to write a piece on the unethical behaviour of the oil industry, naming and shaming corporations involved, they are unable due to the threat of advertising revenue being pulled by those companies.
But something much darker is happening in media circles than underreporting, and it is the targeting of smaller independent minded organisations and journalists by the corporate media, and fake news is the route they are taking to do that at the behest of senior editors and the financial backers of these institutions. In response the fake news epidemic that has plagued large scale national and global campaigns in recent years Google released an update which was supposed to remove untrusted pages from the first set of results a user got back from a basic search; this new algorithm was programmed to promote “trusted” news sources, or to put it another way, mainstream media. A result of this was that progressive independent news organisations reported massive drops in the amount of people clicking on, and so seeing, their stories. World Socialist Web Site and Counterpunch feature award winning progressive journalists from around the world and their traffic dropped by hundreds of thousands as soon as this Google update was brought in; among the websites that remain in the “trusted” bracket are things like The Sun, The Express and the Daily Mail along with the other daily newspapers; their longevity should not signify trustworthiness.
If we look at the social media output of star columnists for the Times, Guardian etc we see that they are littered with slanderous comments aimed at small organisations that haven’t the budget to fight back. Journalists who work for MediaLens, Truthdig or any other progressive organisation are called out time and again by six-figure salaried writers who they dare to question. Doxing and gaslighting has been a part of this as has the denial of people’s qualifications to write in their chosen field, despite photographic evidence to the contrary, and it is with this chapter on the state of corporate media today, the BBC included, that this new book from Cromwell and Edwards of MediaLens shines. Much of it is an update on the previous two books about the latest in a long line of state propagandising on behalf of big business or the military industrial complex; very valuable in itself but what is new is this coordinated assault by the biggest companies in the world against small outfits that seek truth and justice and aren’t beholden to advertising revenue so can’t be bought. The corporate world is jumpy; they see how Momentum pushed Jeremy Corbyn to almost becoming British Prime Minister while the whole artillery of the press was opposed to him to almost no avail. They realised their smears were not sticking as people actually had the ability to find out for themselves what was true and what was not, they have started to be able to tell the fact from the fiction and if people start to do that the whole edifice of corporate / government / media threesome comes crashing down as they all exist to sustain one another, and a threat to one is a threat to all.
MediaLens is one of those vital parts of journalism; it watches the watchers and lets us know what the watchers aren’t telling us. This book is a collection of evidence against the more trusted side of the corporate media that they are just as bad, and at times worse in giving us the full picture. It Is hard to conclude at the end of this book that a rightist ideology has not grabbed our media, top to bottom, in a vice like grip of control; at times overt and at times subtle but always there but at no point does this theory enter conspiracy claims. The point of how our media sustains itself is that a conspiracy doesn’t need to take place; the ideology is already shared between the actors who just play their role as they always would have, but in doing so they advance more than those who don’t play by or understand “the rules”. This is a most valuable volume and critical at a time when our politicians seem to be able to lie with impunity without anyone holding them to account, when big business, quite literally in terms of Grenfell tower for instance, gets away with murder and when our hitherto most trusted news organisations have started drinking from the same well as those they are meant to hold to account. I would urge anyone who wants to understand how the media manipulate their readers and viewers to read this book.
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