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A review by unisonlibrarian
Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality by David Edwards, David Cromwell
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.