Media Lens

Media Lens - Limits Of Dissent - Glenn Greenwald And The Guardian
▻http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2018/888-limits-of-dissent-glenn-greenwald-and-the-guardian.html

On November 29, we tweeted Greenwald:

’ Hi @ggreenwald, you have consistently soft-pedalled your criticism of your former colleagues at the Guardian, most recently describing the paper as “solid and reliable’” Will you respond to @Jonathan_K_Cook’s astute and rational criticism of your position? ’

At time of writing the tweet has received 57 retweets and 82 likes. Greenwald has been tweeting and must have seen some of these responses and yet has chosen not to reply. We would guess that he finds himself in a pickle: if he attempts to defend his false claim that the Guardian is ’solid and reliable’, he will be shot down in flames for the reasons described above by Cook. And if he agrees with Cook’s analysis, he risks alienating former colleagues and important allies on the paper.

The conclusion, then, is that Greenwald is following so many Guardian and other ’mainstream’ journalists before him in simply blanking reasonable, rational questions.

„#ce_peu_est_encore_trop“

Media Lens - Mass Media Siege: Comparing Coverage Of Mosul and Aleppo
▻http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2017/852-mass-media-siege-comparing-coverage-of-mosul-and-aleppo.html

http://www.medialens.org/images/Mosul%20alert%20pic%20final.jpg

When Russian and Syrian forces were bombarding ’rebel’-held East Aleppo last year, newspapers and television screens were full of anguished reporting about the plight of civilians killed, injured, trapped, traumatised or desperately fleeing. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, both Official Enemies, were denounced and demonised, in accordance with the usual propaganda script. One piece in the Evening Standard described Assad as a ’monster’ and a Boris Johnson column in the Telegraph referred to both Putin and Assad as ’the Devil’.

As the respected veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn put it:

’The partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron.’

This, he said, was ’the nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria.’ Media reporting focused laser-like on ’Last calls (or messages or tweets) from Aleppo’. There were heart-breaking accounts of families, children, elderly people, all caught up in dreadful conditions that could be pinned on the ’brutal’ Assad and his ’regime’; endless photographs depicting grief and suffering that tore at one’s psyche.

By contrast, there was little of this evident in media coverage as the Iraqi city of Mosul, with a population of around one million, was being pulverised by the US-led ’coalition’ from 2015; particularly since the massive assault launched last October to ’liberate’ the city from ISIS, with ’victory’ declared a few days ago. Most pointedly, western media coverage has not, of course, demonised the US for inflicting mass death and suffering.

As Cockburn pointed out, there were ’many similarities between the sieges of Mosul and East Aleppo, but they were reported very differently’.

’Flatten All Of Gaza’ - The ’Benghazi Moment’ That Didn’t Matter
►http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=708:flatten-all-of-gaza-the-

the fevered atmosphere generated every time state-corporate propaganda targets a ‘New Hitler’ for destruction (Gaddafi, Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Assad, et al). Two or three weeks of sustained moral outrage from Washington, London and Paris, echoed across the media, are more than sufficient to generate the required hysteria. Almost anything can then be claimed, with even rational questioning denounced as ’apologetics for tyranny’.

#médias #propagande #double_standards #libye #syrie #gaza