MOSCOW - In 2001, David Cromwell and David Edwards founded the website Media Lens. Ever since, the pair have meticulously scrutinised Western media coverage of major issues and events, an experience that has led them to a stark conclusion - the West's "free press" operates as a propaganda system for state-corporate power.
They regularly issue "media alerts", offering analysis on major global events and issues, seeking to draw attention to the misleading "limits" within which corporate media operates. They also frequently challenge the journalists and organisations involved, and urge their readers to do the same. Despite being a two-man team whose work has rarely been acknowledged in the mainstream, over the course of its existence the organisation has proven itself to a most troublesome media antagonist.
The pair have also authored books — their latest, "Propaganda Blitz", is the result of 25 years spent watching corporate media "trash literally every major issue they touch", "consistently and systematically attacking even minor threats to the status quo at home and abroad". In this exclusive interview, they share with me their key findings.
What inspired you to write the book?
"Propaganda Blitz" is the result of 25 years spent watching how corporate media trash literally every major issue they touch. They don't just distort, hype, or "sex up"; they reverse the truth, render issues completely impossible to understand, and ignore the most important facts, arguments, and voices. It's an awesomely effective form of thought control, all happening in the absence of any controlling conspiracy.
Media analysis is much more interesting, mysterious, and obscure than meets the eye. It's not just about collecting facts and figures. Anyone who thinks it's mere data collection or hard science, could not be more wrong — it is as much about subtle psychology as it is about politics. For example, the American novelist Upton Sinclair wrote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
This is a key issue for understanding corporate media conformity, mendacity, and destructiveness, and it's rooted in the human capacity for self-deception.
The idea of the "propaganda blitz" was formulated by David Edwards after noticing how, time and again, media storms erupted at fortuitous times in support of establishment policy on Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and then in attacking Jeremy Corbyn.
It was obvious in 2013, for example, the BBC was being used as a conduit to peddle relentless atrocity stories in support of "intervention" in Syria. It was clear some kind of mechanism was in place to ensure a steady supply of these claims intended to culminate in a major Western attack. Many of these claims were based on allegations of dramatic new evidence that, we were told, demanded Western "intervention".
They were delivered with intense moral outrage supporting "action", and because all media repeated and accepted these claims, they appeared to be supported by an informed corporate media/academic/expert consensus.
The claims are typically characterised by extreme moral dissonance — the public was told "we" — the great humanitarians who wreaked havoc on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — were best placed to "save" Syrians from Assad. Anyone daring to challenge this "consensus" was condemned as "pro-Assad", an "Assad apologist", a "denier", and so on. The claims often appeared at just the right time in support of action of some kind and dried up the moment "action" happened or was rejected. When Obama decided not to bomb Syria at the last moment in August 2013, it was very noticeable that the flood of atrocity stories suddenly dried up.
Taken together, the characteristics outlined above are the key features of what we call a "propaganda blitz" — a lightning strike of smears and deception intended to achieve some kind of decisive result benefiting powerful interests.
How does the mainstream media "reverse reality"?
Western states that have been mercilessly plundering the world for hundreds of years are the "good guys". Independent nationalists defending themselves against the "good guys" in places like Iran under Musaddiq, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas and Cuba under Castro become the "bad guys" and even a "threat" to the superpowers attacking them.
After a decade of war and crippling sanctions, Iraq — threatened by yet another massive military attack in 2003 — becomes a "clear and present" danger to the West it has never threatened. The former colonial powers launching an imperial oil grab in Libya in 2011 are depicted as "humanitarian interventionists". The commentators endlessly tubthumping about our "responsibility to protect" human rights in oil-rich countries like Iraq and Libya, fall completely silent when those countries are conquered, collapse into chaos, and when returning oil revenues reveal that "we" were all along focused on the "responsibility to protect" profits. The right-wing Republican and Conservative parties, depicted as the parties of "national security" and "law and order", simply ignore the looming climate collapse, threatening actual human extinction, in the name of short-term profits, and so on…
What are some major case studies in the book?
At the start, we set out the "anatomy of a propaganda blitz"; in other words, its characteristic features, and then proceed to give examples of corporate and political attempts to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and smear Julian Assange, Russell Brand and Hugo Chavez.
For instance, the issue of anti-Semitism has been "weaponized" cynically and deliberately to attack Corbyn. But, in the wider picture, it is being exploited by the Israel lobby and their influential, privileged supporters in the "mainstream" media to fend off increasing international condemnation of Israel's war crimes and brutal oppression against the Palestinians. Whenever Israel launches yet another show of force against Gaza, a propaganda blitz will then attempt to reinforce the conventional narrative that Israel is only "responding" to Palestinian "aggression".
We also analyse the campaign to boost public support for the NATO attack on Libya in 2011, in which the UK was a key player under David Cameron. Libya was essentially destroyed as a functioning country, with horrendous consequences in terms of fomenting Daesh* terrorism against Western targets, including here at home in the UK.
Other examples of propaganda blitzes include the incessant corporate mantra of a "failing" National Health Service that needs to be "saved" by restructuring it and selling it off to private interests. Another example was the establishment frenzy about the "dangers" of Scottish independence in 2014. This was a remarkable example of the British establishment genuinely in fear of losing its grip on power, and scaremongering the population into supporting the status quo.
The final chapter demolishes the fakery around the issue of "fake news" and proposes a new model of doing journalism that is free of the corporate stranglehold.
Why are mainstream journalists so averse to your work?
We put them in an impossible situation. Take The Guardian's best-known progressive commentators, Owen Jones and George Monbiot — they're famous for their supposedly no-holds barred commentary as left and green dissidents, but there's a problem. Jones, for example, has admitted he's "barred" from criticising his Guardian colleagues in his column. So, when he damns the state of the modern mass media, as he occasionally does, he can't criticise Guardian journalists, editors and managers — he can't dish the dirt on his employer.
It was noticeable in his book, "The Establishment", Jones focused heavily on the problem of media moguls but ignored the Herman and Chomsky "propaganda model" of media control. This was significant because The Guardian isn't owned by a media mogul — which means, happily, it fell outside the focus of Jones's criticism — whereas the "propaganda model" lists media moguls as only one of five key forces filtering media content, with four of those five applying perfectly to The Guardian.