MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

January 25, 2006

On the rare occasions when the issue of civilian casualties is discussed in the mainstream media three words are invariably mentioned: Iraq Body Count (IBC).

IBC describes itself as a project which maintains “the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies”. (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/background.htm)

Source: MEDIA LENS
September 12, 2005

In our Media Alert, Burying The Lancet - Parts 1 And 2 (September 5 and 6), we focused on the media response to a November 2004 report in The Lancet which estimated nearly 100,000 excess civilians deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 US-UK invasion.

Source: MEDIA LENS
September 6, 2005

Introduction

We learn some ugly truths when we compare the media response to Les Roberts' report on Iraq with the response to his earlier work in Congo.

In our analysis we found that in both the US and the British press, news reports initially presented the estimates of 100,000 deaths in Iraq and 1.7 million deaths in Congo without critical comment. The difference lies in the days, weeks and months that followed. Whereas the Congo figures and methodology were accepted without challenge, the Iraq figures and methodology were subjected to steady, withering criticism by both politicians and journalists (with rare defences in comment pieces by, for example, Seumas Milne and Terry Jones in the Guardian).

Source: MEDIA LENS
September 5, 2005

An Exchange Between The Independent's Mary Dejevsky And Lancet Author Les Roberts

"It is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces." (Les Roberts, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health)

Source: DIRELAND
by Doug Ireland
January 27, 2005

The Chronicle of Higher Education today has a top-drawer article about the researchers from Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities who published the study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggesting there were 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead from the war and the occupation. Lila Guterman, the article's author, notes that, "On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines."

Source: Left Hook
by M. Junaid Alam and Noam Chomsky
December 23, 2004

On December 17th, Left Hook co-editor M. Junaid Alam met with Professor Noam Chomsky at his MIT office to get his thoughts on the ideological justifications and historical realities behind America's "war on terror." Professor Chomsky spent a half-hour taking apart the framework of "civilization" versus "barbarism," pointing to Western and particularly US state-sponsored atrocities, laying out the grave nature of war crimes committed in Iraq, attacking the intellectual culture which sanctions massive suffering, and explaining the elite's knowledge of the roots of terrorism.

-Transcribed by M. Junaid Alam and slightly edited for clarification by Professor Chomsky

Sourece: Media Lens Alert
November 4, 2005

By way of a splendid coincidence, Media Lens received this delayed response from the BBC on November 3:

"I am writing in response to your email to Caroline Hawley dated 13/10. Apologies for the delay in replying. The estimate for the number of people killed by Saddam Hussein is based on the figure from Human Rights Watch.  They estimate that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades, and that many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves in Iraq.

Source: Media Lens Alert
November 2, 2004

The Nicest Guys You Can Imagine

In their film, The Corporation, Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan describe how in the mid-1800s the corporation was declared a "fictitious person" in law and granted the same legal rights as real individuals. So what kind of 'person' is a corporation?

The filmmakers assessed the corporate 'personality' using diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organisation and standard diagnostic tools of psychiatrists and psychologists: