medialens vs george monbiot part 2

[dudeness]

MEDIA LENS ALERT: GEORGE MONBIOT QUERIES MEDIA LENS - PART 2




In Part 1 of this Media Alert we published an exchange with Guardian columnist George Monbiot. On October 14 we received the following response from Monbiot:

Dear David and David,

thank you for your letter. I do not disagree that "the UK media serve as a powerful propaganda system defending the interests of state-corporate power." Nor do I believe that the liberal media provide sufficient balance. But it seems to me that you have asked Edward Herman the wrong question. I did not question "the applicability of the model to the British media". I questioned the applicability of the model to the Guardian, for the same reasons as Rusbridger does. As you may remember, my last communication to you in our previous exchange pointed out that you had misrepresented my position in this respect.

Of course the liberal media present an unblananced picture of the world, and the BBC in particular always chooses, when in doubt, the position of safety, which means positioning itself not very far from the line taken by the mainstream press - Times, Telegraph, Mail, Economist etc. Surely the reason for this is that if it does otherwise, the mainstream papers will jump down its throat. Having worked in and out of it (mostly as a freelancer) for 18 years, I can testify that it is terrified of their response, and of the political capital its opponents will make out of that response. Surely this is the simplest and most evident explanation of why - to my frustration and yours - it so often takes the establishment line and presents that as a neutral position?

In other words, the source of the problem is elsewhere. It lies with the deliberately and outrageously distorted reporting of the big corporate news organisations. It therefore seems odd to me that you concentrate on the outlets in which the symptoms of the problem are felt, rather than go to the source of the problem, and expose the lies of the right-wing press. You suggest that "many people recognise" its distortions. That is true in general, but not on a day-to-day basis. It takes time and effort to work out precisely what the real story is, in what respects it has been misreported, and why the interests which control these media want it covered in a misleading way. This is what I thought you were going to do when you started Medialens, and it was obvious to me that this was an urgent and necessary task, which no one else was discharging. So it has been a disappointment to me to see that you appear largely to be ignoring the underlying problem, and concentrating on the derivative one.

What I also find weird is that the majority of the articles you cite to support your case that the liberal media shuts out the voices of dissent are drawn from precisely the liberal media you are attacking - in this letter, for example, you cite Pilger in the New Statesman and Moore in the Guardian. If your model applied to these outlets as consistently as you say it does, these voices of dissent would surely not be published by them.

Finally, you ask me "what is your view of the Guardian's reporting on Iraq?" Last time I gave you my opinion on the Guardian's coverage, I asked you to treat it in confidence. You betrayed that confidence.

With my best wishes, George Monbiot.
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