Seumas Milne, George Monbiot & ‘Media Analysis’ In The Guardian Wonderland
One of the original aims of Media Lens, when we began in 2001, was to engage in honest, open and rational debate with journalists working for major news organisations. It wasn’t about ‘bashing’ them or trying to make them look bad. We wanted to examine media assumptions, challenge journalists’ arguments and find out more about the unwritten rules of ‘responsible’ reporting.
One of the aspects of journalism that we find particularly fascinating is the extent to which even the best, most honest or most radical journalists can push back the mainstream walls enclosing media debate. How dissenting are they really permitted to be? And how might their presence in the media underpin the public’s perception of a ‘free press’?
As we noted in Newspeak in the 21st Century, the journalist Jonathan Cook addressed these points in an eye-opening reply to one of our media alerts. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer, agreed with us that the most consistently challenging voices are systematically filtered out of the mainstream. He asked:
‘How is it then, if this thesis is right, that there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?’
But as Cook himself observed, this tiny group almost entirely exhausts the list of writers who can be said to confront the established consensus from a progressive perspective.
