A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power. Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a →

None of us has previously witnessed a barrage of extreme weather events of the kind that has been devastating lives across the globe this summer. Canadian wildfires the size of Austria, a Hawaiian town incinerated →

On a trip to Japan in 2014, approaching the third anniversary of the Fukishima nuclear disaster, Noam Chomsky told an audience that: ‘Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy.’ What he meant was →

Why are we at Media Lens utterly terrified by climate collapse while other people we know are mildly concerned, blithely indifferent or cockily contrarian? The simple answer is that we are doing this full-time and →

The Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko famously said that: ‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’ In this country, as in other western ‘democracies’, important truths are effectively being silenced. As we →

The late writer, broadcaster and wit Clive James formulated what he called the ‘Barry Manilow Law’: ‘Everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible. But everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great.’ (James, cited →

The death of novelist and essayist Martin Amis on 19 May triggered a ‘mainstream’ wave, not just of admiration, but of adoration. It is clear from the obituaries that Amis died with his reputation intact →

In a recent Guardian advert pleading for readers to hand over money to the paper, leading columnist Marina Hyde declared: ‘My absolute favourite thing about the Guardian is not being told what to write.’ Hyde →