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In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. In an ‘ordinary town’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, people are →

Humanity’s great Achilles’ heel, the flaw that may well determine our fate, was summed up in a couple of lines in the classic Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘The Boxer’: ‘Still a man hears what he →

As the US economist and media analyst Edward Herman rightly noted in the aftermath of the mass slaughter of the first Gulf War: ‘It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the →

‘The American population was bombarded the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, →

There has been much gnashing of ‘liberal’ teeth and pulling out of ‘centrist’ hair following the Tory government’s announcement that the BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries declared via →

If we didn’t have better things to do, it would be a simple matter to produce The Media Lens Book of Obituaries. The cover might feature grim Death shrouded in tattered newsprint carrying a five-bladed →

Huge media coverage has been devoted to allegations, and now serious evidence, that a Christmas party was held at 10 Downing Street on 18 December 2020. London was then in a strict lockdown with social →

One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist: ‘#COP26  has been named the must excluding COP ever. This is →

In their classic book on the news media, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a ‘propaganda model’ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim →

During last week’s Tory Cabinet reshuffle, ITV political editor Robert Peston inadvertently summed up the primary function of political journalists: ‘I simply pass on’ His tweet was in reference to a ministerial source saying that →