Media Lens distribution format alternative media
Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site's editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media's coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately".Media Lens is financed by donations from website visitors. The editors issue regular "Media Alerts" concentrating on mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and Channel 4 News which are legally obliged to be impartial or on outlets such as The Guardian and The Independent which are usually considered left-leaning.  The site's editors frequently draw attention to what they see as the limits within which the mainstream media operates, and provide "a riveting exposé of the myth of liberal media based on a variety of empirical case studies", according to Graham Murdock and Michael Pickering.Media Lens is admired by John Pilger, who has called the website "remarkable" and described the writers as "the cyber guardians of honest journalism". Other journalists, in particular Peter Oborne, have also made positive comments about the group, although it has come into conflict with other journalists. The Observer's foreign editor Peter Beaumont asserted that the group ran a "campaign" against John Sloboda and the Iraq Body Count for underestimating the number of deaths in Iraq. George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens was "belittling the acts of genocide" in their defence of Edward S. Herman, who had questioned the  number of deaths in the Srebrenica massacre.Activities and main arguments
In 2001, Media Lens began issuing regular online Media Alerts, scrutinising media coverage, the arguments used, source selection, and the framing of events to highlight bias, omissions and direct lies. The media alerts are distributed without charge by email to an international readership. According to Media Lens, the readership was around 14,000 people in 2009. Funding is through reader subscriptions and donations.The editors engage in email and Twitter exchanges with British journalists and editors. They also invite their readers to challenge journalists, editors and programme producers directly via email, specifically discouraging abusive contact.According to Cromwell and Edwards, journalists in the mainstream media articulate an "'official' version of events ... as Truth. The testimony of critical observers and participants" and "especially those on the receiving end of Western firepower – are routinely marginalised, ignored and even ridiculed". The editors "reject all conspiracy theories. Instead, we point to the inevitably corrupting effects of 'market forces' operating on, and through, media corporations seeking profit in a society dominated by corporate power ... Media employees are part of a corporate system that, unsurprisingly, selects for servility to the needs and goals of corporate power". They believe that mainstream journalists gradually absorb an unquestioning corporate mindset as their careers progress, becoming unwilling to question their occupations or governments claims, but not consciously lying. They also say that the limitations of the corporate media are not unexpected as "[w]e did not expect the Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist Party, why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power?"In Cromwell and Edwards' opinion, western government actions have followed an "historical pattern of deception" going back several centuries, and "the corporate media is the source of some of the greatest, most lethal illusions of our age". Edwards wrote that, because of these corporate distortions, "we believe, society is not told the truth about the appalling consequences of corporate greed for poor people in the Third World, and for the environment".According to Cromwell and Edwards, the centre-left wing of the mainstream media are gatekeepers "of acceptable debate from a left or Green perspective, 'thus far and no further'" and that dissenting views have difficulty gaining attention in a corporate system. They have contrasted positive comments the mainstream media make about western leaders, with the epithets used to describe politicians such as Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's former President.In 2013, Media Lens described the corporate media as "an extremist fringe" from which progressives should completely dissociate themselves.In May 2011, and more extensively in January 2015, Media Lens advocated "a collective of high-profile writers and journalists willing to detach themselves from corporate and state media, and to place themselves entirely at the mercy of the public" with their output freely available "from a single media outlet" and financed by donations. "The support would be vast, if the initiative was posited as an alternative to the biocidal, corruption-drenched corporate media", they said in an interview with The Colossus website in January 2016.Cromwell wrote in 2016 that, to find coverage of the Yemeni Civil War, "[n]ot unusually, one has to go to media such as" the Russian television network RT and the Iranian news network Press TV, which are "so often bitterly denigrated as 'propaganda' operations by corporate journalists".
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