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One of the most exasperating comments I hear on a fairly regular basis is that the Media has a left wing bias.  If you look even a centimeter inside and below official received opinion you can see there is no left wing bias in the mainstream media.  If anything, a right wing bias exists.  The news we get generally reflects elite opinion on the topic at hand.  That is why it is so important to get your news from as many different outlets as possible hopefully with a few of the ‘alternative’ media outlets thrown into the mix.  Medialens is an orginization that watches the British press for the veracity of their stories and accuracy of their reporting.  As it is with most things, it is better to show than to tell.  I have a short blurb to look at illustrating exactly how filtered our ‘independent MSM’ actually is.

On August 26, the Guardian newspaper published an article titled, ‘US takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme in one massive gamble.’ Julian Borger and Ewen MacAskill told readers:

“The Obama administration’s approach to two of the world’s most intractable and dangerous problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme, is to link them together in the search for a solution to both.

“The new US strategy aims to use its Iran policy to gain leverage on Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.”

The “Iran policy” is based on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s threat of “crippling sanctions” against Iran. (BBC online, ‘Israel-US settlement deal “close”’, Analysis by Jeremy Bowen, August 26, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8221559.stm)

The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.” The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The paper quoted one official “close to the negotiations”:

“The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.”

So much for Obama’s much-hailed Cairo speech in June 2009 in which he promised a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” (‘Obama speech in Cairo’, Huffington Post, June 4, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-speech-in-cairo-vid_n_211215.html)

Okay, so we have the original from the Guardian.  Now lets look at the objection from David Cromwell at MediaLens which bases its critique of the article on reality instead of received opinion.

The Guardian article presented the US as a valiant peace-seeker:

“The Obama administration is setting out to juggle two potentially explosive global crises, while walking the tightrope of a shaky and nervous global economy. It is not going to be easy, but Washington appears to have decided it has no option but to try.” (Borger and MacAskill, op. cit.)

This is a deeply misleading picture of the US in the Middle East and the wider world, as we have often explained in our books and in media alerts. We are to believe that the world’s number one rogue state is searching for benign solutions to the world’s most “intractable problems”. This fiction is standard in corporate media coverage.

As the independent journalist Jonathan Cook commented to us:

“This analysis in yesterday’s Guardian is almost a masterclass in how the liberal media unthinkingly reflect elite priorities.” (Jonathan Cook, email, August 27, 2009)

Huh.   A little different that what you read in the newspapers all the time.  It gets better, Cromwell writes a email to the editor of the Guardian for failing to address the issues in the middle east.

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