ESTABLISHED by David Cromwell and David Edwards in 2001, Media Lens monitors and challenges Britain’s mainstream media, drawing attention to what they describe as “the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately.”

“Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth,” John Pilger commented about the duo’s 2009 book Newspeak In The 21st Century.  

With Media Lens celebrating 25 years of media activism via their frequent Media Alerts and several books, Ian Sinclair asked the two Davids how the British media landscape has changed, why their work often provokes strong reactions from journalists and why they sometimes criticise left-wing writers working for mainstream outlets.  

Ian Sinclair (IS): Has the mainstream media’s reporting of war and peace issues, and the climate crisis, changed over the 25 years of Media Lens?  

Media Lens (ML): The US-led war against Iraq in 2003 was preceded by a massive propaganda campaign to try to convince the general public that Saddam was an imminent threat to the West with alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” who needed to be removed (recall the notorious Sun headline, “Brits 45 minutes from doom”).

The state-corporate media, very much including BBC News and the Guardian, had wall-to-wall coverage and promotion of talking points from the White House, the Pentagon, 10 Downing Street and other major centres of Western power.  

The result was an horrific war that led to the deaths of over one million people, the rise of Isis and even greater instability in the Middle East and globally.

The responsible politicians, not least Bush and Blair, should have become persona non grata; indeed, incarcerated in The Hague.

Instead, Blair has been rehabilitated by the UK Establishment media as a wise, elder statesman whose opinions matter on any number of topics.  

After the myth of “WMD” was exposed, some news outlets issued limited, self-serving mea culpas, admitting “mistakes” and promising to do “better” in future.

Very few journalists and commentators who advocated for war lost their platforms or had to pay any kind of price.  

The reporting of Israel’s genocide — effectively still a verboten term at the BBC and the Guardian — shows that the “MSM” have become even worse since the Iraq war.

Thankfully, the rise of independent media such as Declassified UK and Double Down News, has helped to give the public a more accurate picture of war and peace issues.  

As for the climate emergency, the greatest-ever crisis facing humanity, news coverage has, incredibly, deteriorated.

The UK has been suffering a spate of heatwaves this summer.  Analysis of nearly 2,500 media articles by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found almost three-quarters made no reference to the climate crisis.

Moreover, a study by Carbon Brief showed that nearly 100 UK newspaper editorials, particularly the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, voiced opposition to climate action, such as boosting renewable energy projects, in 2025: more than double the number of editorials that backed climate action.

In fact, 2025 marked the fourth record-breaking year in a row for criticism of climate action in newspaper editorials. Could there be a clearer example of the right-wing, billionaire-owned press sacrificing the well-being, even very survival, of the general population for their own selfish, short-term interests?  

IS: Why do you think the vast majority of mainstream media reporting continues to be closely aligned with Western state and corporate interests?  

ML: People have often asked us, “Is journalism controlled by corporations?” The answer is that the mass media are corporations.

Similarly, they are not “closely aligned” with state and corporate interests, they are state and corporate interests. The BBC, for example, is a key element of the pro-war military industrial complex. It expends huge effort propagandising for “regime change” in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Venezuela.

The Guardian is part of the Blairite-Starmerite assault on any dissident leader, commentator or movement threatening the status quo that pays its editor Kath Viner £602,000 per annum (2024/25).  

In the early days of Media Lens you emailed journalists (and encouraged your readers to do so too), challenging their reporting, leading to frequent irate responses from the journalists. For example, in 2006 the then Observer editor Roger Alton infamously called you “c**ts” in an email to a Media Lens supporter.

Why do you think your emails often engendered such a negative reaction from journalists?  

We don’t live in a totalitarian state. The whole power and kudos of corporate media executives (editors and journalists) resides in the crucial illusion that they are honest, independent, impartial, objective truth-tellers.

In reality, it is clear that profit-maximising media corporations owned by giant corporations, dependent on corporate advertising, cannot report honestly on a world dominated and devastated by corporate power.

So, when we challenge the illusions that are the very source of their power, of their sense of themselves as good people, it’s quite natural that these executives should respond negatively.

The great delight for us, though, has been that the best journalists and media commentators — people like John Pilger, Peter Oborne, Jonathan Cook, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman — have strongly supported our work. That means far more to us than all the brickbats.  

IS: It may surprise people that you have been critical of left-wing and progressive journalists working in the mainstream media, such as Owen Jones and George Monbiot. Can you explain your concern with Jones and Monbiot working for the Guardian?  

ML: From the very beginning, the whole purpose of Media Lens — the source of the excitement for us — was to tell truths about the corporate media that cannot be told by employees of the media, or by BBC and Guardian wannabes, as so many “dissidents” on the left often are.

Burning these bridges meant we could discuss how Owen Jones lamented the departure of his old Guardian “boss” (Alan Rusbridger) and literally “whooped in the quiet carriage. That’s how excited I am” on the arrival of his new boss (Kath Viner), while openly confessing that he is forbidden from criticising them or any other Guardian colleagues in his column.

It’s not about hatred or blame — we have nothing personal against Jones at all — we’re just pointing out the very real limits on free speech afflicting even the supposed best corporate dissidents, because those limits matter.  

George Monbiot initially told us he loved what we were doing. That changed after we gently pointed out the problem with his opining in November 2002 that, “[I]f war turns out to be the only means of removing Saddam, then let us support a war whose sole and incontestable purpose is that and only that…” (Monbiot, “See you in court, Tony,” The Guardian, November 26 2002).

As Harold Pinter liked to say, “That is actually b****cks.’ John Pilger commented to us that by challenging him in our media alerts, we had “saved” Monbiot from this disastrous error of judgement, which he quickly abandoned. Similarly, if we had been media wannabes seeking employment at Zeteo, we wouldn’t remind readers that Mehdi Hasan once applied to become a columnist at the Daily Mail because he admired its “passion, rigour, boldness and… news values.”

For reminding readers of this, Hasan described us as “s**ts” (Twitter, December 12 2014).

Hasan and Jones have come a long way and have done some excellent work on the Gaza genocide, but there is much to criticise.

As for Monbiot, why would we not criticise a “left-liberal” whose foreign policy analysis would often be a comfortable fit at The Times?  

IS: What plans does Media Lens have for the future?  

ML: We aim to continue publishing media alerts and cogitations which also now appear as podcasts on YouTube and in audio form.

With the aid of our trusty webmaster Keyvan Minoukadeh, we will be doing our best to not be totally suppressed by social media algorithms and government initiatives that threaten free speech.

Next March, one of us, David Edwards, will publish a political science fiction novel, The Man with No Face (Roundfire Books).  

For more information visit www.medialens.org. Follow Media Lens on X @Medialens.