Media Lens, London, 18 January 2012
One might think that a corporate media system would act independently of the state ? there is no formal mechanism of control. But as the ingrained bias sampled above indicates, this often turns out not to be the case. With regard to human rights, for example, corporate media typically do not simply pick a subject and lavish it with attention. Rather, political power selects an issue, frames the coverage, and media corporations jump on the bandwagon.
Type a household name like ?Halabja? into the UK media database search engine Lexis-Nexis, for example, and it produces more than 1,800 references to Saddam Hussein?s 1988 gassing of Kurds. Similarly, the words ?Srebrenica? and ?massacre? generate nearly 3,000 hits. Both issues have been afforded vast, impassioned coverage.
In truth, for Western commentators, the importance of these horrors is most often rooted, not in the scale of suffering inflicted, but in their utility for justifying the West?s military interventions. Thus an editorial
?Concern was real enough that a Srebrenica-style massacre could unfold in Benghazi, and the UK Government was right to insist that we would not allow this.? (Leading article, ?The mission that crept,? Independent, July 29, 2011) Continue reading “?Get Out, Black Animals?: what happened in Tawergha, Libya”
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Musings by Shahidul Alam