Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.
In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign secretary…
According to Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model (PM) of the media, the mainstream media do not operate as a fourth estate. Although they may challenge individuals and even governments, they do not challenge the edifice behind which the concentrations of economic and political power are maintained. Events that might threaten established interests are either ignored or treated with indignation, whereas events that bolster support for the status quo are given a lot of attention,…
When the idea of the Rebellious Media Conference first bubbled up a year ago, there were two things that we really wanted to achieve with the event. We wanted to inspire people with excellent examples of radical media – the extraordinary achievements of The NewStandard were a prime example (see articles on this page). We also wanted to get a much wider circle of people (activists, journalists and others) engaging seriously with the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda Model of the media. (There are…
Suspicion of the media is widespread, not only in Britain. But is it really true that the mass media put out “propaganda”? If so, exactly how is this achieved in an open society like Britain?
How can we end up with distorted reporting when there is no government censorship to keep reporters in line? How could there possibly be “brainwashing under freedom” as some have suggested? In this series of columns, we will be exploring questions like these, trying to shine some light on the…
