In March 2009 a remarkable “discussion” took place on the Medialens message board. It’s no longer available there, and a Google search shows nothing, so I’ll post a few excerpts here…

To summarise: Stephen Soldz, a long-time advocate of the Lancet studies (on Iraqi deaths) changed his mind about the Lancet 2006 study, and wrote, “I do not feel that their estimate of 650,000 post-invasion surplus deaths can be trusted”, and, “the study cannot be considered reliable”.*

Not surprisingly, the Medialens crowd were outraged. One Medialens follower (Gabriele Zamparini) wrote that Soldz was providing “propaganda for the mass murderers”. The Medialens editors added that Soldz’s mind showed signs of being affected by “propaganda weathering and erosion”. Soldz, who’d been a Medialens supporter upto this point, described the Medialens discussion as follows:

I do think that what occurred here is in the spirit of the Stalinist Gulag, or perhaps the Maoist criticism-self-criticism session, though on a vastly different scale, since, thankfully, the folks here are powerless. With one exception, there was no attempt at any real dialog, there was simply a process of finding grounds to dismiss me, combined with a constant hectoring because I didn’t phrase things the way that is to be officially tolerated. But it was the lynch mob psychology that was the most disturbing, and the fact that no one said “STOP!” The message implicitly was being sent to anyone who might publicly deviate from the group consensus that this is what will happen to you should you deviate.

The fact that I received private emails from people who were afraid to speak out against this here is a terrible sign. I would never engage in “dialog” with this group again. [...]

I used to think that we needed a group like Media Lens in the US. Now I am simply thankful that this particular flavor of Stalinism hasn’t yet emigrated. The society you fight for would end up, despite the nice words, as being one of the jackboot stomping on the human face forever.

Thankfully, not all Medialens supporters succumb to the mob psychology. A dwindling few think for themselves. One of them responded to Stephen Soldz’s remarks:

I myself have long given up expecting to enjoy the freedom to participate in open and fair debate here. The last straw came when one of my posts vanished without trace. When I enquired, the [Medialens] Editors admitted they had deleted it. Their excuse that “it didn’t add anything to the debate” struck me as disingenuous. Plainly they were preserving the precious feelings of one of their favoured sons. They could not cite any board rules which it had violated. Seeing this happen, another thread contributor abandoned the board for a long time, though he has since returned. My response was to stay here and post occasionally but to give up the prospect of serious debate governed by anything resembling the principles of logic.

The Editors also claimed to be concerned that valuable truths are being lost in excessive feuding. But they were happy to signal their support for the attack dogs against you [Soldz] in this thread. This must mean that they alone know what these valuable truths are in advance. This is contrary to the principle of freedom of speech.

*Stephen Soldz’s piece on the Lancet 2006 study is available at Znet: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20890

[For the full text of the Medialens message board thread which I've quoted from, please contact me via the About page]

Last year I wrote about Medialens’s attack on Nick Davies’s book, Flat Earth News. I said they’d attempted to portray Davies as a “company man” with “nothing serious to offer”, whose analysis is “flawed”, “naïve”, “old” and “very superficial”. Medialens then replied that:

This is a distortion and in fact a complete reversal of what we wrote. (Medialens editors, 10/3/08)

In fact, I’d quoted Medialens accurately, but they objected that:

Our “nothing serious to offer” comment referred specifically to Davies’s material on proposed solutions, not to the book as a whole. (Medialens editors, 10/3/08)

They also replied that they’d “repeatedly praised the book”.

Perhaps, at this point, you’re unclear about Medialens’s real opinion of the book. Did they “repeatedly praise” it, or did they dismiss it as “very superficial”, “flawed”, “naïve”, etc? Presumably they didn’t do both simultaneously – at least not congruently or sincerely. To help make your mind up, here (exactly one year later) are some new comments from Medialens on Flat Earth News:

Davies’s book was very superficial. His major ‘findings’ were absurd but useful to the mainstream propaganda system – the reason he’s had so much high-profile coverage. You’re not helping people by encouraging them to take him seriously. And of course it just encourages him… (David Edwards, email to Nik Gorecki, posted by the ML eds to their message board, 9/3/09)

Davies is “a Guardian man,” as he’s happy to admit – that tells you pretty much all you need to know about the seriousness of his “expose” of the media. It’s like “a party man” declaring the truth about the Communist party in the Soviet Union and being hailed by the Soviet media as a courageous, amazing whistleblower. It’s complete nonsense. (Medialens editors, ML message board, 9/3/09)

Just take a look at his book – honest journalists are under so much pressure these days they can’t do their jobs properly any more. Utter nonsense. I have literally received greater clarity in discussing these issues with my 11/13-year-old nephews and niece. [...] It’s wrong even to label Davies’s analysis a high school-level production – it’s not that it’s dumb or ill-informed – it’s just not honest. And all these people pretending he’s saying something profound and important – it’s classic Emperor’s New Clothes stuff. (Medialens editors, ML message board, 9/3/09)

In case the Medialens editors regard these accurate quotations as a “complete reversal” of their views, I’ll include the latest example of their “repeated praise” of the book:

There are some good parts in the book – the Observer material on the suppression of Ed Vulliamy’s WMD story +is+ interesting – but should we really be satisfied with crumbs when he blithely misses the whole of the bigger picture? (Medialens editors, ML message board, 9/3/09)

Do you get the picture yet? If not, this final quote from Medialens should do it [my emphasis]:

Davies’s book focuses on side issues and trivial nonsense, and simply ignores everything that really matters about the corporate media. But what’s so extraordinary is that these are really huge, blindingly obvious issues – really big stuff that anyone can see. But for him other stuff matters more. It’s a classic example of how thought control works in our society. It’s not something to be praised; it should be exposed. It’s this stuff that finally kills people. It’s this quiet turning away from what really matters, from what could change things, that ultimately leaves children without limbs in Gaza, mothers with their heads torn off. (Medialens editors, ML message board, 9/3/09)

So, while Medialens claim to “repeatedly praise” Davies’s book, they are saying it represents the kind of “stuff” that “finally kills people”. Medialens use a peculiar “logic” of attenuated complicity to attack their opponents (Davies, Monbiot, Adam Curtis, etc). They regard anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs as potentially (or actually) “complicit” in mass killing (in fact they once stated on their message board that anyone who voted New Labour, post Iraq war, was complicit in war crimes). They seem blissfully unaware of where this logic can lead. (Clue: much of the violence in the world stems from self-righteousness and closed belief systems. And remember: the Holy Inquisition arose from a belief system in which the “saviour of humanity” personified compassion and non-violence).

The following is my reply to the editors of Medialens, after their “Alert” [of 4/12/08] attacked this blog. [See, also, George Monbiot's reply to Medialens]

Dear David and David,

The way I read your Alert [4/12/08] is as follows: you start with an attempt at character assassination, then you target George Monbiot with a guilt-by-association line. And this is in response to a one-line question posed by George on your message board? The whole alert reeks of defensiveness.

You also state that I’m “wrong on every level”, but in fact you refute none of my points (the best you can manage is your assertion that I “misrepresent” you at one point – which I dispute). More on that below.

At the top of your alert, before providing any argument, you set the tone by writing of me: “he has smeared us whenever and wherever he can across the web”. That’s a serious charge, but you provide no examples, no evidence of these “smears”. Instead, you mention my piece which criticises your alert on Nick Davies and his book, Flat Earth News. But you provide no direct link – you link instead to your own forum, which has a link to another message board, on which my piece can be found. (So, with some effort, your readers can check whether I’m really “smearing” you or just criticising you).

My blog contains a lot of criticism of Medialens (although not as much as Medialens’s rather obsessive criticism of Monbiot). If it’s true that I “smear” you “whenever and wherever” I can, then presumably my blog should be full of those “smears”. It’s odd, then, that you cite none, particularly as you seem to use my blog as part of your guilt-by-association attack on Monbiot.

You first attempt a “substantial” criticism with the following:

“In other words, Shone’s claim that we ’stress that journalists should “subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism”‘ in the alert is simply false – we said no such thing. He misrepresented what we wrote. In our experience, this is a standard Shone tactic. It is also something you could easily have checked.”

This is pretty staggering given that the words “subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism” are a direct quote from your alert. And that elsewhere you’ve written: “What we’ve said is that we think dissident journalists can and should do more to draw attention to the failings of their host media in those media and outside.” That’s fairly typical of your output. Of course, you often qualify such remarks (as you qualified the above) by adding that there are taboos and constraints which make “criticising the host media” risky and difficult. But you don’t argue that journalists shouldn’t *try* (even though it might ultimately be unsuccessful). It seems a bizarre, and rather defensive, overreaction, therefore, for you to describe my statement as “simply false” and as a “misrepresentation”. (I note that someone has made a similar point on your message board).

You’ve previously accused George Monbiot of being “unwilling to criticise the Guardian’s role in limiting public understanding of our government’s responsibility for crimes against humanity” (Alert, 10/12/02). Is that not a way of saying that you think George *should* be more willing to criticise the Guardian (in a more “serious and sustained” way)? Or are you playing some semantic game, in which you don’t actually mean what you appear to say?

Moving on, you don’t attempt to refute my claim that “in a single Guardian article (The Lies of the Press), Monbiot wrote more words criticising the Guardian than Medialens wrote criticising the New Statesman in their entire run of NS columns.”

Instead, you write “We did criticise the New Statesman while we were writing for them (2003-2005) both in the magazine and in media alerts”.

But the example you provide is one of the two that I’d included in my word-count comparison. There are only two cases of your NS column being critical of the NS. I cited both. You quoted the longer one (brief though it was). The other is as follows: “The fallout from the Hutton report, John Kampfner notes in the New Statesman, is ‘a tragedy for investigative journalism’ as, pre-Hutton, the BBC was ‘beginning to ask searching questions’. Nothing could be further from the truth”. (NS, 23/2/04)

And that’s it for your entire run of NS columns. It’s not surprising then that you’d concentrate on your alerts instead, even though they were largely irrelevent to the points I made (the one exception being my observation that you didn’t issue an alert over the NS’s Iraq special edition). The comparison in my blog was between your NS column and Monbiot’s Guardian column. This was for the very good reason that your criticisms of Monbiot mostly concern his Guardian column.

An interesting part of your alert is where you claim that your NS columns, although not directly critical of the NS (except for the above two exceptions) are “implicitly criticising almost everything the magazine said” (since they were about “corporate media propaganda”). Of course, you could use the same logic to claim that almost every Monbiot column “implicitly” criticises the Guardian, since they address aspects of the power structure of which the media is an integral part. In fact, this perspective would save you a lot of trouble, as you wouldn’t have to criticise Monbiot so much. Unfortunately, however, the bottom line for Medialens is your own narrow criteria and your own particular semantic interpretations, which you seem to dictate that everyone else must accept.

It’s great, by the way, that you issued a few alerts critical of the NS while you were writing for them (although irrelevant to the particular points in my blog entry, as I’ve noted). And it’s interesting that you think your May 2005 alert may have been “the last straw” as far as the NS was concerned (you state that Kampfner rejected your next submission). Have you checked this interpretation of events with Wilby and Kampfer? Could there not be other reasons for your regular column coming to an end?

At this point in your alert, you quote me as saying: “In other words, Medialens were concerned about holding onto their column. Direct ‘full-frontal’ criticism of the NS would endanger that.”

What you fail to mention is that I was commenting on your own remark concerning your NS column, “one might get away with the kind of full-frontal assault you’re suggesting once, but probably not more than once” – given by you in February 2005 as one of the reasons for not devoting a NS column to criticism of the NS Iraq special edition.

If you now say that you weren’t concerned about holding onto your column, then I accept this “in good faith”, but it doesn’t change the fact that in February 2005 you stated, as a reason for not launching a “full-frontal assault” on the NS, that you would probably lose the column as a result.

You also stated at the time (immediately after your NS “full-frontal” comment) that, “By contrast, when appearing in the Guardian we felt it was important for us to draw attention to the Guardian’s failings no matter what the consequences were”.

This clearly demonstrates that you were concerned about the “consequences” of criticising the NS too strongly from within your NS column. Or at least that’s how you felt at the time.

Talking of your Guardian piece, it’s at this point in your alert that you describe my actions as “shameful” (which at least provided some unintended humour to lighten the otherwise defensive tone of your alert). You wrote:

“It is telling, in fact shameful, that Shone, who claims to be so meticulous, forgot to mention the far more pertinent example (certainly from your point of view): our record of criticising the Guardian in and out of the Guardian.”

Of course this is completely irrelevant to any points I made in my blog. Your Guardian piece was strictly a one-off. It was never intended to be a column, as far as I’m aware. So how is this remotely comparable to the risk of losing a regular column – which is the underlying issue touched upon in my blog?

Finally, you refer to my comment: “One wonders why Medialens were so hostile towards Milne”. You quote this out of context. It wasn’t referring just to your NS comment about Milne (about his “gall”, etc), but also to the various comments you made about Milne on your message board at that time (a few of which I noted in the footnotes of my blog).

It’s also interesting that you again present yourself in a heroic light over the fact that the Guardian (I assume you mean Milne or Rusbridger or both?) stopped returning your emails. It’s as if we’re meant to infer that this was due to your “risky” action of criticising the Guardian from within a Guardian article (after you’d agreed with Milne on this), when obviously it could be for other reasons.

To conclude, you’ve not really addressed my main points, let alone refuted them. The best case you can make is that I “misrepresented” you over the “subject their host media to serious and sustained criticism” line. That’s not much of a case, with respect.

Your character assassination looks to have been more successful though, judging from the amount of abuse I’m receiving on your message board. One post states that I’m a “jumped up little amateurish twerp”. I thought that your board guidelines required posters to be civil and respectful. If you’re looking for real “smears”, look no further than your own message board whenever unapologetic critics of Medialens are discussed.

Since you don’t allow me to post on your message board, I’d be grateful if you would be courteous enough to post this email in its entirety. I’m copying it to George Monbiot, and hoping that George will gently prompt you to post it if you’re reluctant to do so.

Best wishes,

Robert Shone