Medialens’s embarrassing archive (part 6)

—Offending the wrong people—

Medialens’s fourth “alert” attacking Iraq Body Count begins as follows:

Noam Chomsky once observed: “If you are not offending people who ought to be offended, you’re doing something wrong.”

One indication that the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project is doing something wrong is that it is deemed, not merely inoffensive, but is eagerly embraced by people who really ought to be offended…

Medialens used the same Chomsky quote to attack BBC’s Adam Curtis (whose series, Power of Nightmares, had been widely praised). It’s notable that Medialens don’t apply the same logic (that if you receive establishment praise, you’re doing something wrong) to themselves. In fact, Medialens tend to boast about the establishment praise they receive. For example, even though they believe that BBC2’s Newsnight is “complicit in war crimes”, they never tire of telling readers that Newsnight editor Peter Barron said something flattering about them. Here’s what Barron said:

David Cromwell and David Edwards, who run the [Medialens] site, are unfailingly polite, their points are well-argued and sometimes they’re plain right. (Peter Barron, BBC2 Newsnight editor, Nov 2005)

Perhaps Medialens should work harder to live up to the Chomsky quotes with which they attempt to ridicule others. They’re certainly offending a lot of people (eg George Monbiot, Nick Davies, Stephen Soldz), but not the ones who really “ought” to be offended. The Observer’s foreign affairs editor (who opposed the war) described Medialens’s campaign against IBC as “deeply vicious”.

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