Corporate Watch (UK) adopting dubious practices?
Bruce Morris
Any activist group which takes a moral stance over dubious corporate
practices needs to be very careful that it doesn't adopt dubious
practices of its own. Betraying confidences by passing on private
correspondence without the knowledge or consent of the sender is one
such dubious practice - particularly when that private correspondence
is passed to a website with a reputation for publishing private
material regardless (in one case the website in question - MediaLens -
was castigated by George Monbiot, the campaigner and Guardian
journalist, for betraying Monbiot's confidence - they published
details of a private correspondence which he asked them to keep in
confidence. Their rationalisation? That by doing so they were somehow
doing good. Except that they weren't - it was completely self-serving:
http://wp.me/plVmg-34
What of Corporate Watch (UK)? Without my knowledge or consent, they
"shared" a private email of mine with a website (MediaLens) which then
put it in the public domain (again without my knowledge or consent) -
and in a way designed to insinuate the usual ad hominem stuff that
people resort to when they can't or won't address the specifics of an
argument (my email to Corporate Watch had simply expressed my private
view that they were unwise to feature material from MediaLens, given
the latter's persistent attacks on George Monbiot, etc. Since the
email is now in the public domain, I reproduce it below, together with
a link to an archive of the web page where it was originally made
public, following Corporate Watch's act of betraying my confidence).
********email*********
From: Bruce Morris
To: con...@corporatewatch.org
Sent: April 6, 2011 8:02 PM
Hello,
I've just seen your latest, with an interview with MediaLens.
Sorry to say this, but I think you harm your credibility by featuring
MediaLens. On the face of it they seem harmless enough (like an
inferior UK version of FAIR), but they are not quite as they present
themselves. A few years back, ZNet refused to publish one of their
articles, due to a passage which "implied that a very excellent
journalist, George Monbiot, was protecting corporate interests" (in
the words of ZNet editor, Michael Albert, who added that "We refuse to
give silly and destructive claims and formulations credibility".
(Medialens board, 16/7/09: http://tinyurl.com/3mrw554)
They have a long record of attempting to undermine Monbiot's
reputation (sometimes with unpleasant smearing-by-proxy).
http://www.mediahell.org/community/08010201.htm
Monbiot himself wrote the following to them back in 2002:
["]And this surely highlights the trap into which MediaLens has
fallen. There is a desperate need for what you appear to be doing: the
world cries out for a thorough, critical analysis of the media, its
agenda and its hidden interests. When your project began, I believed
that this was what you were offering. But I have viewed your mailings
over the past few months with growing concern. Rather than offering a
clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who
pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or
otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform
merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular
doctrine. Whenever a journalist takes a line at variance to your own,
your automatic assumption is that he has stopped thinking for himself,
and has been, wittingly or otherwise, coerced by dark forces. As a
result, you are in danger of reproducing the very problems you
criticise. You appear to me to be confronting one form of bias and
intolerance with another.["] http://tinyurl.com/monbiot2002
In addition to their needless attacks on Monbiot and others, their
standard of research can be quite abysmal. Here's a ZNet article which
exposes their alerts on Iraq mortality as riddled with errors:
http://tinyurl.com/yjpjnfd. Here's another which points out the highly
dubious nature of one of their recent attempts at media "analysis":
http://www.thecommentfactory.com/how-not-to-do-media-analysis-4097/
Oh, and a former supporter of MediaLens (Stephen Soldz - an antiwar
camapigner, psychoanalyst and writer for ZNet) suddenly found himself
under attack by MediaLens for having the "wrong" views on a particular
subject (the MediaLens editors wrote that his mind showed signs of
"propaganda weathering and erosion"). Soldz replied:
["]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.["] http://wp.me/plVmg-6u
Rather unfortunate given that they'd approvingly cited Soldz's work in
their book.
Regards,
Bruce
*********end of email***************
Archive of MediaLens publishing the private email (together with their
entirely unsupported assertions, vague insinuations, ad hominem, etc):
http://www.webcitation.org/5xzksaZ94
Aside from this disturbing lapse of judgment, I recommend Corporate
Watch's work: http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/