Media Lens: On corporate journalism on Heathrow's Climate Camp

August 23, 2007
From Media Lens

This is a Media Lens discussion of the Heathrow Climate Camp and Corporate Media. The Heathrow Climate Camp is a group of concerned people camped outside Heathrow to raise awareness of the damage that the expansion of the airport (and corresponding significant increase in aircraft) will cause to the people in surrounding suburbs and to the atmosphere through emissions.

The mainstream media is attacking this as an exclusive club who just cause people to turn away from this message. The Media Lens article attacks mainstream media for their double standards and support of corporations who do this and more including encouraging and causing damage to our planet.

The corporation is one of the most totalitarian organisations imaginable: control is strictly top-down with zero public input and minimal staff input flowing back up the chain of command. As the Canadian lawyer Joel Bakan has noted, the corporate motivation is essentially “psychopathic”: all concerns, values, motivations are subordinated to the bottom line of maximised profits as a matter of legal obligation. That’s what you are part of.

As for being taken seriously, your diatribe against the climate camp tells its own story. When has a corporate journalist ever railed in this manner against the restrictions imposed by the US/UK military in Iraq, against the control freaks of New Labour, against the taboo on discussing their advertisers‘ products and services?

Your piece is a good example of how respect is reserved for the powerful, while the powerless are considered fair game to be patronised and in effect told off with impunity. It’s all part of the great myth of balanced professional journalism. It turns out that ‘balanced’ is that which does not offend powerful interests. You are very much part of the corporate media problem, John. The sooner we all wake up to this, the better.

...

Read the article.