The Matrix Database is an effort to document personal factors that undermine powerful journalists’ claims of objectivity and impartiality. We are on the lookout for significant conflicts of interest and likely causes of bias/imbalance along the most high-profile political and opinion journalists in the UK – and we’ve found plenty!
We have now completed the entries for the “top 20” UK journalists (ranked by Twitter following). Our results for the “top 20” are as follows:
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Picture the scene: August 29th, Kabul. Ezmarai Ahmadi, an engineer for an NGO, returns home from work. His children and nephews, excited by his return, pour out of the house to greet him and to play inside the car. Moments later a high-powered missile, fired from an unmanned United States drone, strikes the car. Ahmadi is killed, along with seven children and two other adults.
How would a free press report such an atrocity? The Daily Mail, card carrying member of the UK corporate media, quickly showed how they wouldn’t. “A cuddle amidst the carnage” declared their 30th August front page beneath a picture of a US Military servicewoman cradling an Afghan child.
Continue reading “Afghanistan: US Carnage and Corporate Media Cuddles”
“After the Nazis were defeated, almost everyone in France became a member of the Resistance.”
So tweeted The Guardian’s George Monbiot on January 7th, the day after shocking footage of the US Capitol building being stormed by a pro-Trump mob made worldwide headlines.
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We all know that January can be a tough month: post-Christmas blues, dark nights, depleted bank balances.
Spare a thought, then, for Toby Young and the group of right-wing, pseudo-intellectual shills he identifies as his “fellow lockdown sceptics…Allison Pearson, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens and Lawrence Fox.”
Young and co. entered this challenging period trying to digest three almighty receipts: years of “libertarian” support for Donald Trump culminating in a deadly, anti-democratic assault on the US Capitol Building, Brexit posturing resulting in a trade deal as sweet as a lorryful of dead fish, and months of Covid-related scepticism coming back to bite them via 60,000 cases a day, a new variant and record UK death tallies.
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We have previously documented the extraordinary campaign by Blairite elements of the Labour party and the corporate media to tar Jeremy Corbyn with the stigma of anti-Semitism (in spite of his lengthy record as an anti-racist campaigner including 50 occasions where he has stood with the Jewish community).
The double-standards employed to do so have been so shameless and Orwellian we feel compelled to document them.
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In 2011 Julian Assange was presented with the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, awarded to figures “whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda.”
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The Free Press? 