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This month marks the 25th anniversary of Media Lens. Still in short trousers, we sent our first media alert to a handful of readers on 9 July 2001.
For a long time, our alerts focused on challenging journalists directly by email, publishing their responses, and encouraging readers to politely respond with their own views. One of the most positive exchanges involved the BBC’s diplomatic editor Paul Adams. From his news reports, we had always gotten the impression that Adams was a decent, amiable guy. And so it proved when we emailed him in January 2007:
‘Dear Paul
‘Your online piece today is curious. You write:
‘“Tony Blair insists Britain must continue to show its willingness to launch military interventions for humanitarian purposes after he leaves office.”
‘Why do you take at face value Tony Blair’s argument that military interventions are “for humanitarian purposes”? Why did you not write, instead:
‘“…to launch military interventions for what he calls ‘humanitarian purposes’…”?
‘Likewise:
‘“We can pursue climate change, world poverty and the Middle East peace process while still being able and willing to project British military power, in the interests of British and global security.”
‘Again, why do you take at face value Blair’s argument that projecting military power is “in the interests of British and global security”?’
‘Why is your piece – supposedly from an objective, nonpartisan perspective – in fact couched in propagandistic terms?
‘I hope you will respond, please.
‘Best wishes
‘David Cromwell
Adams replied:
‘Dear David,
‘Thanks for your comments, and you’re absolutely right that the piece should have appeared with rather more in the way of editorial distance. I don’t – and shouldn’t appear to – take a partisan view one way or the other.
‘All I can say in my (rather feeble) defence is that the first paragraph, which appears in bold on the page, was not written by me at all but by the OnLine team, presumably as a kind of “headline” or explainer for the piece to follow. I agree that it would certainly have read better with the sort of caveat you describe.
‘As for the second, I think I assumed (wrongly, perhaps) that the reader would see it as an extension of the previous paragraph, in which I set out Blair’s view of what he’s about. Again, it would have benefitted from some added distance.
‘The piece was, I admit, written in a hurry on a day when I was flitting between one live broadcast and the next. In fact, what the OnLine team tend to do in these cases is to transcribe things they hear me saying during lives and thread them together as a kind of “authored” piece. I don’t care for the method, as live remarks are rarely as considered or articulate as properly written ones (as one Andrew Gilligan once rather disastrously illustrated!). This piece was a mixure [sic] of transcription and writing – and probably suffered as a result.
‘Apologies.
‘Best
‘Paul Adams’
This was an eminently reasonable response, topped off with an actual apology. Adams was clearly open-minded and able to respond with genuine humility. The exchange seemed to vindicate our strategy of politely engaging with journalists. Perhaps they would be willing to listen and change. And after all, even small changes could make a difference.
Alas, as we have since learned, Upton Sinclair’s famous observation did not tell the whole story:
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’ (Upton Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked,’ Oakland Tribune, 11 December 1934)
In fact, we have found that people can understand salary-unfriendly truths and then go straight back to behaving as if they had never understood them at all. Discussing his famous study of obedience, psychologist Stanley Milgram warned:
‘With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the [authority’s] definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.’ (Stanley Milgram, ‘Obedience to Authority’, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.141)
The Missing War Crime
Last week, before the latest tit-for-tat airstrikes, Adams commented on Donald Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding with Iran:
‘Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.’
By focusing on ‘the issues that led to war’, Adams gave the impression that political pressures had escalated to the point where war seemed almost inevitable. He led readers away from the reality that the US and Israel opportunistically waged a war of choice on Iran in the middle of peace negotiations. Certainly, no serious analyst has suggested that ‘issues’ were leading Iran to declare war on the US or Israel. The ‘issue’ that actually ‘led to war’ was Trump’s willingness to fulfill Netanyahu’s dream of combining US and Israeli military might to again overthrow the Iranian government as the US and Britain had done in 1953. Netanyahu said:
‘This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh. This is what I promised – and this is what we shall do.’
The promise to ‘smite… hip and thigh’ was a reference to a biblical idiom indicating a plan for total, merciless destruction. Adams’ version self-censored the unarguable truth that the attack that began on 28 February was a textbook example of a war of aggression, the supreme war crime. By contrast, in the Guardian, Julian Borger described the war as ‘an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public’.
How, in reviewing the history of the conflict, could Adams not make the same point? How can this key truth of the war go unmentioned? The words ‘crime’ and ‘illegal’ did not appear in his piece. The answer is that the war’s illegality is deeply embarrassing to the UK state’s leading US and Israeli allies – the truth paints them as the rogue states they really are, which is the exact opposite of the salary-friendly impression reflexively communicated by the BBC.
Adams added:
‘The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran.’
Khamenei was not merely ‘killed’; he was assassinated in the middle of peace negotiations. General Sir Richard Shirreff, a retired British Army officer and former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, explained that Khamenei held absolute religious authority for Shiite Muslims worldwide – not just political power in Iran – and that assassinating him, especially during Ramadan, was like ‘murdering the Pope on the steps of St Peter’s during Holy Week’.
Adams’ reference to ‘devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes’ suggests these were merely tactical attacks – perhaps part of a long-term tit-for-tat pattern – rather than a maximum effort to ‘smite the terror regime hip and thigh’. The US committed fully 40-50% of its air power, on a par with the US-UK Iraq wars of aggression in 1991 and 2003.
Adams continued:
‘Back in January, Iran was wracked by popular protest which both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted might herald the collapse of the Islamic Republic.’
It is not reasonable to present the unrest as simply a ‘popular protest’. On December 29 last year, The Jerusalem Post reported:
‘On Monday, the Mossad [Israeli secret service] used its Twitter account in Farsi to encourage Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it will join them during the demonstrations.
‘“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote.
‘It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”’
Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of State, posted on X:
‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…’
We can find no record of Adams ever mentioning these astonishing admissions. No doubt there was a ‘popular’ element to the protests, but history will surely judge that this was Phase 1 of ‘Operation Epic Fury’ and ‘Operation Roaring Lion’, as the 28 February ‘hip and thigh’ campaigns were termed by the US and Israel, respectively.
Adams added:
‘Iran’s economy was already in tatters after decades of international sanctions. The country was also still badly wounded after a 12-day war with the US and Israel six months earlier.’
Sanctions have indeed left Iran’s economy in ‘tatters’. But why did Adams make no attempt to communicate the reality of what that means? In fact, it is a devastating form of siege warfare waged on the civilian population of Iran. In March 2021, the academic journal Foreign Affairs reported:
‘To judge from Iran’s Households Income and Expenditure Survey, administered by the Statistical Center of Iran, the country’s absolute poverty rate rose by 11 percent between March 2018 and March 2020, while the average living standard dropped by 13 percent nationally. The national currency lost almost one-fourth of its value, leading the minimum wage value to drop from $260 to almost $70 per month… In 2017, 27 percent of Iranians could not meet the basic daily nutritional requirement of 2,100 kilocalories. The proportion of the population suffering such deprivation rose to 40 percent in 2019. In this period, Iranian families spent less on education and entertainment, respectively, by 30 percent and 32 percent…
‘A flood of new sanctions in 2018 then vastly increased the number of poor Iranians, from 22 million to 32 million, and shrank the size of Iran’s middle class from 45 percent to 30 percent by March 2020. The poverty rate is expected to rise to 45–48 percent in 2021.’
Adams wrote of the US’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities:
‘Iran’s nuclear programme, long a diplomatic tool of leverage, had not been obliterated, as Trump boasted, but had been significantly damaged.
‘The whereabouts of its stockpile of uranium, believed to be enough for 10 or 11 atomic weapons if enriched further, was not certain, but much of it was thought to be buried under rubble near the Isfahan nuclear complex.’
This gave the impression that Iran is one step away from acquiring a dozen nuclear weapons. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University supplied some background:
‘The fact of the matter is that the claim that Iran wants a nuclear weapon and is just about to get a nuclear weapon has been the false propaganda literally for 30 years. Netanyahu, who is a war criminal, has been saying [it] for 30 years since 1996.’
Adams wrote:
‘In the Gaza Strip, another Iranian ally, Hamas, had suffered a similar fate. Israel responded to the group’s devastating October 2023 attacks with a relentless assault that laid waste to much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians.’
The ‘relentless assault’, of course, is a reference to Israel’s genocide – a term BBC journalists are all but forbidden from using.
Adams commented:
‘For decades, Washington had sought to contain Iran through its network of military facilities and burgeoning relationships with Gulf countries.’
One might more plausibly argue that, for decades, Iran has sought to ‘contain’ US and Israeli forces that have been determined to erase the 1979 Islamic revolution. In 2019, the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported:
‘Iran’s military strategy is basically defensive and is designed to deter an adversary, survive an initial strike, and retaliate against an aggressor to force a diplomatic solution.’
Adams mentioned decades of ‘tortured relations between Iran, its Middle Eastern neighbours and the US’. He again failed to mention the key event shaping those relations – namely, that in 1953, the US and UK supplied armored cars and mercenaries who took to the streets of Iran to overthrow the democratically elected nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh, replacing him with the Shah. According to then CIA agent Richard Cottam, ‘…that mob that came into north Teheran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large’. (Quoted, Mark Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power’, Zed Books, 1995, p.93)
Amnesty International reported that Iran under the Shah had the ‘highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture’, which was ‘beyond belief’, in a society in which ‘the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror’. (Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty Publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976). US Iran specialist Eric Hoogland commented on the Shah:
‘The more dictatorial his regime became, the closer the US-Iran relationship became.’ (Quoted, Mark Curtis, op.cit., p.95)
Adams noted a regional danger:
‘Reports suggest that most Gulf countries are putting out feelers to Iran, looking to repair relations with their dangerous neighbour.’
We have to remind ourselves that it was Israel and the US that attacked Iran. There was no plan to install a better government; the goal was to reduce the country to chaos, in the manner of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, so that it could no longer offer resistance to US and Israeli dominance of the region. US-Israeli success would have been devastating to the welfare of Iran’s people. If Iran is the ‘dangerous neighbour’, how should we describe a country whose president can say:
‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will’?
Adams focused on the US’s promises of ‘help’:
‘In January, Trump promised Iranian citizens that “help is on its way.” Launching the war, on 28 February, he was even more explicit… Such promises have so far proved illusory. A new generation may be in charge in Tehran, but not one that has yet offered its people the prospect of a freer, more prosperous future.’
Honest journalism would reference earlier US promises to improve the lives of people in Iraq, Libya, and Syria – one million people died in the Iraq war, and Libya was reduced to an ethnically cleansed basket case. This absence of big-picture thinking is a key feature of ‘mainstream’ journalism – focus is kept on small pieces of the jigsaw so that the uglier, wider picture is kept from public awareness.
Adams wrote:
‘With the regime utterly focussed on its own survival, Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, a Chatham House analyst based in Abu Dhabi, does not expect to see a different approach to dissent.
‘After the shock generated by its mass bloodletting in January, the regime has shown that it can at least protect the country’s sovereignty.’
Again, Adams subtly imported the propaganda assertion that the Iranian government’s ‘mass bloodletting’ was simply targeting ‘dissent’, not responding to violent external forces seeking to trigger mass violence, civil war, regime change and social collapse.
To his credit, Adams focused on US crimes:
‘The deaths of scores of children at an elementary school in Minab, on the first day of the war, caused some to wonder who the real enemy was. After promising to liberate them, Israel and the US seemed intent on destroying the country.’
The next sentence, however, was pure propaganda:
‘But having stood up to the combined might of the US and Israel, can Iran’s new leadership capitalise on this potentially fleeting opportunity to rebuild the regime’s shattered legitimacy?’
‘Regime’ is a propaganda term used for enemies of the West. Has the Iranian government’s ‘legitimacy’ really been ‘shattered’? The Financial Times reported that as many as 12 million people attended the funeral of Iran’s former supreme leader Ali Khamenei. These millions were often reported as ‘thousands’ by the BBC:
‘Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei was conspicuously absent from his father’s funeral, as senior regime figures joined thousands paying their respects to the late ayatollah on Sunday.’
Adams also referred to Iran’s ‘shattered domestic reputation’. It is the reputation of an Iranian government that has somehow defied both the regional and the global bullies that is ‘shattered’. But why, in discussing war, is the legitimacy and reputation of only one side – the side that happens to be the UK’s Official Enemy – in question? What about the reputation of Israel, fresh from its historic genocide in Gaza, and of the US fresh from its ‘regime change’ war of aggression on Venezuela, with both the US and Israel having waged a war of aggression on Iran? Is their legitimacy not also an issue for discussion? Even US Vice President J.D Vance exceeded Adams’ honesty on Israel:
‘Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.’
Adams concluded:
‘After six tumultuous months, the region has started to look different. But a lot has to go right for this plastic moment to solidify into something better.’
An honest version should at least acknowledge the argument that optimism for peace in the region may now rest on the hope that Iranian defiance will ultimately compel all sides to eschew violence and seek diplomatic solutions.
Conclusion
Nearly two decades after we asked Paul Adams why his supposedly objective journalism was in fact ‘couched in propagandistic terms’, nearly two decades after his admirable apology, his journalism appears to be unchanged. This is a pattern we have often seen repeated. In his book, ‘Live From Downing Street’, former BBC political editor Nick Robinson summarised our criticism, forcefully rejecting some of our arguments, before adding:
‘But is there something in the concern they [Media Lens] express that “balanced reporting” can allow those in power too much control over the terms of debate…?’ (Robinson, ‘Live from Downing Street’, Transworld, e-book version, 2012, p.287)
Robinson then confessed:
‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions…’ (Robinson, ibid., p.288)
In his book, ‘News and How to Use it’, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger noted that Media Lens had ‘repeatedly attacked the Guardian and other mainstream news outlets for its dependency on advertising’. Like Robinson, Rusbridger strongly challenged the claim before adding:
‘But, as conventional advertising revenues began to drain away from printed newspapers, there have been notable examples where the Chinese walls were, in effect, torn down by commercial managers who wanted to get their hands on the editorial train set.’ (Alan Rusbridger, ‘News and How to Use It’, Canongate, e-book version, 2020, p.35)
Rusbridger discussed Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model of media control’ in some depth, describing their book ‘Manufacturing Consent’ as a ‘classic’. (Rusbridger, ibid., p.210) But did any of this fundamentally change his journalism?
We suspect that Adams, Robinson and Rusbridger largely continue to be ‘seduced by the trappings of authority’, swayed by the ‘uncritical acceptance of the [authority’s] definition of the situation’, as Milgram observed. Ultimately, we need to tweak Upton Sinclair’s vision – it is not that hard for people to understand truths that threaten their salary. But it is hard to act on that understanding.
Because, as genuine, formerly ‘mainstream’ rebels like Peter Oborne, Richard Sanders and Jonathan Cook have discovered, the price is high: literally overnight, the phone stops ringing, emails are no longer answered, article submissions are rejected and ‘mainstream’ ‘respectability’ vanishes. On the other hand, the rewards of their kind of integrity and courage, though subtle, are very real and, in fact, worth it.