Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site’s editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media‘s coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider “the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately”.
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Media Lens is financed by donations from website visitors. The editors issue regular “Media Alerts” concentrating on mainstream media outlets, such as the BBC and Channel 4 News, which are legally obliged to be impartial, or on outlets such as The Guardian, or The Independent, which are usually considered left-leaning. The site’s editors frequently draw attention to what they see as the limits within which the mainstream media operates, and provide “a riveting exposé of the myth of liberal media based on a variety of empirical case studies”, according to Graham Murdock and Michael Pickering.
Media Lens is admired by John Pilger, who has called the website “remarkable” and described the writers as “the cyber guardians of honest journalism”. Other journalists, in particular Peter Oborne, have also made positive comments about the group, although it has come into conflict with other journalists. The Observer‘s foreign editor Peter Beaumont asserted that the group ran a “campaign” against John Sloboda and the Iraq Body Count for underestimating the number of deaths in Iraq. George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens was “belittling the acts of genocide” in their defence of Edward S. Herman, who had questioned the number of deaths in the Srebrenica massacre.
