Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media

By David Edwards and David Cromwell

Guardians of Power ought to be required reading in every media college. It is the most important book about journalism I can remember." John Pilger "Regular critical analysis of the media, filling crucial gaps and correcting the distortions of ideological prisms, has never been more important. Media Lens has performed a major public service by carrying out this task with energy, insight, and care." Noam Chomsky "Media Lens is doing an outstanding job of pressing the mainstream media to at least follow their own stated principles and meet their public service obligations. [This is] fun as well as enlightening." Edward S. Herman Can a corporate media system be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312380233

David Edwards

David Edwards is is co-editor and co-founder of Media Lens. He is the author of Free To Be Human (1995), The Compassionate Revolution (1998), and co-author, with David Cromwell, of Guardians of Power (2006), Newspeak in the 21st Century (2009), and Propaganda Blitz: How and Why Corporate Media Distort Reality (Pluto, 2018).

Reviews for Guardians of Power

[jaygheiser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The basic point of the authors is that all of the popular media are completely beholden to the power structure, so they are inevitably corrupt. Although non-commercial broadcasters and 'left-leaning' newspapers have moments of liberal freedom, there are unspoken limits beyond which reporters and editors are not allowed to go. The part that resonated the most with me was a section towards the end entitled "Towards a Compassionate Media." Making the very credible claim that compassion is not a part of contemporary news media, they explain "Exploitative pwer has a vested interest in smearing concern for others as 'naive,' 'sentimental,' and 'weak' because it benefits from the promotion of greed, hatred and ignorance." Whether or not you agree with the cause, I think it self-evident that compassion is out of style. This trend is especially significant on Fox, which consistently portrays any form of empathy, other than a shallow sort of sentimentality over relatively trivial stories, as being a form of weakness. A story about a lost puppy can generate more emotion than can a story about killings in Darfur.