‘All Together Now. That’s my rallying call to the country today. When we pull as one, there is nothing we can’t do.

‘Today we draw a line on a decade of division. We stop doomscrolling on posts running Britain down. And we put the country on a new path.’

Burnham continued:

‘Britain with belief again. People with hope again.’

It was notable that he used the word ‘hope’ 11 times in his speech. Burnham is likely well aware that significant numbers of voters have been turning away from Labour to the Green Party with leader Zack Polanski regularly issuing skilful messages on social media about hope.

Burnham concluded his address to conference using short, declamatory sentences so beloved of political speechwriters:

‘It’s time to draw a line.

‘To move beyond a decade of drift and division.

‘To bring a spirit of unity and positivity back to our country.

‘To unlock the working-class aspiration that is still there in every postcode in this great land.

‘All Together Now.

‘We can do it.

‘We will believe again.

‘We will hope again.’

He received a rapturous reception in the hall.

There was a single passing mention of climate in his hour-long speech:

‘And we will be pragmatic in relation to the North Sea as we build a bridge to a clean energy future and face the climate crisis.’

As we noted in a recent media alert, Burnham has so far resisted calls to block plans to exploit the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland and the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. If approved, Jackdaw would emit the equivalent of over 35 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). By contrast, burning the reserves of the huge Rosebank oil field, the UK’s largest undeveloped field, would release the equivalent of over 250 million tonnes of CO₂. That is 70% of the UK’s entire annual emissions in 2025.

Carbon Brief, an authoritative source on energy and climate, rebuts the ‘pragmatic’ argument that opening up these fields would help form a ‘transition bridge’ to ‘a clean energy future’. Instead, it would undermine the pathway to reducing carbon emissions to zero, an urgent and vital requirement to stop catastrophic global heating.

A report last year from University College London, ‘The Climate Implications of New Oil and Gas Fields in the UK – An overview of the evidence’, argued that:

‘Existing fossil fuel infrastructure causes “carbon lock-in”, as there are major economic, political and legal barriers to closing oil and gas fields once they start operating.’

Therefore, allowing additional fields such as Rosebank and Jackdaw would make it harder to achieve internationally agreed targets for limiting the rise in global average temperature. Rather than acting as a ‘bridge’, new fossil fuel development creates an economic and structural barrier to a clean energy transition.

On the other hand, argued the report:

‘…ending new UK licences and consents for oil and gas exploration and production would send a powerful signal to other countries at this important moment for international climate cooperation.’

Last month, almost 600 scientists and healthcare professionals issued an open letter calling on the UK government to reject Rosebank. The letter cited a recent report estimating that, if Rosebank went ahead, between £119 billion and £336 billion of climate-related damages would result over the coming decades.

Their conclusion was stark:

‘Communities are already facing rising costs because of drought, excess deaths because of heatwaves, and loss of land due to wildfires. This is a matter of national security and approving Rosebank would be adding fuel to the fire. A Government’s first responsibility is to prioritise above all else the best interests of the people it serves and protects – approving Rosebank would be completely going against this principle, by knowingly triggering more devastation on the people of the UK.’

According to a recent report in The Times, government ministers were concerned about the ‘optics’ of giving approval to Rosebank and Jackdaw during a summer in which much of the British public endured a series of intense heatwaves. The decision is likely to be announced later in the autumn, safely following the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October. The seat was formerly held by the now-departed Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and is under threat of being lost by Labour to the Greens whose candidate is Zack Polanski, the Green leader. One can imagine a deluge of Green votes were Labour to announce the opening of new oil and gas fields before the by-election.

Burnham’s long speech, with its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the climate crisis, indicates that he really has no idea of the serious risk of climate breakdown. Has he ever heard of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation?

Climate Running Amok

In a recent, crystal-clear video, renowned climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf explained the vital importance of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to Europe’s relatively mild and stable climate. The Gulf Stream is the most well-known component of the AMOC. It brings heat north from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, past Florida and along the US east coast, before crossing the North Atlantic and releasing its warmth to the atmosphere over Western Europe.

Professor Rahmstorf, who is co-Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, summarised the worrying scientific observations that AMOC is weakening. He also outlined the very real risk of the total shutdown of AMOC and what would be the likely consequences.

First, he explained what the AMOC is:

‘The AMOC is a vertical overturning motion of the Atlantic Ocean. Relatively warm surface waters flow north along the entire length of the Atlantic, from the tip of South Africa across the Equator into the high latitudes south of Greenland and the Nordic Seas.

‘There, the water sinks down to between 2000 and 3000 metres depth after giving off a lot of heat to the atmosphere, and then at that depth, returns to the south.’

AMOC works like a central heating system for western Europe, explained Rahmstorf, because warm water is flowing towards us across the North Atlantic and cold water is flowing away from us. Europe therefore enjoys a relatively mild and stable climate. The amount of heat provided by the AMOC corresponds to around 50 times the entire energy consumption of humanity.

It is known from paleoclimatic analysis of deep-sea sediments that the AMOC has been unstable at various times over the last 100,000 years. Rahmstorf observed:

‘What Earth’s history tells us is that these are really dramatic events with big impacts on ecosystems. Surely in the modern world with 8 billion people on this planet, they would be devastating for the stability of our society.’

Scientific reconstructions of the AMOC from paleoclimatic data show that after being stable for about the last millennium, the AMOC has weakened over the 20th and 21st centuries. It is now at the weakest it has been in at least a thousand years.

A clear fingerprint of the AMOC’s weakening is a ‘cold blob’ seen in ocean temperature maps of the North Atlantic. In his video, Rahmstorf pointed to the map and explained:

‘Look at this blue patch in the North Atlantic to the west of the British Isles and to the south of Greenland and Iceland. That is the famous “cold blob”: the only part of the world that is cooling and has been cooling while the entire rest of the planet has warmed.’

The reason for the ‘cold blob’ is that less heat has been carried there by the weakened AMOC. Why is the AMOC weakening and why has it shut down several times over the past 100,000 years? The reason is the input of fresh surface water at high latitudes in the North Atlantic. The AMOC requires the sinking of dense water at high latitudes – in particular, in the subpolar and Nordic regions of the North Atlantic – in order to drive the vertical overturning of the AMOC. This process creates North Atlantic Deep Water which fills the deep ocean and flows back south toward the equator, completing the AMOC ‘conveyor belt’.

Ocean surface water becomes colder and therefore denser when it releases its transported heat to the atmosphere. Also, water with relatively high salinity is denser than diluted sea water. Dense water sinks and keeps the AMOC flowing.

However, due to global heating, the Greenland Ice Sheet and sea ice in the Arctic Ocean are melting. This releases fresh water into the North Atlantic and also enhances rainfall. Both effects mean that the surface water becomes less salty and less dense. There is therefore reduced sinking of surface water to ocean depths, thus weakening the AMOC. This is the same process that shut down the AMOC at various times in the past.

Rahmstorf summed up:

‘In short: we have the AMOC because the water in the Northern Atlantic is salty, and it is salty because we have the AMOC. If you dilute it with fresh water, the AMOC weakens, bringing less salt, which weakens the AMOC even further. Once that feedback crosses a certain threshold, there is no stopping a total breakdown.’

This is one of many potential ‘tipping points’ in the Earth system which, if breached, would plunge the world into rapidly accelerating global heating and ecosystem collapse.

He added another serious cause for concern:

‘If the AMOC breaks down, it will take less carbon dioxide down into the deep ocean, leaving more in the atmosphere and making global warming worse.’

Moreover, there would be disastrous direct impacts on marine ecosystems. Because the AMOC acts as a massive pump of nutrients that are vital for phytoplankton – the base of the marine food web – there would be huge repercussions for ocean species. This would also mean socioeconomic shocks to human communities. Not least, global food security dependent on North Atlantic fisheries would face severe disruptions.

It is possible for a collapsed AMOC to recover. But it typically only occurs on a timescale of one thousand years. That is scant comfort for humanity.

3°C Warming Is Beyond Catastrophic

So, what is the current best estimate of the risk of the AMOC shutting down? Rahmstorf noted that he has been investigating the AMOC and its possible shutdown over the past thirty years:

‘For decades we in the scientific community used to discuss this as what is called a low-probability, high-impact risk: say, a nuclear power plant blowing up. This is a low probability but can have a high impact, at least locally.

‘With the Earth system, of course, we’re talking about high-impact global changes and global risks. But we considered the probability of that as being less than 10 per cent. That would still be high for the massive consequences that this would have. But recently, latest studies suggest that if we continue on a high-emission path we may run around a 70 per cent risk of the AMOC shutting down.’

Although Rahmstorf delivered this assessment in an understated, calm manner, that there is such a high probability of AMOC collapse – no less than 70 per cent – is terrifying. On a sane planet, political leaders would be responding urgently and comprehensively to this impending emergency with even greater fervour than any ‘terrorist threat’.

He continued:

‘Even with low emissions [aligned with] the [2015] Paris Agreement, if we rapidly lower our emissions, we might still run at 25 per cent risk. This is [still] a really serious risk.’

Sadly, the Paris Agreement to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius and, ideally, 1.5 degrees, has been crushed by rising fossil fuel combustion and greenhouse gas emissions. We are already breaching 1.5°C.

James Hansen is the NASA scientist who sounded the climate alarm to US Congress in 1988. In the immediate wake of the Paris Agreement, he declared:

‘It’s a fraud really, a fake.’

He continued:

‘It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.’

Ten years later, in 2025, Hansen said that:

‘The 2°C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.’

Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, put Burnham’s pro-corporate tactics into perspective:

‘While we continue to dither about the rights and wrongs of reopening the North Sea to further drilling, global heating shows no such tendency. The worst possible news was revealed in a [Geophysical Research Letters] paper published just a week after the bombing of Iran started, which is that the rate of global heating has been supercharged since 2015, and is now almost double what it was in the 1970s. The current rate – of close to 0.35C a decade – means that without drastic action on emissions, we will see the 2C limit shattered as soon as the late 2030s, and no end in sight.’

Global heating may well reach 3°C by 2050 according to some scientists, including the German Physical and Meteorological Societies. As we noted in a recent media alert, 3°C is beyond catastrophic. Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report, ‘Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature’.

These sober experts believed that it was worth including the ‘extreme’ scenario of 3°C warming into their matrix of risk assessments. This is what they concluded would happen:

· Multiple climate tipping points triggered.

· Breakdown of several critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.

· High level of extinction of higher order life on Earth.

· Significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or state failure with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital and systems identity.

· Frequent large scale mortality events.

· There would be at least 4 billion deaths.

Read that last line again: at least 4 billion deaths. The climate crisis is surely the most pressing issue facing humanity.

What does it say about the new Prime Minister that climate barely merited a mention in an hour-long speech about his vision of the future? And what does it say about the ‘mainstream’ media that he was not lambasted for ignoring the severity of the threat hanging over all of us?

DC

Note to our readers

Media Lens was 25 years old in July 2026. We are very grateful to everyone who supports us; in particular, the many kind donors who responded to our recent appeal. There were simply too many of you to respond individually. Thank you.

In response to news that we are this year celebrating 25 years of Media Lens we have received many kind comments from readers, some of them sympathising that it must be ‘awful’ to live with the knowledge that we are ‘so despised by mainstream journalists’. But, in fact, it has been surprising just how much support we have received – often expressed privately, for fear of consequences – from journalists deeply frustrated by the limits placed on their free speech. As Noam Chomsky witheringly told a visibly wincing Andrew Marr of the BBC:

‘Well, I know some of the best, and best-known investigative reporters in the United States, I won’t mention names, whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and in fact the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.’ (See at 2 mins 03 here; transcript here)

Last week, the following comment was tweeted on X by Martin Asser who worked at the BBC for 22 years (1995-2015 and 2022-2024) with a stint as head of communications at the American University of Beirut (2015-2021):

‘I remember in mid-2000s being handed Media Lens emails by my editor at BBC Middle East Online desk to draft the responses. They were hardest (usually impossible) to argue against compared with the pro-war pro-Israel stuff flooding our inbox.’

In June, we had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Oborne on Zoom about an article he was planning to write to mark our 25^th anniversary. Oborne has worked as political editor of the Spectator, as chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, as a journalist at the Evening Standard, as a commentator at the Express, and has made nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4. One might not ordinarily expect this track record to translate as sympathy for our cause, but Oborne is a rare fish indeed. Consider, for example, that one of our first mentions of his journalism came in 2009 when he responded like this in the Daily Mail to an MPs’ expenses scandal:

‘Nobody can say any longer that our politicians are motivated by honesty, duty or patriotism. Almost to a man and woman they have been exposed as cheats and crooks whose primary motivation is lining their own pockets rather than serving Britain.

‘As a result, Parliament itself no longer looks like our greatest national institution. Instead, it has been exposed as an organised criminal conspiracy whose primary purpose is to defraud the taxpayer and serve the vested interest of a venal political class.’

Having somehow got away with that blast of honesty, a decade later, Oborne published an excoriating piece titled, ‘British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine’, commenting:

‘Papers and media organisations yearn for privileged access and favourable treatment. And they are prepared to pay a price to get it.

‘This price involves becoming a subsidiary part of the government machine. It means turning their readers and viewers into dupes.

‘This client journalism allows Downing Street to frame the story as it wants. Some allow themselves to be used as tools to smear the government’s opponents. They say goodbye to the truth.’

This was classic Oborne: blistering honesty completely unhindered by concern for personal consequences born of a fierce integrity and deeply felt compassion for the victims of greed and cruelty. The response from his rather less honourable ‘mainstream’ peers: instant, total cancellation:

‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement.’ (Peter Oborne, ‘The Assault on Truth – Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism,’ Simon & Schuster, 2021, p.132)

Warm thanks to Peter Oborne and to Declassified UK for allowing us to republish the piece below, originally published here, for our annual appeal for support:

How Media Lens forged a path for independent journalism

As Media Lens celebrates 25 years, Peter Oborne pays tribute to the dissident outlet that influenced his work

We are seeing today a surge in heretical media outlets including Novara, Doubledown News, Drop Site, Byline Times, Middle East Eye – and of course Declassified UK.

We have emerged thanks in part to a growing appreciation that the mainstream media is broken, cannot be trusted, and is far more likely to disseminate falsehood than tell the truth.

So it is only fair to wish a happy 25th birthday to the earliest of these dissident outlets – Media Lens.

Media Lens first published in July 2001. The timing was perfect, with George W Bush starting to mobilise ahead of the Iraq invasion.

Media Lens recorded how Bush’s United States softened up reporters and editors as Tony Blair made the ‘moral case’ for war.

It showed how journalists had played down the mass deaths of Iraqi children from sanctions and ignored the devastating effects of bombing infrastructure (such as the wrecking of schools and power plants).

The Daily Telegraph dismissed the impact of sanctions as an ‘allegation’ dreamt up by “Left-wing activists, Arab nationalists and Muslim extremists”.

Vindication?

When foreign secretary Jack Straw and US President Bill Clinton claimed that Saddam Hussein had booted the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, with few exceptions British reporters went along with the lie.

Authoritative sources, such as the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, strongly challenged the official narrative. They were ignored.

And when the tanks finally rolled into Baghdad, British journalists worked overtime to hail the ‘vindication’ (the term used by Mark Mardell and Nicholas Witchell of the BBC as well as John Irvine of ITN) of Tony Blair.

Andrew Marr stood outside Downing Street to proclaim that Tony Blair “stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.”

Media Lens recorded all of this (and much more) in regular bulletins. It also wrote emails to reporters asking for an explanation of why their reports had omitted relevant facts, promoted obvious falsehoods or told only one side of the story.

These letters were polite and thoughtful, and all the more deadly for that. Some recipients failed to answer, some engaged (they tended to lose the argument) and others resorted to abuse.

In 2007, Media Lens won the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award. John Pilger explained that “Without Media Lens during the attack on and occupation of Iraq the full gravity of that debacle might have been consigned to oblivion and to bad history.”

Libya

After the invasion of Iraq, Media Lens documented the lies peddled about Libya, including the unevidenced claim from US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice that Colonel Gaddafi was supplying viagra to his troops to facilitate a campaign of mass rape, and the discredited warning that the Libyan dictator was planning a genocide in Benghazi.

When the Gaddafi regime fell, mainstream journalists duly noted that David Cameron, architect of the fiasco alongside Nicholas Sarkozy, had been ‘vindicated’ (the inevitable term deployed Ian Pannell and Norman Smith of the BBC).

The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson voiced the same sentiment as Andrew Marr, though with different language: “Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Col Gaddafi his first foe. Today his first real taste of military victory.”

Media Lens went on to expose the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy employed by British journalists against Jeremy Corbyn. It documented the smear campaign against Julian Assange.

Media Lens has been accused of being ‘useful idiots’ for taking the side of dictators. They responded that although “we hold no candle whatever for Gaddafi, and had never expressed a scintilla of support for him, [it] mattered not at all.”

Exposing liberal bias

Media Lens mainly ignored the blatantly biased reporting of the right-wing press repeating official propaganda.

Instead of these easy targets like the Daily Mail, they focussed on progressive or centre left media which boasted of its objectivity and impartiality, especially the Guardian and the BBC.

Here, Media Lens was performing an important function. Mainstream media plays an important role in shaping public understanding of events, yet there has long been an unwritten rule (“dog does not bite dog”) that journalists do not challenge colleagues.

For a quarter of a century, Media Lens has held sloppy or biased reporting to account. This made it very unpopular.

Its work has never been more relevant than today in the wake of the momentous reporting failures of the Gaza war and the US/Israeli attack on Iran that have left many British broadcasters and newspapers complicit in war crimes.

Changed climate

It is a remarkable achievement for a two-man team, neither of whom has a background in journalism.

David Edwards is a former teacher while his colleague David Cromwell holds a doctorate in solar physics, is an expert in oceanography and at one stage worked for oil giant Shell.

His scientific knowledge gives special credibility to a long standing focus of Media Lens work: climate change.

It has long sought to challenge the media failure to take the existential threat posed by climate change at all seriously, or to expose the financial backers of campaigns for climate change denial.

As usual, one prime target has been the Guardian. As with foreign affairs, Media Lens has been, to coin a phrase, vindicated.

I want to acknowledge a personal debt to Edwards and Cromwell. When they started out I was an occasional target of their courteous but deadly bulletins.

There is a good rule in life that, while praise is pleasant, you can learn from criticism.

So I studied their analysis carefully and concluded that, more often than not, the rebuke was well-deserved.

Over time, Media Lens has educated me to become more sceptical and reexamine my instinctive belief that Britain was a force for good.

Recent history shows they have been correct about most of the great issues of our age. From the Iraq War to Climate Change, from Assange to the NHS, Media Lens has made the right call.

Meanwhile the British media, security and political establishment have made a habit of being calamitously wrong.

Thank you, Messrs Edwards and Cromwell, for paving the way.

Peter Oborne, 12 August 2026

How To Donate

If you have ever considered supporting Media Lens, or considered increasing your support, please do so here.

If you wish to make a donation via bank transfer from outside the UK, please email us at editor@medialens.org for IBAN details.

David Edwards and David Cromwell – The Editors

English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is a megastar. With over 128 million followers on Spotify, he ranks as the platform’s second most-followed artist, surpassed only by Taylor Swift. Sheeran’s official YouTube channel has more than 50 million subscribers. His shows are among the highest-attended live music events in history, often setting attendance records across North America, Europe and Australasia.

The US rapper Macklemore was a support act on Sheeran’s current LOOP Tour, before he spoke these words to an audience of nearly 90,000 people at the MetLife Stadium in the US on 4 September:

‘I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this all day. One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine!

‘I said, Free Palestine!

‘I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank, know that we have not forgotten them.

‘And this next song was inspired by the bravery of Columbia University students who led an encampment movement that mobilised the entire world; open up hearts, myself included, so thank you to those students that risked their diplomas, that risked their tuition, that risked their scholarships, that stood up and said, no. CUAD students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voices for Peace. Thank you, guys.

‘To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.

‘So I say Free Palestine! I say Free Lebanon! I say Free Cuba! I say Free Congo! Free Sudan! I say Free all people in America living in fear of this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free until we are all free.’

A controversy was quickly manufactured by pro-Israel individuals and organisations to get Macklemore kicked off the tour. Ed Sheeran commented:

‘Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine.’

Macklemore filled in the gaps:

‘Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.’

Robert Kraft said the decision to bar Macklemore from Gillette Stadium, which was intended to be ‘a welcoming environment for all guests’, was made after the comments at the MetLife shows and ‘a broader history of rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community’.

But there was nothing antisemitic or hateful about what Macklemore said – he explicitly rejected antisemitism. And Kraft’s reference to ‘a broader history’ of ‘offensive’ comments in fact points to a single incident in 2014 when Macklemore wore fancy dress to mingle with an audience. He described the outfit:

‘On Friday night we had a surprise show at the EMP Museum in Seattle. Earlier in the day I thought it would be fun to dress up in a disguise and go incognito to the event, so that I could walk around unnoticed and surprise the crowd with a short performance. I picked up a bunch of fake mustaches and beards and grabbed a left over wig from our recent trip to Japan.

‘As it turns out the fake noses they sell at the costume store are usually big (my nose didn’t fit most of them). So I ended up with a big witch nose. I went with a black beard, because that’s the furthest color from my natural hair. Disguise was the intention. I personally thought I looked very ambiguous in terms of any “type” of person. Some people there thought I looked like Ringo, some Abe Lincoln. If anything I thought I looked like Humpty Hump with a bowl cut.’

Last week in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland saw it differently:

‘Those outside the country appalled by what they see in Gaza or the West Bank sometimes struggle to know what they can do to help. The temptation is to rally around, say, the rapper Macklemore, calling out “Free Palestine” from Ed Sheeran’s stage – but that temptation fades a little when you see that the same Macklemore once performed dressed up as what looked unmistakably like an antisemitic caricature of a Jew, complete with a false, giant nose. He later apologised, saying a “Jewish stereotype” had never crossed his mind.’

This was classic Freedland: working hard to appear even-handed while crudely undermining the credibility of Israel’s critics. Why ‘crudely’? Because the use of ‘unmistakably’ suggested there is no doubt when in fact there is plenty of doubt. Someone deliberately dressing up as an antisemitic caricature in public would have to be in thrall to an extreme form of racism that would surely manifest itself at other times – it would not be a one-off. The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone commented:

‘If there had been other incidents of the artist expressing hateful opinions about Jews, one could make the case that he may have been lying about his intentions with the fake nose incident. But there are no such incidents… There is not one shred of evidence, anywhere, that these words [of explanation] were insincere.’

Freedland offered a similarly damning assessment in 2018 when he wrote in the Guardian:

‘Similar was the mural of hooked-nose bankers, counting their money on the backs of the poor. The artist himself said he had depicted Jews, but when Corbyn heard it was to be removed his response was “Why?” He literally could not see anything wrong with it. Again, that’s nothing to do with opposing Israel. That’s just old school antisemitism.’

Again, Corbyn ‘literally could not see anything wrong’ just as Macklemore’s outfit was ‘unmistakably’ antisemitic. In both cases, Freedland was suggesting absolute certainty where none existed. In fact, the biggest nose on display in the mural belonged to a very recognisable J.P. Morgan, an Episcopalian Christian. In her book, ‘Killing Corbynism – Zionism’s War on Socialism’, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt wrote of the mural:

‘The artwork in question – Freedom for Humanity – False Profits – depicted caricatures of six white men playing a board game on the bent backs of faceless black and brown people. The central characters were identified by the artist as Andrew Carnegie, Aleister Crowley, JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller, Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg, only two of whom (Rothschild and Warburg) were Jewish.’ (Incarnadine Imprint, 2026, pp.120-121, our emphasis)

Smears aside, Macklemore appears to have a sensitive and astute understanding of these issues, as indicated by this comment on free speech:

‘And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying “Free Palestine” gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.’

If Kraft, who is worth around $15 billion, cancelled Macklemore for defending Palestinian human rights, expressing solidarity with ‘all my Jewish brothers and sisters’, who is Robert Kraft?

This is as much as the BBC was willing to say:

‘Kraft, who is Jewish, confirmed on Monday that he had made the decision to bar Macklemore from the Gillette Stadium because his venue would not “provide a platform for hate speech”.

‘The tycoon accused the Grammy-winning rapper of having “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric”, which Macklemore denies.’

What the BBC was not willing to say was that Kraft had previously said:

‘After my family, there is nothing I’m more passionate about than the state of Israel and my Jewish identity.’

In 2019, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally awarded Kraft the Genesis Prize, often described as the ‘Jewish Nobel’. The prize recognises extraordinary contributions to humanity, and commitment to Jewish values and the State of Israel. Kraft donated the $1 million prize money to organisations dedicated to combating ‘antisemitism’ and the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

Netanyahu described Kraft as:

‘A terrific champion of Israel and someone that I am deeply proud to call my friend.’

Kraft replied:

‘Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, not only for your kind words, but for your decades of leadership, but especially what you do for this state of Israel.’

In 2019, Kraft created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. He is a longtime supporter of Donald Trump. Sheeran sang at Kraft’s wedding in 2022 and described him as ‘super sweet’.

Kraft’s passionate support for Israel was similarly soft-pedalled in the Guardian, which mentioned:

‘…Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a prominent supporter of and donor to Israel …’.

A Guardian opinion piece by Laura Snapes went further, mentioning some of the reality but not Netanyahu’s personal friendship with Kraft:

‘Kraft is friends with Trump and is a major donor to Israel: Netanyahu said at a 2019 awards ceremony honouring Kraft that “Israel does not have a more loyal friend”.’

To her credit, Snapes commented that ‘losing financial and professional opportunities and creating inconvenience is precisely what it takes to show backbone and stand against genocide and billionaires crushing free speech’.

The Art Of Not Speaking Publicly…. Sometimes!

Sheeran said of the furore:

‘I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care. Nor does it mean I don’t support causes in my own, personal way.’

He continued:

‘There is a reason I do not use my professional platform for politics – my audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds.

‘Those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum. I respect Macklemore’s strength of purpose to stand up and shout for what he believes.’

And yet, footage is freely available of Sheeran using one of his concerts as a political forum in support of Ukraine, even though many young people, including children, were present. Did the audience come to the show expecting literal Ukrainian flag-waving in a time of war?

In May 2022, the BBC reported:

‘Ukrainian group Antytila have teamed up with Ed Sheeran, releasing a new song partly filmed and recorded while serving in the war against Russia.

‘Antytila are one of the biggest musical acts in Ukraine but stopped working to join the military.

‘Proceeds from the song, released on Monday, will go to help the people of Ukraine.’

‘”Ed feels that pain, compassion and sympathy for Ukrainian people,” lead singer Taras Topolya told the BBC.’

Sheeran told the band and the people of Ukraine:

‘Firstly I just wanted to say to all Ukrainians, I love you, I stand with you and I’m so proud to be playing this fundraising event next week.’

The Ukrainian people certainly need all the love they can get. But so do the people of Palestine. What’s the difference?

Sheeran could hardly have been more political when he openly supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2017:

‘I love Corbyn. I love everything Corbyn is about.’

These comments, and the fact that he has known Macklemore for many years, suggest that Sheeran privately agrees with him.

Sheeran was engaging politically when he co-signed an open letter organised by the Human Rights Campaign, an initiative by musicians and entertainers urging the US Congress to pass legislation which aimed to prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals. Sheeran also signed open letters to Theresa May in 2018 and Boris Johnson in 2021 about Brexit.

Sheeran’s claim that he is apolitical reminds us of the refusal of The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to ban Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024. The EBU explained:

‘We firmly believe that the Eurovision Song Contest is a platform that should always transcend politics, promote togetherness and bring audiences together across the world.’

The EBU must simply have forgotten that Russia had been banned from the song contest since 2022 for its invasion of Ukraine.

In his first show since Macklemore had been dropped, Sheeran said the furore had placed him ‘in the middle of an important and passionate argument about free speech and the most complex political issue on the planet’.

Council Estate Media posted a very simple tweet (included at the top of this media alert), that put that comment in perfect perspective.

Sheeran said that what happened in Israel on 7 October was ‘horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain’, and what was happening in Gaza was ‘catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate’:

‘My heart has been broken by the scale of devastation and loss of civilian lives, of children’s lives, and this systemic injustice we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank cannot be overlooked.’

At the time they were taking place, would Sheeran have described earlier genocides as ‘the most complex political issue on the planet’? We suspect not. We also suspect he would not have tearfully apologised for commenting on those genocides, as he did after making the comments just cited:

‘The one thing that I would like to apologise for is the first bit of the show where it wasn’t about music… but that was something I felt like I needed to say… I do apologise for the first bit of the show. My shows are about this – they’re about unity, they’re about love, they’re about family, they’re about people coming together…’

With Gaza in ruins, with children making up 30 per cent of the dead, with the survivors living in rat-infested, bomb-blasted, tent cities dependent on aid, Sheeran’s tears had the unfortunate effect of placing his own stress and suffering front and centre as he sat on the stage in front of 50,000 fans. His repeated apologies make clear that he has no intention of commenting again at one of his shows on the ‘catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate’ suffering of the Palestinian people.

In the real world, love and unity – if they are more than cultural candyfloss – are based on honesty, the facing of uncomfortable truths; the facing and digesting of painful differences. They are not based merely on having ‘fun’, on ‘escapism’, on pretending the world outside does not exist.

Left progressives have all but universally denounced Sheeran as ‘spineless’, as a ‘coward’ and, in the words of Roger Waters, a ‘prick’.

Everybody knows that damning denunciations play supremely well on social media – nothing boosts the ego like the feeling that we are, not just right, but morally ‘superior’ to some wimpier soul – but it is going too far to promote bravery as the defining moral virtue. We are all cowards in different ways, and sometimes we are well-advised to be a coward. Sometimes the bravest amongst us are simply egotists driven by delusions of invincibility. And it is not, in truth, certain that Sheeran is merely guided by fear of personal negative consequences. It could be that, knowing how open dissent is relentlessly attacked, and outreach shut down, he really is trying to spread peace, love and understanding apolitically. Political progressives might find that hopelessly naïve, or self-serving drivel, but it has been the approach taken by the likes of Jesus, Buddha, Bodhidharma, Chuang tzu and Lao tse – people who had a vast and salutary impact on human civilisation and who were not political activists. Many of our leftist compassionate values actually have their roots in such teachings.

Nevertheless, the words of historian Howard Zinn ring very true, in our time more than ever:

‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train. The world is already moving in certain directions – many of them are horrifying. Children are going hungry, people are dying in wars. To be neutral in such a situation is to collaborate with what is going on.’ (Howard Zinn, ‘The Zinn Reader – Writings on Disobedience and Democracy’, Seven Stories Press, 1997, p.17)

In this age of genocide, corporate psychopathy and climate breakdown, to be neutral is indeed to collaborate, not just with ‘their’ annihilation, but with our own.

DE

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming Chomskyan, dystopian, mystical science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books on 30 March 2027.

The deeply shocking video footage shows the massive main building surrounded by a complex of other buildings and car parks. Some of the 560 staff and visitors can be seen running for their lives. At 25 seconds, what looks like a puff of white cloud emerges top left, behind the main building. Seconds later, the entire complex is hit by 2.2 million metric tons of sediment, rocks and water, a mixture that has been likened to ‘liquid concrete’. It is clear that everyone seen running will have been killed by the wave travelling at 60 mph. Before and after images show that the complex was not just destroyed but erased down to the bedrock. As the first journalists at the scene reported, it looks as though no-one had ever built there. In all, the flood left at least 1,380 dead and some 5,500 people missing.

The US Geological Survey reports that since 2000, glaciers ‘have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally’, changes which are ‘indicators of ongoing anthropogenic climate change’.

Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, explained the connection in the Guardian last week:

‘As glaciers retreat, they expose unstable terrain that is often ripe for landslides. The swift thawing of permafrost as global heating causes freezing levels to progressively rise also means that mountain faces become unstable rock masses looking for any excuse to collapse. At the same time, wherever there is an available dip or hollow, glacial meltwater is accumulating, forming expanding lakes that are increasingly prone to overtopping or breaching, dumping prodigious volumes of water into inhabited valleys downslope.

‘In such circumstances, there are manifold ways in which climate-driven responses from the earth under our feet can drive dangerous and deadly hazards. As in Nepal and Tibet, the collapse of a weakened glacier can promote a flood, either directly, or by throwing a dam across a river valley that is eventually breached. Permafrost thawing, heavy rains or an earthquake can lead to the formation of landslides that can also block rivers, or obliterate communities completely.’

The increased threats McGuire describes include earthquakes and volcanoes, and are biblical in scale:

‘Add in the fact that environmental parameters such as temperature, precipitation and sea levels are all on the rise, and you have that extra nudge that can goad an inactive volcano into erupting, cause a long-dormant fault to rupture, or coax the snout of an unstable glacier to collapse. The end product can be a devastating geological event that is out of all proportion to the size of the initial trigger.’

In August 2025, a landslide in Alaska’s Tracy Arm fjord generated a 500-metre-high wave. By sheer luck, the landslide occurred early in the morning, before the arrival of large cruise ships, which during the summer can involve six vessels and thousands of passengers per day. A few months earlier, the collapse of part of a glacier in Switzerland caused a torrent that destroyed most of the village of Blatten, which had been evacuated.

In the Daily Mail, commentator Richard Littlejohn defied both the scientific evidence and common sense when he declared that the disaster in Nepal and Tibet ‘had nothing to do with drilling (or not) in the North Sea’. (Littlejohn, ‘The climate emergency is over – here comes the rain,’ Daily Mail, 28 August 2026)

In The Spectator, Matt Ridley agreed:

‘This catastrophe was far more likely to have had an entirely natural cause.’

‘UK Air Passenger Numbers Hit Record High’

Back in the real world, after this latest calamity, the term ‘climate change’ seems almost quaint. In reality, we are facing climate breakdown that is bringing not just human disaster but human erasure.

The glacier collapse follows the warmest UK summer on record. Over an eight-day period, the UK experienced sustained temperatures above 34°C for the first time, causing grass to turn brown nationally as a severe drought took hold, while 54 Met Office stations set all-time daily high records. Globally, the daily average sea surface temperature hit 21.1°C – the hottest ocean temperature ever recorded by satellites. Multiple European countries also set all-time or monthly maximum records, including Germany (41.7°C), France (43.8°C), Spain, Austria, Poland, and the Netherlands. Tragically, the heatwave resulted in 2,877 deaths in the UK in May and June (figures for July and August are not yet available), and 35,000 deaths elsewhere across Europe from May to early August.

After watching the obliteration of Gyirong Port, it was sobering to look up and know that airliners were flying thicker and faster than ever with not even a glimmer of hope of change on the horizon. A Jet2 advert announced the good news last week:

‘Over 15,000 seats at £39 or less on selected September 2026 flights. When they’re gone, they’re gone.’

Under the headline, ‘UK air passenger numbers hit record high despite Middle East disruption’, the Travel Tomorrow website reported on 28 August:

‘UK air passenger numbers broke a record in the second quarter of 2026, with more than 81 million passengers travelling through British airports despite disruption caused by the conflict in the Middle East… The figure was more than 120,000 higher than the 81,035,648 recorded during the same period in 2025, making it the busiest second quarter on record.’

The increase was mostly driven by low-cost airlines like Ryanair and Jet2, which both recorded 9% year-on-year growth in passenger numbers during the quarter.

If this was madness, what to say of the two stories that broke on the same day last week? On 4 September, an astonishing piece on the BBC website reported:

‘Households should stock up on food to prepare for extreme weather as the strongest El Niño event in a generation develops over the Pacific Ocean, a government minister has said.’

Environment Secretary Angela Eagle warned:

‘We’re about to experience probably the largest El Niño that has ever been seen, and that will lead to drier summers, wetter winters, with more extreme storms in this country…

‘If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t.’

Even the fanatically climate-denying Telegraph reported:

‘Britain braces for crippling food crisis as “Godzilla” El Niño stirs’

About as many people died from the heat in the UK in May and June as died in the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. While those attacks triggered a vast propaganda blitz launching ‘the war on terror’, the heat deaths of 2026 are being met, not with positive political action, nor even with indifference, but with action to make the problem worse. Thus, also on 4 September, the BBC reported:

‘The UK government is set to give the go-ahead for a controversial new gas field off the coast of Aberdeen, the BBC understands.

‘Approval for the Jackdaw project could come in mid-September, just before Parliament breaks for party conference season, according to government and industry sources.’

It has been estimated that Jackdaw could produce 35.8m tonnes of carbon over its 11-year lifetime, the equivalent of 90% of Scotland’s emissions for 2023.

Tessa Khan, executive director of environmental group Uplift, said more North Sea drilling would not cut energy bills and would ‘make no meaningful difference’ to UK energy supply.

‘The science is clear that the world already has far more oil and gas than can ever be safely burned if we are to limit warming.

‘When it comes to these decisions, the prime minister needs to listen to scientists’ warnings and think back to those families who lost their homes to this summer’s wildfires, the UK farmers struggling to grow our food in the drought, and the lives lost in the floods in Nepal – and not the self-interested demands of the oil companies.’

In a long piece for the BBC, international business correspondent Theo Leggett noted that flights are being increasingly impacted by the flooding of airports, intensifying storms causing diversions and worsening turbulence. Leggett quoted the no-doubt scrupulously impartial Andrew Charlton who manages the Swiss-based consultancy Aviation Advocacy:

‘I think the best we can do is mitigate.’

Charlton offered some detail:

‘We need to make sure we have enough space at air terminals for people whose flights are being disrupted and delayed, that we have enough hotel rooms and parking space and so on.

‘But ultimately, disagreeable moments are going to happen more.’

The BBC’s sage conclusion:

‘Passengers, he thinks, will have to accept it as a fact of flying life.’

Just two sentences were devoted to the role of aviation in driving climate breakdown:

‘The aviation industry is often criticised for its own contribution to climate change emissions. It faces a forbidding challenge in attempting to meet a target of being carbon neutral by 2050, while also accommodating growth that is expected to see the global aircraft fleet double in size over the next two decades.’

The ‘forbidding challenge’ involves the notion that Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), fuels made from waste oils or synthetic power-to-liquid processes, will cut emissions by 50% – 65% . Unfortunately, SAF currently accounts for less than 1% of total global jet fuel demand. Increasing that figure to meet 2050 needs would mean 5,000-7,000 new biorefineries and over $4-5 trillion in capital investment: a highly improbable scenario, to say the least.

Nowhere does Leggett raise the exotic possibility that solutions might lie in people choosing to take fewer flights to hen parties in Prague, stag parties in Berlin and weekend shopping trips to New York. With clear signs of social collapse looming, stopping is not on the agenda.

Instead, the Ostrich-like delusion that climate breakdown is something we can ride out is everywhere. Stuart Rust of the BBC asked:

‘What will you tell your grandchildren about the summer of ‘26?…

‘As it draws to a close, we look back on some of the moments that will be talked about for years to come.’

The question is completely divorced from reality. If we are even around in ‘years to come’, we won’t be talking about the summer of ‘26; we will be talking about the cataclysmic summers to come that will do to us, our food supply and social cohesion what 2.2 million metric tons of ‘liquid concrete’ did to Gyirong Port.

Even if such an outcome was a mere possibility rather than a certainty, we would be right to place society on an emergency war footing, exactly as has happened in the face of far lesser threats from war and terrorism.

Alas, while war is decidedly good for business, action to limit fossil fuel use is anything but. Our key, related problem being that, as John Dewey observed, ‘politics is the shadow cast on society by big business’. (Quoted, Robert Westbrook, ‘John Dewey and American Democracy’, Cornell University Press, 1991, p.440)

In the final analysis, the same is true of climate breakdown.

DE

Our work is crucially dependent on our ability to search media databases with ProQuest or Nexis. If you can help, please email us: editor@medialens.org

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming Chomskyan, dystopian, mystical science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books on 30 March 2027.

If you need an indication of how divorced the ‘mainstream’ media is from reality, consider this: the possibility of at least 4 billion deaths resulting from 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050 made barely a dent in news headlines.

Last year, a team of experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter published a report, ‘Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature’. The report examined the risks and likely catastrophic impacts if humanity does not take immediate decisive action to stop greenhouse gas emissions which have already led to increasingly devastating wildfires, flooding, droughts, loss of harvests and threats to food supply.

The current global temperature rise, compared to pre-industrial times, is on the verge of breaching the 1.5C ‘cap’ agreed in 2015 at the Paris climate summit. Protesters said then: ‘1.5 to stay alive’.

However, on the present trajectory of emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates a rise of around 2C by 2050; possibly as early as 2039. A 2C rise by 2050 was the ‘highly likely’ case included in a range of scenarios considered by the expert actuaries and Exeter researchers. They labelled 2C warming as ‘catastrophic’ and listed a number of associated impacts on climate, nature, society and human mortality:

· Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.

· Major extinction events in multiple regions.

· Ocean circulation severely impacted.

· High number of climate tipping points triggered, with a partial ‘tipping cascade’, increasing climate instability even further.

· Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions; low-lying regions lost.

· Heat and water stress driving involuntary mass migration of billions of people.

· Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

And the starkest conclusion of all:

· The deaths of at least 2 billion people.

As utterly grim as this was, the expert team also included an even more ‘extreme’ scenario of 3C warming by 2050 which cannot be ruled out; indeed, it is highly plausible. Recently, New Scientist reported a new climate study that concluded the world may warm by 25 per cent more than current projections predict, suggesting around 3.25C of warming by 2100. In fact, some reputable scientists believe that a 3C temperature rise by 2050 is the most likely outcome if the current dangerous fossil fuel trajectory continues. For example, the German Physical and Meteorological Societies issued a joint warning last year that the planet could warm by 3C over preindustrial levels by 2050. Leon Simons, a Dutch climate researcher and the Executive Director of the Club of Rome Netherlands, produced this useful thread on X about the warning.

Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of policy institute Climate Analytics, warned:

‘This is just physics. We’re losing the ability to limit warming even by two degrees without strong action and people need to be aware of that and be aware that it’s a political failure. It’s not an act of God or anything. It is just because politicians in many places are not acting fast enough.’

Arguably, there are no politicians in positions of real power who are ‘acting fast enough’. In fact, they are avoiding, even blocking, substantive action on climate. They have essentially been captured by fossil fuel interests.

So, what would be the effects of 3C global warming? The ‘Planetary Solvency’ report estimated that there would be at least 4 billion deaths. There would also be:

· Multiple climate tipping points triggered, and a tipping cascade.

· Breakdown of several critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.

· High level of extinction of higher order life on Earth.

· Significant socio-political fragmentation worldwide and/or state failure with rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital and systems identity.

· Frequent large scale mortality events.

To put things in awful perspective, 4 billion deaths is around half the current global population.

Note that the 4 billion figure did not appear in the title of the report. Nor was it addressed in the main body of the text. Instead, it appeared in an appendix on page 32 of the 40-page report.

How did the Guardian report it? With the headline, ‘Global economy could face 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from climate shocks, say actuaries’. The figure of 4 billion dead was only mentioned in passing in the fifth paragraph.

Later that month, an Observer piece on the climate crisis by Robin McKie, a former science and environment editor of the Observer, addressed the report:

‘It argues the global economy “could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090, unless immediate policy action on risks posed by the climate ­crisis is taken,” adding: “Populations are already impacted by food ­system shocks, water insecurity, heat stress and infectious diseases. If unchecked, mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic ­contraction and conflict become more likely.”’

McKie then quoted Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, who called the report ‘a stark message’. McGuire continued:

‘In light of the projections in Planetary Solvency, it is pretty clear that hope is now a luxury we can no longer afford, and the truth is we are in deep, deep excrement that is getting deeper by the day.

‘It is a simple fact that there is now an extraordinary disconnect between government and business actions and the reality of the colossal impacts of climate breakdown of society and economy.’

There was, however, no mention in the Observer article of the likely billions of deaths.

We could not find a single article about the actuaries’ report in any other national UK newspaper. Nor could we find anything on the BBC News website. This silence is extraordinary. It is a stunning example of propaganda by omission; arguably the greatest crime of state-corporate media.

As it happens, the team of experts that produced the report included an actuary from the UK government Actuary’s Department. The government website therefore posted an anodyne summary, titled ‘Actuaries highlight the increasing risk of Planetary Insolvency’. But it made no mention of the prospect of billions of deaths.

The Gargantuan Lie

Adam McKay is the Academy Award-winning director of ‘The Big Short’, ‘Vice’, and ‘Don’t Look Up’. In this most recent film, two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humanity of an approaching comet that will destroy Earth, only to be met with apathy, political denial, and corporate greed. Clearly, the film was an allegory for the climate crisis.

McKay recently wrote a powerful piece titled, ‘The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate’.

He wrote:

‘It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day… This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”’

This lie is not ‘the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President.’ Instead, it is a lie that has prevented serious action being taken to cut emissions:

‘Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”

‘Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.’

The grand lie of ‘we have more time’ includes:

‘lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.”’

McKay added:

‘In service of the Great Lie, the government of the United Kingdom even tried to bury a climate report from its own intelligence agency before it was leaked. To my knowledge there aren’t many spies being called tree huggers, unless they’re undercover of course. But the MI5 and MI6 are clear-eyed about the danger that’s coming. The report warned that “global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”’

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit UK organisation, found that almost two-thirds of articles in UK national newspapers that referenced wildfires during this summer’s record-breaking temperatures failed to mention climate change.

The ECIU also reported that 72% of coverage of the UK’s June heatwaves likewise failed to mention climate change. And an analysis by Climate News Tracker in May found that more than half of UK television and radio news coverage of that month’s heatwave also failed to link it to climate change.

And yet, UK climate breakdown is ‘coming faster and harder’, according to the economist Professor Matthew Agarwala, the chair of sustainable finance at the University of Sussex Bennett Institute. We may now be entering a ‘perfect storm’ of climate impacts that could devastate the country’s infrastructure and food supply.

Luke Tryl, UK director of More in Common, a non-profit research agency that aims to understand what Britons think and why, noted recently via X:

‘Weather may be getting cooler, but what has been the impact of recent heatwaves on public attitudes to and salience of climate and net zero? Two thirds of the public say they are worried about hot weather and 86% think climate change at least partially responsible.’

Geoffrey Lean, formerly of the Independent, and the world’s longest serving environment journalist with a 56-year career, responded to the survey results:

‘What a disconnect! The vast majority of people rightly link the heatwaves with climate change, but another survey has found that two thirds of media articles on them fail to mention it. The Government seems stuck in same elite Westminster/Whitehall/Fleet Street bubble….’

Likewise, the BBC is failing to properly inform viewers about the realities of the climate emergency. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, says that the BBC is choosing instead to follow the lead of right-wing newspapers owned by billionaires. He told the National newspaper in Scotland:

‘It’s really important we have a public service broadcaster but what’s happened is the denigration of trust because of years now of overreporting on Reform.

‘I think the most obvious example is Question Time, the constant seat that is given to a Reform spokesperson. But sometimes we miss the point if we just focus on Question Time; I think it’s much more insidious than that.’

He continued:

‘I think it’s daily, I think it’s in the commentary around British politics, I think it’s constantly through the frame of what Reform are saying, or there is a much bigger problem where The Telegraph or The Times or the Mail will put something on their front page and then the BBC allow those billionaire-owned newspapers to set the news agenda.

‘It’s corrosive to our political discourse and our national conversation.’

Polanski called on UK prime minister Andy Burnham to block plans to exploit the Rosebank oil field west of Shetland and the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. Climate scientist Bill McGuire noted:

‘The climate doesn’t care about what pleases the fossil fuel industry or is perceived as politically palatable. It cares about the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.’

So far, Burnham has shamefully neglected to tackle the climate crisis, or even discuss it publicly. A recent government ‘severe alert’ sent to phones in the UK only went as far as warning that people ‘should not undertake any activity that could start a fire, including disposable barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators or fireworks.’ The word ‘climate’ did not appear.

He has yet to make a decision on whether to approve the Jackdaw and the Rosebank fields. According to a recent report in The Times, government ministers are concerned about the ‘optics’ of giving approval during a summer that has seen a series of intense heatwaves and wildfires in many parts of the UK. The decision is now expected to be delayed until the autumn.

After speaking with Burnham in a phone call, US president Donald Trump said that opening up new oil and gas fields would help solve Britain’s ‘energy problem’ and make the UK ‘pretty rich’. Burnham has reportedly said that he would adopt a ‘pragmatic’ approach. That hardly inspires confidence that he is serious about cutting emissions of dangerous global warming gases.

The 4 Billion Dead Movement

Early in 2026, a new climate movement emerged in the UK. 4 Billion Dead (4BD) was founded by climate activist Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. Hallam is a former organic farmer who, motivated by the loss of his business due to extreme weather events, later became a researcher in the study of mass mobilisation at Kings College, London.

In 2024, Hallam was sentenced, along with other activists, for his part in organising a climate action to disrupt traffic on the M25. His sentence was initially for five years, later reduced to four years on appeal. He was released in 2025 after serving around thirteen months in prison.

The name of the 4BD movement comes from the worst-case scenario included in the expert actuarial report discussed earlier. The movement’s call for international climate activism stated:

‘You felt this summer. Across the world it was felt.

‘The heat that didn’t break. The grass that turned to straw then dust. The rivers running low. Heatwaves killing thousands of people.

‘It will get worse. Not might. Will. Every year temperatures will rise and more people will die.

‘Last year the truth came out. The British insurance industry produced a report on the climate crisis, predicting at least 4 billion deaths at 3C of global warming – possible by mid century.

‘4 billion. Half the Earth’s population. Dead.

‘Sit with that number for a moment. There are no words.’

On the 4BD website, Hallam has written about how this movement will differ from the ‘old’ climate movement. The first aspect, he says, is to recognise that what humanity is facing is not ‘merely an “issue” that requires a “campaign” to “fix it”.’

He continued:

‘What we face requires us not just to change the world but to change how we see the world and ourselves. We are not going to have any resilience unless we first take the time to focus on what it means to live a good life in the appalling context we are presented with.’

Inspired by India’s fight for independence against British rule, he points to Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of ‘self-purification.’

Hallam explains:

‘We have to detach ourselves from our egos – that bit of ourselves that wants success – to win. And that part of ourselves which is filled with judgement against those who we see as responsible for this ultimate catastrophe. Both paths lead to burnout and/or violence. And paradoxically, neither of these outcomes will lead to “success”.’

The second aspect of importance is that 4BD will operate within the law, because otherwise:

‘In the increasingly authoritarian contexts we face, direct action will most likely lead to the arrest and imprisonment of people in the organisation and force its closure.’

A third component is a ‘grand vision’ for 4BD as:

‘part of an international movement which, as conditions worsen, seeks to provide a positive radical alternative to the default collapse into fascism. Along with partner groups and networks we are demanding a political revolution – a fundamental change in how decisions are made in our society’.

Taking Back Power

Professor Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Manchester, has long spoken out forcibly about the real risk of societal collapse under global warming, and the urgent need to make substantive cuts in emissions. In a recent interview with Novara Media, he pointed out that tackling climate change means improving the everyday lives of those large numbers who are currently struggling:

‘better [public] transport, better homes which improves the well-being of the people in those homes…which improves the educational attainment of their children. So, this is win-win-win for those communities.’

He also reminded viewers that power in society resides with the general population. We do not have to genuflect before Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and pay attention to his views on climate, while the media flock adoringly around him.

Anderson says of technical and political elites:

‘I don’t think these people have power unless we allow them to have power.’

The ‘real skill’ of elites, with their self-serving neoliberal agenda, is to:

‘break the world into individual components. As individuals we have very little power. As collectives, we have far, far more power than Gates, [Elon Musk], [Jeff] Bezos [founder of Amazon], the PM [Prime Minister]. So, the trick of those who want to maintain power is to make sure the rest of us just continue as individuals, not as collectives.’

He referred to the Suffragette and civil rights movements:

‘We can see where collectives come together [and change society]’.

Elites have always resisted change from below because they have done remarkably well under the status quo. The same holds today where we are encouraged to see ourselves as individuals competing against each other, rather than ‘citizens in a collective, a community, a society, a country.’

Anderson summed up:

‘So, I do not hold that they [elites] have the power. We have allowed them to have the power by allowing them to reduce us to individuals. We can take that power back any time we want to do.’

And that is the key to tackling the climate emergency.

DC

Note to our readers

Media Lens was 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.

Peter Oborne kindly wrote this tribute for our 25th anniversary, ‘How Media Lens forged a path for independent journalism’, at Declassified UK.

New alerts and cogitations are now available as podcasts on Substack, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’

This has to be a serious candidate for the most foolish comment ever made publicly by a British newspaper editor. Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, opined:

‘We’ve lost the war against global warming – so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather.’

One might wonder which trench Heath occupied in the ‘war against global warming,’ given that the Telegraph titles have spent decades in the climate-denial camp.

From his privileged position of comfort and wealth, he added:

‘Yes, climate change will inflict many well-rehearsed costs on Britain, and there will be plenty of losers, but it is pointless seeking to prevent the inevitable.’

And:

‘It’s time to accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and whenever possible, even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate, if that is indeed to be our fate.’

Capitalism, the very system of planet-devouring economics that brought us here, will, Heath confidently proclaimed, ‘drive down emissions, when the time and, crucially, price are right.’

He continued:

‘Without minimising the severe downsides of global warming, especially on some [sic] poorer nations, many in Britain would enjoy the kind of warmer climate predicted by modellers… construct more pools…plant more Mediterranean vegetation.’

Jason Hickel, an economics anthropologist professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in Barcelona, noted of Heath’s article:

‘This grotesque headline is from the Telegraph. 3,000 people in Britain have been killed in heatwaves this year so far. 20,000 in Europe.

‘Even if Britain did get to “embrace Mediterranean life”, what about the actual Mediterranean, what do they get to embrace? What about India?’

Hickel added:

‘The indifference of the British elite toward mass suffering is astonishing.’

As for ‘the despicable con that is net zero’, it is a basic law of physics that to stop global warming, humanity has to cut net emissions of global-warming gases to zero. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who sounded the climate alarm to US Congress in 1988, said three years ago that ‘we are damned fools’ for not acting upon warnings over the climate crisis. According to Hansen, there is a huge amount of global heating ‘in the pipeline’ because of the continued burning of fossil fuels. Moreover, he argued, the Earth is ‘very sensitive’ to the impacts of this; far more sensitive than the best estimates presented by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He said:

‘We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain [in burning fossil fuels]. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.’

Hansen added:

‘We are in the early phase of a climate emergency. Such acceleration is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium.’

A new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows that global warming has accelerated sharply since 2015. Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the study’s co-authors, warns that:

‘How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.’

In his Telegraph piece, Heath adopted a classic diversionary tactic: blame China and growing nations of the Global South:

‘All of our efforts at carbon reduction (and those of the European Union) have been offset many times over by the increase in Chinese emissions; Britain could return to the stone age and cut our GDP to zero, and it would still make only a trivial difference.’

He continued:

‘Even a global government would not have enforced net zero. Forget worthless treaties: such a body would have been controlled not by Western eco-warriors but by a coalition of Chinese, Russian, Indian, African and South American powers desperate for growth.’

Heath neglects to mention the great strides that China, for example, is taking in boosting its renewable energy capacity and decarbonising its economy. Moreover, many climate scientists disagree with cynical attempts to whitewash Britain’s historical responsibility for global warming since the Industrial Revolution.

Dr Ella Gilbert, a climate scientist and board member of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non-profit UK organisation conducting independent research and analysis on energy and climate, said:

‘The climate crisis is a global problem and every country should be acting to reduce emissions and build a greener global economy, especially those with the largest historical responsibility, like the UK. The climate doesn’t care where carbon comes from – whether [it’s] from multiple countries responsible for smaller proportions of emissions, or China.’

She added:

‘The UK may account for just 1% of current global emissions, but we’re responsible for 100% of our own emissions, and we have the opportunity to show global leadership by bringing them down.’

While Heath pines for a mythical Mediterranean lifestyle, soaking up sunshine and sangria by his pool, in the real world the Mediterranean will increasingly suffer ever more intense and persistent heatwaves of over 40C, with extensive wildfires forcing people to flee from their homes. In Britain, the hard reality is that we could face food shortages this year after severe droughts in parts of England, as well as climate-driven crop failures in major importing countries.

Heath’s article suffered such a severe public backlash that the original title of:

‘Britain can’t stop climate change. Let’s just embrace a Mediterranean lifestyle’

was later changed to:

‘We’ve lost the war against climate change. Time to scrap net zero’

One of our X followers asked if we could fathom Heath’s mindset. We pointed out the famous dictum by the US writer Upton Sinclair:

‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

Meanwhile, Andy Burnham, the putative saviour of the genocide-participating Labour government, has maintained a stoic silence over the summer’s European wildfires and wider climate breakdown. Instead, he has promised he will take a ‘pragmatic’ approach to oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.

The dictionary tells us ‘pragmatic’ means: ‘dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations’. There is, of course, nothing ‘sensible’, ‘realistic’ or ‘practical’ about burning yet more oil and gas, raising carbon emissions and global temperatures, and leading to ever-greater climate emergency death tolls.

Burnham says that:

‘There is a resource there [in the North Sea]. When people are struggling, we can’t ignore that.’

He would like us to believe that being ‘pragmatic’ is about helping the ordinary man and woman in the street, not the billionaire oil giants like Shell who have just posted profits of £7.37 billion for the April-to-June period, double last year.

Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party in England and Wales, condemned Burnham’s comments:

‘Allowing new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea will worsen the climate breakdown, putting more lives at risk and doing untold damage to our economy. It’s not too late for Burnham to do the right thing and commit to leaving dangerous fossil fuels in the ground.’

Compare Burnham’s version of reality with that described a few years ago by Noam Chomsky:

‘I don’t know what word in the language – I can’t find one – that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal – the existence of organised human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it.’

DC & DE

Note to our readers

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027.

Media Lens was 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.

New alerts and cogitations are now available as podcasts on Substack, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This month marks the 25^th 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 got 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 they can then go straight back to behaving as if they had never understood 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 a point where war happened in an almost natural, inevitable way. 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 fulfil 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 fully40-50% 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 armoured 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 reside in the hope that Iranian defiance will ultimately compel all sides to eschew violence and instead 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.

DE and DC

As discussed, Media Lens is 25 years old this month. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.

If any friendly academics or others are able to help us access the ProQuest or Nexis media database, please email us: editor@medialens.org

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027.

On Monday, Sir Keir Starmer was given a largely respectful farewell by the ‘mainstream’ media, portraying him as a ‘decent’ man who put his country first. And now the same news organisations are burnishing Andy Burnham’s credentials to enter 10 Downing Street without actually submitting his record or policies to proper scrutiny.

Starmer’s appalling record as Prime Minister was barely touched upon in his political obituaries. In particular, his complicity in the Gaza genocide was virtually whitewashed out of existence; notably by the BBC and the Guardian.

But first, consider this selective overview of his two years in power since his ‘landslide’ victory at the 2024 General Election. (With just one-third of the electoral vote, fewer than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour achieved in both 2017 and 2019, Starmer’s Labour won around two-thirds of the parliamentary seats because of the absurd first-past-the-post UK voting system):

• On his election as PM, Starmer ditched the ten pledges he’d made during his Labour leadership campaign which had deceptively presented him as a left-leaning, progressive successor to Corbyn whom he had called his ‘friend’.
• He attempted to court right-wing Reform voters by adopting the language of the notorious Enoch Powell in warning that ‘mass immigration’ had done ‘incalculable damage’ to the British economy, and that the UK could become an ‘island of strangers’.
• He attacked pensioners, people with disabilities, families on low income with more than two children (until he did a U-turn following a huge public backlash), and migrants.
• Against strong advice, he appointed Peter Mandelson, a close friend of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as UK ambassador to the US.
• He waged war on the left wing of the Labour Party, suspended Jeremy Corbyn and many others, including numerous Jewish members.
• He undermined trial by jury and, unjustly extending the definition of ‘terrorism’, proscribed Palestine Action and oversaw the arrests of more than 3,000 peaceful protesters, many of them elderly or with disabilities, opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
• He continued to arm and support Israel during the genocide despite his obligations under the Genocide Convention to take immediate action to prevent it, welcomed Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who had used genocidal language against the Palestinians in Gaza, approved visits from Israeli military officials and thwarted calls for a ceasefire. He also allowed the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus to be used for spy flights over Gaza, sharing intelligence with Israel that was likely used to attack targets in Gaza.
• Infamously, he even declared in a live radio interview with Nick Ferrari that Israel ‘has that right’ when asked about Israel denying electricity and water to Palestinians in Gaza and, days later, tried to gaslight the public that he had not actually said that.

The list could go on and on.

As Peter Oborne, author of ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, rightly noted of Starmer:

‘Incredibly, he leaves office without accusing Israel of ever committing war crimes.’

No tears were shed by Starmer in his ‘emotional’ Downing Street speech for the more than 73,000 Palestinans killed in Gaza, including at least 21,289 children, since 7 October 2023.

This week, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

In December 2024, Amnesty International published a detailed report that explained the meaning of genocide:

‘Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, five specific acts constitute the underlying criminal conduct of the crime of genocide, including: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Each of these acts must be committed with a general intent to commit the underlying act. However, to constitute the crime of genocide, these acts must also be committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such…” This specific intent is what distinguishes genocide from other crimes under international law.’ (Our emphasis)

Amnesty added a key clarification:

‘Importantly, the perpetrator does not need to succeed in destroying the targeted group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to be established. International jurisprudence recognizes that “the term ‘in whole or in part’ refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction”.

In its submission to the International Court of Justice against Israel, South Africa presented a detailed legal case that Israel has committed genocide. This case has been backed by other states at the ICJ who have published their own findings of genocide. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, reached similar conclusions in two reports in 2024: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ and ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure’. In 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that Israel ‘has engaged in an intentional starvation campaign against the Palestinian people which evidences genocide and extermination’. Moreover, many of the world’s leading scholars on genocide, including Israeli experts, have determined that Israel has committed genocide. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

Diverting Readers’ Attention Away From The Genocide

The media’s whitewashing of Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide and crimes against humanity is stunning. Searches of British newspapers using the Nexis database reveal that in the first 24 hours of Starmer resigning, there were 1,485 mentions of him. Only 30 of these had any reference to Gaza. Several of these were reports of Irish rap trio Kneecap saying farewell in Irish to Starmer (‘Slán Keir’). For example, the Independent mentioned that Kneecap released the single ‘Liars Tale’ earlier this year where they criticised Sir Keir’s stance on, as the paper put it, ‘Israel’s military offensive in Gaza’, thus avoiding use of the accurate word, ‘genocide’.

Another mention of Gaza appeared in the Daily Telegraph where associate editor Gordon Rayner noted:

‘As early as September 2024, in his first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Sir Keir gave the country a taste of the blunders to come when he called for the return of “sausages” from Gaza rather than hostages.’

That was a safe mention of ‘Gaza’ for the right-wing paper.

Only 11 of the 30 mentions of ‘Starmer’ and ‘Gaza’ also contained the word ‘genocide’. Recall, this is out of a total of 1,485 newspaper mentions of Starmer in the 24 hours after his resignation.

One such mention was in the Herald in Scotland quoting Green Party leader, Zack Polanski:

‘The vested interests that are holding this country back need to be confronted, with wealth taxes on the super-rich, utilities taken into public ownership, rent controls and affordable housing, and an end to support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

‘We are still waiting to see which version of Andy Burnham might [be] going to show up in Downing Street.’

That the Gaza genocide barely registered in media coverage of Starmer’s departure from Downing Street is utterly damning of the insular, power-hungry nexus of the British political-media establishment.

The Guardian’s ‘big hitter’ and resident Zionist Jonathan Freedland devoted around 2,000 words to the question, ‘the rise and fall of Starmer: where did it all go wrong?’. Notable features of his piece:

Mentions of genocide? Zero.

Mentions of Gaza? Zero.

Mentions of Israel’s crimes? Zero.

It takes real dedication to divert readers’ attention from Starmer’s complicity in all of the above.

Meanwhile, Dan Sabbagh, the Guardian’s defence and security editor, uncritically cited analysts declaring that foreign policy was an ‘area of relative strength’ for Starmer. Mark Curtis, co-director and co-founder of Declassified UK, was scathing:

‘The Guardian is such trash.’

In similar vein, Guardian political correspondent Alexandra Topping had a piece on the departing PM’s record with a section titled, ‘Success: Starmer the international statesman’. Once again, there was no mention of Gaza.

BBC News performed its usual establishment role too, steering clear of awkward mentions of the Gaza genocide; not least on BBC News at Ten on the day of Starmer’s resignation speech.

Ben Chu of BBC Verify presented an overview of ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership in six charts’. None of these charts depicted the deaths, injuries or devastation wreaked by Israel in Gaza, with Starmer’s complicity. In fact, there was not a single mention of genocide, Gaza or Israel. Propaganda by omission is, of course, a dominant feature of BBC News.

In an extensive piece titled, ‘Sir Keir Starmer: Top lawyer whose “Mr Rules” approach failed to connect with the public’, BBC political reporters, Becky Morton and Brian Wheeler, managed to write 3,000 words on how Starmer ‘failed to connect with the public’ without once mentioning the Gaza genocide.

This omission is particularly glaring because one of the many reasons that Starmer is deeply unpopular with much of the public is his complicity in Israel’s massive crimes against humanity. For example, in 2025, an Opinium poll tracker found that 45 per cent of the British public explicitly disapproved of Starmer’s handling of ‘the Israel-Gaza conflict’. In particular, support for Labour among British Muslims collapsed. A 2024 Survation poll showed that British Muslims’ identification with Labour as their natural choice had plummeted from 72 per cent in 2021 to 29 per cent three years later.

That BBC reporters simply ignored the issue of Gaza in their analysis of Starmer’s premiership tells us how divorced they are from reality. The fact that Sir Keir ‘Mr Rules’ Starmer broke rules under the Genocide Convention, namely to take immediate action to prevent its occurrence, went under the BBC radar. Client journalism and the Westminster bubble need to be rooted out.

‘A Brutal, Inhuman, Pitiless Political Machine’

Key requirements for achieving this would be to expose and reduce the power of the Israel lobby. Earlier this year, analysis by Mark Curtis of Declassified UK showed that Britain’s national media fails to recognise the influence, and even the existence, of an Israel lobby. In two years of reporting by seven British media outlets, Curtis found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks. He observed:

‘Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.

‘The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.’

If the Israel lobby’s grip on the British media were not so pervasive, Starmer’s record on Gaza would have been a central feature of coverage of his resignation. Peter Oborne noted that media ‘myth-making has begun’, spinning Starmer as ‘a brave and principled politician whose heroic efforts rescued the Labour Party from bankruptcy and oblivion.’ Media broadcasts and newspaper articles uncritically relayed Starmer’s Downing Street boast that he left office with Britain’s reputation restored as a country that stands for ‘decency, respect and the rule of law’.

In an excellent piece for the indispensable Double Down News, Oborne noted that:

‘For the last four years, Keir Starmer has been in charge of a brutal, inhuman, pitiless political machine. But you simply wouldn’t know about that if you read or watched the mainstream British media.’

Owen Jones gave short shrift to Starmer’s boasts and the emotion displayed at the end of his speech:

‘Do not feel sorry for this man. He was not a good man in the wrong job. He was not a man of public service and duty who was defeated by events. He was not a man of decency and integrity who wasn’t quite up to it.

‘This was a man who lied through his teeth to become leader of the Labour Party. He justified Israeli war crimes. Arrested opponents of genocide. Attacked pensioners, disabled people, migrants. All while pocketing freebies from the rich, crushed dissent and then threw others under the bus to save himself.

‘History will damn him.’

Richard Sanders, also for Double Down News, gave a superb summary of ‘What The Media Refuses To Tell You About Keir Starmer’s Resignation’. A crucial overlooked story in the ‘mainstream’ media, said Sanders, has been an account of the deceitful and arguably illegal Morgan McSweeney-led Labour Together project that essentially adopted Starmer as a frontman in an attempt to kill off the Labour left. Paul Holden’s vital book, ‘The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy’, documented this story in detail, as discussed in an earlier media alert.

As we noted at the time, Holden’s book was blanked by the British national media, along with Oborne’s book ‘Complicit’. As far as we are aware, neither book has ever been reviewed by a major national British newspaper: an extraordinary, but entirely predictable, fact.

Sanders noted that Labour Together projected themselves as a broad inclusive movement promising a bright future for Labour:

‘through intellectual renewal, through their ability to charm, and to persuade people that they were possessed of a brilliant, forward-thinking, radical policy platform’.

The reality, under McSweeney’s leadership, was rather different:

‘Labour Together simply lied. Posing as a consensus-seeking think tank, it secretly raised three-quarters of a million pounds from hedge funds and supporters of Israel; money it illegally failed to declare, enabling it to fly under the radar as it set about systematically undermining Jeremy Corbyn, above all through the weaponisation of antisemitism. In doing so, they delegitimised the Palestinian struggle and facilitated the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, helping lay the foundations for the British establishment’s disgraceful complicity in the slaughter of the people of Gaza.’

The British media are themselves deeply complicit in this slaughter. And that is why they have remained silent about Starmer’s role in the Gaza genocide.

DC

Note to our readers

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Media Lens is 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.

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We, of course, post on all kinds of emotive and controversial issues on social media: genocide in Gaza, the war of aggression on Iran, the weaponisation of anti-semitism to undermine democratic choice and defend Israel, and so on. Perhaps because we don’t post out of anger and hate, we don’t generally receive a lot of hostility in response.

Remarkably, the one issue that is all but guaranteed to generate snarling dismissals and abuse is climate change. Discussion of highly sophisticated and complex climate science has become a ‘populist’ cause among people raised on a diet of trashy tabloids and hard-right politics (Reform, Restore, MAGA). Their passionate conviction: climate scientists and ‘alarmist’ politicians are faking data to secure research grants and tyrannical control of society. With great, mocking confidence, scientists are accused of the most childish errors – like all ‘Bad Guys’ they are as stupid as they are corrupt.

On 26 May, the Met Office posted on X:

‘Today is now the hottest day in May on record with Heathrow and Kew Gardens provisionally reaching 35.0°C.

‘Until yesterday the highest temperature in May was 32.8°C, but we’ve now exceeded that record on consecutive days by a full two degrees Celsius.’

The Met Office emphasised the ‘full two degrees’ because in the last century records have usually been broken by tenths or hundredths of a degree. Despite what many people appear to believe, this spring was actually the warmest on record for England and Wales. The last three years are the top three warmest on record. Nine of the top ten warmest springs have been since 2007.

Paul Hudson, a BBC meteorologist and climate correspondent, posted:

‘EVERY weather station, both rural & urban, in Yorkshire & Lincolnshire, set a new May temperature record yesterday.

‘Unprecedented.

‘For the climate sceptics out there, the game is up. Go and bore someone else with your nonsense.’

Nahel Belgherze, who focuses on extreme weather events worldwide, commented over a graph:

‘Hard to believe I’m even writing this.

‘Meteorological summer hasn’t even begun, yet Paris, France has already logged more days above 32°C (89.6°F) than its annual average.’

Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV (Tampa Bay), posted a map of shattered temperature records in France that also contained this comment:

‘A totally HISTORICAL day.

‘334 monthly records were SIMULTANEOUSLY broken this afternoon in France. Never in the history of climatology have so many records fallen all at once.’

Nevertheless, in response to the latest heatwaves, the BBC featured the following responses from two male beachgoers:

‘I just love it, just bring it on! More, more…! If this is what global warming means, don’t want the other stuff, but lovely temperatures like this is good.’

The second interviewee agreed:

‘Gotta make the most of the sunshine. You can’t complain about it; it’s not here for long enough, is it? So, yeah, make the most of the sunshine; come down by the sea and enjoy it.’

In 2022, Saffron O’Neill, Professor in Geography at the University of Exeter, led a study which investigated the visual reporting of heatwaves over the summer of 2019 in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France. The conclusion:

‘Many visuals were positively valenced (in contrast to article texts), framing heatwaves as “fun in the sun”. The most prevalent type of images in all countries were photographs of people having fun in or by water. When images did depict the danger of heat extremes, people were largely absent.’

Professor Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University responded to an article on the BBC website:

‘This article says climate change is “believed to have played a role” in the UK’s extreme heat this week.

‘As a climate scientist, let me fact-check that.

‘First, climate change is not a religion. No belief is required. It is about evidence.

‘And the evidence has been crystal clear for more than two decades: climate change is making heat waves hotter, longer, more frequent and more dangerous.

‘In fact, science has advanced far beyond saying climate change merely “played a role.” Today, we can quantify how much more likely and how much hotter climate change made a specific event.’

Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, was more direct:

‘”Climate change is believed to have played a role in such hot spells as this”

‘FFS BBCNews

‘Belief has nothing to do with it. This is hard, scientific, fact

‘When will you get this right?’

Carbon Brief, a UK-based website specialising in the science and policy of climate change, found that despite blanket news coverage of the record heat in media outlets across western Europe, there has been ‘relatively little commentary from their opinion pages’:

‘No major UK newspapers have published editorials about the heat and there has been no space dedicated to it in the comment sections of the largest French and Spanish newspapers.

‘One exception in UK media was the Daily Mail’s climate-sceptic columnist Richard Littlejohn writing an article mocking heat-safety measures and warnings issued by the Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).’

Fiddling The Figures

Alas, many social media posters were unimpressed by claims of record temperatures. Gregory Davis offered us some unsolicited advice on X:

‘Remove your lens from your asshole.’

Christopher Talbot questioned the source of the measurements:

‘Are those measurements from real stations or your imaginary ones?’

This is a popular theme – for obscure, nefarious reasons, temperature readings are distorted to inflate the results. Thus, Paul Dakers, ‘Ex Army and an ex District Councillor’, explained in his reply to Talbot:

‘They measure them at the end of airport runways apparently – not surprisingly it’s quite warm there with all the heat coming out of the plane engines, supposedly it helps the planes fly or something’

Scientists are just that corrupt, or stupid, or both. Someone called Lady Windermere concurred:

‘They use ground temperatures near tarmac and enclosed buildings to get the most out of their scam stats’

Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, offered a correction:

‘The UK’s hottest ever May Day was recorded at Kew Gardens. Next to plants. Does anybody still take this climate change denial seriously?’

An incredulous tweeter saw the absurdity:

‘It’s a green house’

To be honest, like many people, we didn’t know where the weather station is located in Kew Gardens, and would likely not have had the time or inclination to find out in answering one of the endless flood of denier claims. So, we asked AI. From its cogent answer, linked to highly credible sources that we could easily check, we wrote this response:

‘The measuring station is situated in the middle of a wide, open lawn. It’s deliberately sited far enough away from walls, concrete paths and greenhouses to ensure they don’t inflate the readings.’

It took us a couple of minutes, and the poster had no answer. We understand that, like much technology, AI is a double-edged sword consuming yet more energy and posing huge potential risks for society. Last year, global datacentres used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world. Perhaps unwittingly, anyone accessing Google searches and social media like X, Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or shopping online, is using AI. The same is true of anyone using email spam filters, or playlist curating on Spotify and Netflix, and so on. If much of this use of AI involves a grotesque and unjustifiable waste of energy, the one justifiable use of this new technology, we would argue, is asking simple text questions to challenge and debunk climate denier propaganda. It is a tool that changes the balance of power against the propagandists – the result is a rout, an intellectual turkey shoot. Given that it is far less energy intensive, and far more vital, than standard online habits like streaming video and video conferencing – which many of us indulge without a thought – then perhaps this is one of the few uses of AI that is acceptable.

What is so staggering about the frequency of scepticism about UK temperature measurements is that records are, of course, constantly being shattered all around the world. In January, Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation, indicated the scale of this:

‘We conclude that 2025 was the third warmest year on Earth since 1850. It is exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. This period, since 1850, is the time when sufficient direct measurements from thermometers exist to create a purely instrumental estimate of changes in global mean temperature. Berkeley Earth’s analysis combines 23 million monthly-average thermometer measurements from 57,685 weather stations with ~500 million instantaneous ocean temperature observations collected by ships and buoys.

‘The last 11 years have included all 11 of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record, with the last 3 years including all of the top 3 warmest.’ (Our emphasis)

Are these 23 million measurements from 57,685 weather stations all being faked in pursuit of some dark Orwellian agenda? The idea is simply pathological.

Of course, many of the deniers popping up on social media are fossil fuel industry ‘astroturf’ (propaganda operations made to look like a genuine, grassroots movement). In 2020, a major study from Brown University analysed millions of tweets. They found that bots were responsible for roughly 25 per cent of all tweets about climate change. On days with big climate announcements, bot activity surged even higher, promoting denialist talking points and generating the illusion of a massive, angry public consensus against climate action. On the other hand, we suspect a substantial portion of posters are just people who have been misled by this propaganda effort.

Back on X, Ken H. Lane dismissed the idea that humans could have increased the level of atmospheric CO2 by 50 percent. In fact, for roughly 10,000 years leading up to the mid-18th century, the Earth’s pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 baseline was stable at around 280 ppm. The current level is 430 ppm, an increase of 53 per cent. Lane wrote:

‘Pretty hard to increase atmospheric CO2 by 50% when human CO2 production is miniscule compared to the natural carbon cycle that has been maintaining atmospheric CO2 at 0.04% of all the atmospheric gases.’

It takes mere seconds to run that claim through AI: just copy and paste, and ask, ‘Is this true?’. We studied the answer, read the linked sources, and quickly posted this response:

‘The argument assumes that because natural CO2 emissions are large, human emissions are too small to matter. Think of the natural carbon cycle like a business bank account:

‘Natural Cycle: Every month, the business automatically deposits £100,000 and automatically withdraws £100,000. The net change is zero. The account balance stays perfectly steady.

‘The Human Input: Now, a human comes along and deposits an extra £4,000 every single month, but never withdraws anything.

‘Even though £4,000 is small compared to the £100,000 flowing through the account, it has nowhere to go. Over time, that £4,000 monthly surplus accumulates. After a few years, the account balance will skyrocket.

‘That is exactly what humans are doing to the atmosphere.’

Ian Guthrie wrote:

‘Media lens et al probably support politically motivated high energy prices that contribute to winter deaths which are 4 X higher at least.

‘Not saying you should ignore heat deaths but saving summer deaths by killing more in winter seems counterproductive.’

In fact, there is compelling evidence that the steep rise in heat-related deaths due to global warming will far exceed any drop related to cold, resulting in a net increase in mortality across Europe.

In India, the city of Banda in Uttar Pradesh and regions in Rajasthan officially recorded peaks of 48.2°C last month, making them some of the hottest places on Earth. For weeks, maximum temperatures ranging between 45°C and 46°C struck a huge portion of the country. Weather data recently showed that 95 to 98 of the world’s 100 hottest cities were located simultaneously inside India. As a result, power grids have collapsed under record demands from air conditioning. Hospitals have reported a massive influx of patients suffering from severe dehydration, heat exhaustion, and kidney-related complications.

Climate researcher Dr. Genevieve Guenther, Founding Director of End Climate Silence, posted a link to a new study, ‘Estimating heatwave-induced excess mortality in India’s districts’ with a quote:

‘We estimate that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally; a five-day heatwave causes nearly 30,000.’

You may not know it, you may not believe it, but the reality is that a ruthless propaganda war is being waged against the survival of human civilisation in the name of short-term greed at any cost. It is that simple, that irrational. Even though truth, science and sanity are on our side, human civilisation is currently losing the war. One of the key reasons for our loss is that many of us are going down without a fight. In a time when it is easier than ever to check and debunk climate denier claims, that must change.

DE

If any friendly academics or others are able to help us access the ProQuest or Nexis media database, please email us: editor@medialens.org

Media Lens is 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.

David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in March 2027.

Any aliens who have been monitoring radio and television transmissions streaming outwards into space from Planet Earth over the past few decades will likely be intrigued, bemused or simply horrified at humanity’s headlong drive towards climate catastrophe. No matter the urgent warnings from climate scientists, the power of billionaires, financial speculators and corporations maintains a death-like grip on governments around the world. Amid the occasional flurry of big business greenwashing and government rhetoric about ‘climate protection’ and ‘eco-friendly’ initiatives, billions of people are being held hostage by the forces that are dragging everyone to the edge of the climate abyss.

New warnings about climate change do, of course, occasionally appear in the press. But rarely, if ever, are there prominent and sustained front-page headlines and news-leading television coverage. Rarer still are impassioned editorials, high-profile presenters and commentators demanding the substantive, radical changes that are needed to avoid the most damaging predicted impacts of business as usual.

Earlier this month, the Royal Albert Hall hosted a 100^th birthday party for naturalist David Attenborough, Britain’s most beloved broadcaster. Celebrities showered him with love and praise: Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Olivia Colman, Emily Eavis, Chris Martin, Ben Fogle, Raye, Kate Winslet. And Paddington Bear. Attenborough sat in the royal box, alongside Prince William. King Charles delivered a handwritten message from Balmoral Castle via a ‘cavalcade of creature couriers’, including eagles, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, otters, ducks, a fox and deer, thanks to the wonders of CGI. All very nice; all very Disneyfied.

For many years now, Attenborough has been warning about the dangers of mass consumption, pollution, worldwide species loss and global warming. These subjects are clearly of great concern to him, although he started ringing the alarm bell very late.

But the evening gave a wide berth to such uncomfortable topics. ‘Life on Earth’? The climate crisis must be happening on a different planet entirely.

As Jonathan Liew, a Guardian sports journalist and columnist, pointed out:

‘This is, of course, the Attenborough with which our public discourse is most comfortable: depoliticised, universally adored, a man-sized Paddington Bear fit only for our veneration. Who teaches us about tree frogs and seal cubs and stick insects and asks for nothing in return.’

Of course, what Liew called ‘public discourse’ is the tightly constrained media space permitted by state and corporate power.

Liew continued:

‘And perhaps there are more difficult questions to negotiate here: the extent to which he has been a force for the meaningful and revolutionary change he seeks, and the extent to which his broad, inoffensive appeal has been more hindrance than help, allowing the powerful to feign concern for the planet while shirking the tough and bloody compromises required to secure it.’

To his credit, Attenborough has been eloquent and impassioned in recent years about the climate crisis. He addressed the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, saying that:

‘We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking. This story is one of inequality, as well as instability. Today, those who’ve done the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit. Ultimately, all of us will feel the impact, some of which are now unavoidable.’

But, even five years on, as the climate crisis worsens, the topic was deemed unmentionable by the organisers of Attenborough’s 100^th birthday party.

‘Hothouse Earth’ And Collapsing Currents

In February, a new scientific report warned that runaway global warming is closer than had previously been thought. We are heading for the ‘point of no return’ after which we would be locked into a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’. Climate ‘tipping points’ would be triggered, producing rapid heating, which would lead to a domino effect of yet more tipping points and feedback loops. These include the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, drastic dieback of the Amazon rainforest and the weakening, and possible shutdown, of the Atlantic ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The scientists stated that:

‘Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia.’

The world has already experienced a global average temperature rise of over 1.3C since pre-industrial times and is likely to surpass the Paris Agreement ‘limit’ of long-term average heating of 1.5C in the next few years. Current government and business policies are pushing us towards 2-3C of global warming, if not more, by 2100.

But, if trigger points are breached and runaway global warming occurs, we are talking about much higher temperature rises, perhaps 10C or more. This would mean almost unimaginable catastrophic effects on the climate system, global agriculture and societal infrastructure; not to mention the extinction of humans. Scientists have warned that even a rise of 3-4C means that ‘the economy and society will cease to function as we know it’.

Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, put things in grim perspective via X:

‘We are already locked-in to a return to Pliocene [around 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago] conditions (3C hotter and (eventually) ~ 20m sea-level rise)

‘Keep going as we are, and hotter Miocene [5.3 to 23 million years ago] conditions will result

‘Beyond this a return to early Eocene [around 48 to 56 million years ago] hothouse beckons – and potential oblivion’

During the Eocene, the global average temperature was well over 10C higher than present. Oblivion would hit humanity long before such a temperature rise occurred.

Earlier this month, yet another deeply disturbing scientific study revealed that the risk of AMOC reaching a tipping point by 2100, after which its shutdown would be inevitable, is as high as 50 per cent. Previously, this was considered ‘a low likelihood event’ of around five per cent. But even this should be held in perspective. How many of us would board a plane knowing that there was a five per cent chance that it would crash?

AMOC, of which the Gulf Stream is the best-known component, is a vital carrier of warm water from the tropics to high latitudes in the North Atlantic, returning cold water southwards. It is a primary source of heat for western and northern Europe, leading to the temperate climate here. AMOC connects with other ocean current systems in a global network that transports heat, water, nutrients and carbon around the planet. Any disturbance to AMOC, far less its collapse, would have devastating global consequences for climate, agriculture, infrastructure and even for the habitability of Earth.

Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who has studied AMOC for 35 years, said:

‘This is an important and very concerning result. It shows that the “pessimistic” models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are, unfortunately, the realistic ones, in that they agree better with observational data.’

He added:

‘I now am increasingly worried that we may well pass that AMOC shutdown tipping point, where it becomes inevitable, in the middle of this century, which is quite close.’

To emphasise: the tipping point may be much earlier than 2100; it could happen by 2050, or even sooner. The vital point here is that scientists increasingly agree that the ‘safe window’ to stabilise the current by halting emissions is closing far faster than previously thought. And the public likely does not even realise it.

Rahmstorf had previously said that a collapse must be avoided ‘at all costs’. Now he added:

‘I argued this when we thought the chance of an AMOC shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the AMOC switched to a different state.’

In an English-language video for the German DW news channel, Rahmstorf explained the importance of AMOC for European and global climate, and the significance of the latest alarming results. He warned that we should expect more climate extremes in heat, cold, drought, floods and storms.

If and when the AMOC collapses, the impact on agriculture in the northern hemisphere will be devastating. The drop in harvest yields for key crops could be as high as 50 per cent. Mass starvation is a very real possibility.

Climate Shocks

A few days after the disturbing new AMOC report came out, Guardian columnist George Monbiot noted:

‘Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.’

Prior to Monbiot’s column in the Guardian, the paper had published a piece on the report by Damian Carrington, its environment editor. Two other UK national papers covered the study: the Daily Mail and the Independent. Channel 4 News covered the topic in a news broadcast. Amazingly, that was about it for the entirety of the establishment media. The fact that deeply disturbing findings about a likely collapse of a vital component of the climate system were not given wider, extensive and sustained coverage is a devastating indictment of ‘mainstream’ journalism.

Even worse, when the report came out, the BBC preferred to push Reform-style propaganda about ‘migrants making false claims to stay in UK’. This was given prominent placing on the front page of the BBC News website. We could not find a single report on the BBC News website (although there was an article about it in the BBC Science Focus Magazine). That is simply appalling, particularly for a supposed ‘public service’ national broadcaster.

Scientists are warning, as loudly as they possibly can, that the present economic system of rampant capitalism is destroying the very life-support systems that made Planet Earth a habitable environment for humans to evolve and flourish.

Professor Bill McGuire, whose new book, ‘The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis’, is published this month, writes:

‘In our current predicament, [global warming] is set to bring about nasty and unwanted shocks and surprises, which are the last things we need right now, and the signs are already there. The ramped-up heat is acting to accelerate melting of the polar sea ice and land-based ice sheets, increase methane degassing from northern hemisphere permafrost and significantly slow the AMOC. Via positive feedback loops and the crossing of tipping points, such domino effects can and do magnify abrupt climate change and its ramifications.’ (Bill McGuire, ‘The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis’, HarperNorth, 2026, pp. 102-103)

McGuire also points to the devastating effects of climate change on the human body. It is not just rising temperatures that should concern us, he says, but the lethal combination of heat and humidity:

‘If you can’t sweat, you die – and quickly. A combination of heat and humidity is measured on what’s called a wet-bulb thermometer, which provides a far better estimate of the heat we actually feel than a normal, dry-bulb instrument. The critical value on a wet-bulb thermometer is 35°C, because at this level of heat and humidity the human body cannot lose heat by sweating as the surrounding air is already saturated with water. Anyone exposed to such conditions, super-fit or not, resting by the pool in the shade or working in the fields, will start to experience their internal body temperature climbing rapidly, ultimately leading to organ failure and death in 6 hours or so.’

(Ibid., p. 189)

He adds:

‘All of the threats and problems of the modern world will be multiplied and magnified, from physical and mental health to poverty and inequality, to mass migration, civil strife, conflict and war. Global heating is not only tearing apart our climate but shattering the social and economic constructs that keep our world functioning, albeit in a sort of mad-cap way, and stop everything falling apart.’

(Ibid., p. 195)

McGuire relates that he knows from conversations with fellow scientists that:

‘many feel desperately sad and frustrated about where our world is headed and the bleak future we are bequeathing our children and their children, and I am no different. Knowing what I know, it is no longer possible to see my kids without wondering just what incarnation of hell they will have to face in later life.’

(Ibid., p. 199)

Look at the daily, hour-by-hour obsessing over the endless maneuvering within the Labour government; every single statement from ministers and their allies scrutinised by the Westminster bubble of political correspondents.

Imagine that, instead of focusing on short-term melodramas, leading news organisations rigorously probed politicians, day in and day out, about the climate crisis.

Imagine that news editors and journalists relentlessly challenged the government about current policies that are bringing us closer to the brink of climate chaos.

Imagine that reporters investigated and exposed the deep reluctance and state-corporate obstacles, including the establishment media, that are blocking alternatives to climate Armageddon.

Imagine, in other words, that we had a sane media system. That could just mean the difference between human survival and human erasure.

DC

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