Letter: As biased as all the others

IN HER discussion of media bias, Anne McElvoy is guilty of the same self-deception and intellectual laziness that she deplores in other commentators ("A few childish questions can destroy bias", 13 December). It is nonsense to suggest that any bias is merely a "sharp reflection of the public mood at any given time". Ms McElvoy fails to see that the mass media act as a filter which distorts the truth about corporate consumerism. They suppress information which if it entered the public arena would bring our business and political leaders to account for human rights and environmental abuses carried out in our name around the world.

Why do our media ignore the UN condemnation of the Western-supported Indonesian invasion of East Timor, while sweeping over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi people during and since the Gulf war? Why are the media silent on the corporate imperative of profit before people, and the greed for unsustainable economic growth which leads to global apartheid between rich and poor, environmental degradation, and the pumping of destabilising quantities of climate-changing gases into our atmosphere?

Journalists such as Ms McElvoy may be intelligent, lucid and rational, but only within parameters that preclude a deeper understanding of what is really happening in the world.

DAVID CROMWELL

Southampton