David Edwards (born 1962) is a British media campaigner who is co-editor of the
Media Lens website with
David Cromwell. Edwards specialises in the analysis of mainstream, or
corporate,
mass media, which are normally considered impartial or liberal, an interpretation both men believe is disputable.
Born in
Maidstone,
Kent, Edwards was raised in the village of Bearsted, and spent summers in Sweden, his mother's country of origin. He sees this as influencing his attitudes to modern living.
[Derrick Jensen & David Edward]
"Nothing To Lose But Our Illusions: an interview with David Edwards"
''The Sun'' magazine (United States), June 2000, as reprinted on the Media Lens website, 22 June 2000. Jensen reprinted this interview in the book
''How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization''
Oakland: PM Press, 2008, p.11-36. Interview conducted by telephone, 11 January 2000 After graduating from
Leicester University with a Politics degree he worked in
sales and
marketing management for several large corporations, but became profoundly dissatisfied with the corporate working environment. According to Edwards, while working at
British Telecom
BT Group plc (trade name, trading as BT and formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is th ...
in the late 1980s, his employment there became untenable after he attempted to set up a "green initiatives" project.
In 1991, feeling he was "not fully alive", he left the business world completely to begin his writing career, taking the advice of
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the ...
, the American
mythologist, to "follow your bliss", Edwards earned most of his income at this time by
teaching English as a foreign language.
After his early articles were published on
human rights and
environmental issues by independent magazines and journals (such as ''
Z Magazine''), Edwards wrote his first book, ''Free to be Human'', (Green Books, 1995), which later appeared in the United States as ''Burning All Illusions: a Guide to Personal and Political Freedom'' (
South End Press
South End Press was a non-profit book publisher run on a model of participatory economics. It was founded in 1977 by Michael Albert, Lydia Sargent, Juliet Schor, among others, in Boston's South End. It published books written by political activi ...
, 1996). It relies on
Edward S. Herman and
Noam Chomsky's
propaganda model, as well as on the writings of
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the U ...
. Edwards advanced the thesis that corporate structural factors conspire to make the mass media give a picture of the world that goes beyond the political indoctrination postulated by Herman and Chomsky, to encompass almost all aspects of personal life, by constantly promoting the values of blind
consumerism.
Edwards has also drawn on his practice of
Buddhism in his writings. Edwards, writing for the New York-based ''
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review'' in 2005, commented: "The antidotes to systemic greed, I am convinced, are political movements motivated by unconditional compassion for suffering. This compassion needs to be rooted in genuinely profound and authentic sources—the kind provided today by the best Buddhist teachers and organisations."
Edwards was
remote work
Remote work, also called work from home (WFH), work from anywhere, telework, remote job, mobile work, and distance work is an employment arrangement in which employees do not commute to a central place of work, such as an office building, ware ...
ing in Bournemouth for the
International Society for Ecology and Culture at the time he first met
David Cromwell. Together with Cromwell, Edwards co-founded in 2001 (and remains a co-editor of)
Media Lens, a
website correcting what they perceive as bias in the British "corporate media". The Media Lens' editors have collaborated on two books, ''
Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media''
(2006) and ''Newspeak in the 21st Century'' (2009).
Bibliography
* Edwards, David (1998) ''The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism'', Dartington: Green Books
* Edwards, David (2000) ''Free to Be Human: Intellectual Self-defence in an Age of Illusions'', Dartington: Green Books (published in America as ''Burning all Illusions'')
* Edwards, David (2005) ''Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media'', London: Pluto Press
* Edwards, David (2009) ''Newspeak in the 21st Century'', London: Pluto Press
* Edwards, David (2010) "Normalising the unthinkable: The media's role in mass killing", in ''Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution'', ed. Richard Lance Keeble, John Tulloch, Florian Zollman, New York: Peter Lang
Notes
External links
David Edwards author page at Zcomm An earlier version has more details
Author page from Z Space(retrieved by the Internet Archive, Wayback Machine, 15 April 2013)
Weblog on Media Lens
{{DEFAULTSORT:Edwards, David
1962 births
Living people
Alumni of the University of Leicester
British Telecom people
British male journalists
People from Maidstone
Gandhi International Peace Award recipients