[12] George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens was "belittling the acts of genocide" in their defence of Edward S. Herman, who had questioned the number of deaths in the Srebrenica massacre.

[18][19] Edwards has also cited Erich Fromm, who thought "a society that subordinates people and planet to profit is inherently insane and toxic",[14] and his practice of Buddhism as influences.

They believe that mainstream journalists gradually absorb an unquestioning corporate mindset as their careers progress, becoming unwilling to question their occupations or governments claims, but not consciously lying.

"[28] In Cromwell and Edwards' opinion, western government actions have followed an "historical pattern of deception" going back several centuries,[29] and "the corporate media is the source of some of the greatest, most lethal illusions of our age".

[30] According to Cromwell and Edwards, the centre-left wing of the mainstream media are gatekeepers "of acceptable debate from a left or Green perspective, 'thus far and no further'"[31] and that dissenting views have difficulty gaining attention in a corporate system.

[5][7] They have contrasted positive comments the mainstream media make about western leaders, with the epithets used to describe politicians such as Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's former President.

"[39] In June 2006, Peter Beaumont wrote in The Observer that Media Lens "insist that the only acceptable version of the truth is theirs alone and that everybody else should march to the same step", and described them as "controlling Politburo lefties".

[41] In his 2007 book The Triumph of the Political Class, journalist Peter Oborne wrote that while researching media coverage of the Iraq war, he had found the site "extremely useful".

[44]In January 2012, The Guardian's Michael White, accused Media Lens of suggesting the newspaper's two most left-wing writers, Milne and George Monbiot "trim their sails and pull their punches to accommodate their paymasters".

[47] In February 2012, the philosopher Rupert Read criticised Media Lens' use of Michel Chossudovsky and articles by Robert Dreyfuss and Aisling Byrne as sources for the situation in Syria.

[48][49] In May 2014, Elliot Murphy wrote in ZNet that Media Lens "have carefully exposed the shortcomings and lies of the press" and "their Alerts are invariably well researched, well argued, and often entertaining".

[50] In response to Ditum, Edwards wrote: "Cooper’s voting record of course has grave implications for the near-certainty of future wars waged on more states around the world.

[51] David Wearing, writing in openDemocracy in September 2015, commented that while the group has "a vocal, dedicated following", it also has "a long record of alienating potential allies with their purity tests and aggressive oversimplifications".

[55] Journalist James Ball responded that writers should try the mainstream first to gain attention for their work as "virtually all of the best journalism comes out of 'corporate' or 'mainstream' media", such as the parliamentary expenses scandal, "the exposure of offshore leaks", "Iraq War Logs", "Libor rigging", and "dozens of other major pieces of accountability stories".

[57] A 30 April 2003 Media Lens database search, covering the period leading up to and including the invasion of Iraq found that, of the 5,767 articles published by The Guardian and its sister paper The Observer, only twelve made any mention of Scott Ritter.

[60] After referring to the "mountain of evidence" assembled by Cromwell and Edwards for their argument, John Jewell wrote for The Conversation website: "It must be remembered that the press was not completely united in its support for Blair" pointing to the opposition of the Daily Mirror to the invasion of Iraq as an example.

[61] Nick Robinson in Live From Downing Street (2012), refers to an exchange between Media Lens and then Head of BBC News Richard Sambrook in late 2002 a few months before the invasion of Iraq:"[W]e believe you are a sincere and well-intentioned person ... but you are at the heart of a system of lethal, institutionalised deception.

[63] They cited a rhetorical question posed by BBC correspondent Bridget Kendall in 2006, about whether the Iraq war was "justified" or a "disastrous miscalculation" as a demonstration of personal bias, and not meeting the requirement for reporting to be impartial.

[64] Media Lens cited comments made by Andrew Marr in 2003, while he was the BBC's political editor, in support of their argument that journalists regularly present inflated assessments of the accomplishments of western politicians.

Following criticism of the article by Media Lens, Paulos acknowledged he had been wrong to use a "largely baseless personal assessment", to call into question the findings of The Lancet study.

[68][67][69] In 2005, Media Lens challenged The Independent's senior leader writer on foreign affairs, Mary Dejevsky, to explain why an editorial in the paper said the results of the 2004 Lancet study were obtained "by extrapolating from a small sample" and that "[w]hile never completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted".

Her main point "was less based on my impression than on the fact that this technique exposed the authors to the criticisms/dismissal that the govt duly made, and they had little to counter those criticisms with, bar the defence that their methods were standard for those sort of surveys".

[67] Reviewing Media Lens' engagement with press coverage of The Lancet study, Arvind Sivaramakrishna drew a similar conclusion stating, "Political correspondents are clearly ignorant of sampling frames and techniques, confidence limits, significance levels, likelihood estimators, and so on.

It described the criticism of Media Lens and others as "inaccurate and exaggerated, personal, offensive, and part of a concerted campaign to undermine IBC's reputation among those who use our data".

Ian Mayes, then the readers' editor of The Guardian, wrote on 12 December 2005 that he and Brockes had received "several hundred" emails from Media Lens followers, who were protesting about Chomsky’s treatment.

Soon after, Kamm wrote in his blog for The Times newspaper that the article Media Lens had removed repeated false claims about Serb-run detention camps in Bosnia which had led in 2000 to a successful libel action brought against LM magazine (originally Living Marxism) by ITN.

[90] In June 2011, George Monbiot wrote that Media Lens "maintained that Herman and Peterson were 'perfectly entitled' to talk down the numbers killed at Srebrenica".

[49] Rupert Read, an academic and Green Party politician said that Media Lens tends to talk up the numbers of victims of western actions but minimise those of governments in conflict with the west, such as those of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Slobodan Milošević.

"[94][95] Tribune magazine published an article by Howson about the exchange in which he asked why Media Lens had not sought his "evidence for alleging that Merkel and Lagarde have really truly desecrated corpses, as depicted in my cartoon".

[96] In June 2017, the German newspaper Die Welt published an article by Seymour Hersh in which he said the attack by the Syrian government at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 did not involve sarin and that US intelligence knew this.