David Cromwell

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Dr. David Cromwell (born 1962 in Glasgow) is a Scottish oceanographer, writer and activist. He is the author of Private Planet (Charlbury: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 2001) and of numerous articles published in several newspapers and magazines. Cromwell is currently a monthly ZNet commentator and co-editor of MediaLens.

Cromwell spent most of his formative years in Barrhead and Cumbernauld. He graduated in natural philosophy [physics] and astronomy from the University of Glasgow. After a PhD in solar physics he moved to the United States in 1988 to pursue a year-long postdoc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Returning to Europe, he joined Shell International in 1989 as an exploration geophysicist. After five months of training in geology, geophysics, and "management skills", Cromwell was posted to Shell's exploration and production company in Assen in the north of The Netherlands, living in the university town of Groningen. He left Shell in 1993 to take up his present research position in the institution now known as the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK.

Cromwell's articles and letters on human rights, the environment and grassroots activism have appeared in newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Independent, Financial Times, The Scotsman, The Herald and Z Magazine. In 2001, he co-founded Media Lens with David Edwards (author of Free To Be Human and The Compassionate Revolution) and webmaster Phil Chandler, later succeeded by Oliver Maw. Media Lens is a small independent watchdog which monitors the broadcast and the print media in the UK, particularly the "liberal" media, and attempts to show evidence of bias, distortions and omissions on such issues as climate change, Iraq and the "war on terror". Free e-mailed media alerts urge subscribers to write to journalists and editors to challenge their arguments.

The BBC former political editor Andrew Marr has criticized Media Lens for "brutally selective quotation" and for being "pernicious and anti-journalistic." Media Lens responded to Marr's charges in a media alert about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Cromwell has been derided as an "ignoramus" by the writer Oliver Kamm in an exchange about the Hiroshima bombing. In this exchange, Kamm argues that the US historian, Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States has "misrepresented the state of scholarly research" on the dropping of the atomic bomb in World War II.

Cromwell and Edwards have written a book, titled Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media, published by Pluto Books in 2006. The authors argue, with reference to numerous examples from press and broadcasting, that the liberal media enable state-corporate power to pursue destructive aims at home and abroad. It contains details of debates with editors and journalists from the BBC, The Guardian, ITN, Channel 4, The Independent and others.