{"id":2616,"date":"2017-06-01T09:28:20","date_gmt":"2017-06-01T07:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2616"},"modified":"2017-06-01T20:50:38","modified_gmt":"2017-06-01T18:50:38","slug":"time-to-confront-the-medias-anti-corbyn-bias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2017-06-01\/time-to-confront-the-medias-anti-corbyn-bias\/","title":{"rendered":"Time to confront the media’s anti-Corbyn bias"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those journalists who should have been behind Corbyn from the start \u2013 who could have been among his few allies as he battled the corporate media for nearly two years as Labour leader \u2013 are now starting to eat humble pie. Polls suggest that Corbyn may be gradually turning the election around, to the point where\u00a0the latest poll, published in the Times, indicates that Britain could be heading for a hung parliament.<\/p>\n

No one is surprised that the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Times have been relentless in their hatchet jobs on Corbyn. But it has been disconcerting for the left that the Guardian and BBC never gave him a chance either. He was in their gun-sights from day one.<\/p>\n

Owen Jones, a Labour stalwart and Guardian columnist, should have been Corbyn\u2019s number one ally in the press. And yet he used the\u00a0invaluable space in\u00a0his columns not to challenge the media misrepresentations, but to reinforce them. He engaged in endless and morose navel-gazing, contemplating a Labour rout.<\/p>\n

In an Evening Standard interview<\/a> in February, he imparted the following wisdom: \u201cThings change but only if people will it to be.\u201d But then almost immediately ignored his own advice, saying that if another Labour leadership election were held: \u201cI\u2019d find it hard to vote for Corbyn.\u201d<\/p>\n

In eary May, Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian\u2019s most senior columnist, wrote a commentary entitled<\/a>: \u201cNo more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown.” In fact, though he did not mention it, he had been making that very same argument for the previous\u00a0two years.<\/p>\n

But as Corbyn has begun chipping away at Theresa May\u2019s lead \u2013 and equally significantly, forced the media to widen the public debate into political territory it has avoided for nearly four decades \u2013 Freedland finally admitted this week, very reluctantly, that he and others may have misjudged the Labour leader.<\/p>\n

Freedland’s\u00a0reassessment, however painfully made, was\u00a0still an evasion. He and\u00a0Jones continue to avoid\u00a0facing up to the central problem of British politics \u2013 and must do, because they\u00a0are at its\u00a0very heart.<\/p>\n

The lesson of Corbyn\u2019s much-improved polling, according to Freedland, is this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If May is returned with a Commons presence far below the expectations of even a month ago, it will suggest that one more bit of conventional wisdom needs to be retired along with all the rest. It will prove that campaigns matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But that is not the real lesson. The turnaround in Labour\u2019s fortunes is not chiefly about the party getting its act together, staying on-message and communicating better with the media. Rather, it is that the formal requirements of an election campaign \u2013 equal coverage, reporting the speeches of candidates, leaders’ debates \u2013 have made it much harder for the media, especially the broadcasters, to entirely obscure Corbyn\u2019s winning qualities. His honesty, warmth and humanity eclipse May’s stiff, evasive and charmless demeanour.<\/p>\n

It was precisely those qualities in Corbyn that proved so attractive to voters in the Labour leadership elections. He\u00a0inspires a rare passion for politics when he is heard. That is why he is the only politician filling stadiums. That is why the Labour party now has hundreds of thousands of members, making it the largest party in Europe. That is why young people have been registering for\u00a0the election in record numbers.<\/p>\n

The demographic breakdown of support for\u00a0Corbyn and May is largely generational. Corbyn enjoys a huge lead among young people, while May can rely on overwhelming backing from those aged over-65.<\/p>\n

It may be comforting to imagine this is simply the natural order of things. Radicalism is the preserve of those starting out in life, while old age encourages caution and conservatism. This\u00a0may be one factor in explaining the generational divide, but it\u00a0clearly will\u00a0not suffice. In much of the post-Thatcher era, the young have proved to be even more conservative than their parents.<\/p>\n

The reason for the Corbyn-May split has to be found elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The fact is that the young are least likely to trust the traditional, corporate media, and most likely to seek out information from alternative sources and social media, which have been\u00a0fairer to Corbyn. Youtube clips of Corbyn’s speeches, for example, are one way to\u00a0bypass the corporate media.<\/p>\n

Conversely, elderly voters are mostly\u00a0still relying on the BBC, Sky and the Daily Mail for the bulk of their information about politics. The over-65s have little sense of who Corbyn is apart from what they are told by a media deeply wedded to the current neoliberal order he is threatening to disrupt.<\/p>\n

But neither Freedland nor Jones has been prepared to admit that all of the corporate media \u2013 not just their trusted scapegoat of the \u201crightwing press\u201d \u2013 have been to blame for preventing Corbyn getting a fair hearing. It is an admission they cannot make because it would expose their own complicity in a media system designed to advance the interests of corporate power over people power, oligarchy over democracy.<\/p>\n

A desire to avoid facing this simple truth has led to some quite preposterously contorted reasoning by Freedland. In a commentary<\/a> before his recent reappraisal of Corbyn, he dismissed\u00a0suggestions that the media had played any significant\u00a0role in\u00a0the Labour leader’s\u00a0troubles. Freedland cited two focus groups he had witnessed. It is worth quoting the section at length to understand quite how ridiculous\u00a0his\u00a0logic is.<\/p>\n

With no steer from the moderator, who remained studiedly neutral, they described Jeremy Corbyn as a \u201cdope\u201d, \u201cliving in the past\u201d, \u201ca joke\u201d, as \u201clooking as if he knows less about it than I do\u201d. One woman admired Corbyn\u2019s sincerity; one man thought his intentions were good. But she reckoned he lacked \u201cthe qualities to be our leader\u201d; and he believed Corbyn was simply too \u201csoft\u201d. \u2026<\/p>\n

Corbyn\u2019s defenders will blame the media, but what was striking about these groups was that few of the participants ever bought a paper and they seldom watched a TV bulletin. Corbynites may try to blame disloyal MPs, but, whatever its impact elsewhere, none of that Westminster stuff had impinged on either of these two groups, who couldn\u2019t name a single politician besides May, Corbyn and Boris Johnson. They had formed their own, perhaps instinctive, view.<\/p>\n

Blaming others won\u2019t do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How do people form an \u201cinstinctive view\u201d on political matters, if they never read a paper, never watch TV and never attend a political rally? Through the ethers?<\/p>\n

The answer should be\u00a0obvious. They can do so only through conversations with, or\u00a0impressions gained from, family, friends, acquaintances and work colleagues who do watch TV and read papers. Given that it is impossible for most voters to see Corbyn in the flesh, most are either getting their information and opinions directly mediated for them by\u00a0the media, or receiving the\u00a0mediated information second-hand, from people\u00a0they know who have been\u00a0influenced by the media.<\/p>\n

Freedland\u2019s assumption that it is possible for voters to form a view instinctively that Corbyn is a \u201cdope\u201d \u2013 the view of him that has been uniformly\u00a0cultivated\u00a0by the media \u2013 is laughable. It is evidence of a profound unwillingness to confront the power of the media, and his own irresponsible complicity in wielding that power.<\/p>\n

Corbyn is a \u201cdope\u201d not because that\u2019s the way he\u2019s seen by voters. He is a “dope” because that is the way he has been characterised for two years by all of the media, including the Guardian. The fact that a growing number of voters are starting to question whether Corbyn is quite the dope they assumed is because he has finally had a chance to talk to voters\u00a0directly, even if\u00a0in the leaders\u2019 debate\u00a0Jeremy Paxman did his best to prevent Corbyn\u00a0from forming a complete sentence.<\/p>\n

If we had a fair, pluralistic media driven primarily by the desire to serve the public’s\u00a0interests rather than those of corporations, who can doubt that Corbyn would be winning hands-down in the polls?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those journalists who should have been behind Corbyn from the start \u2013 who could have been among his few allies as he battled the corporate media for nearly two years as Labour leader \u2013 are now starting to eat humble pie. Polls suggest that Corbyn may be gradually turning the election around, to the point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,59],"class_list":{"0":"post-2616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-guardian","8":"tag-jeremy-corbyn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}