Culture Wars

by James Curran

  My impression is that political correspondents struggle with leaders who are not towards the centre of their parties. There was an incomprehension about Iain Duncan Smith that we now see displayed towards Jeremy Corbyn. Having failed to predict his nomination and then his landslide leadership victory, viewers would now be entitled to be sceptical about pundits’ predictions about Corbyn’s wider electability. 48

  Much of the criticism of the BBC’s coverage was aimed at their Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg. How much of it was deserved is a moot point, though none of it justified the vilification that Kuenssberg subsequently received. The widely perceived bias was probably being more attributable to the innate ‘pro-Westminster bias’ discussed earlier than any anti-Corbyn one. One BBC correspondent admitted that initially the would-be Labour leader was seen through a prism that labelled him as either, or both, a hopeless outsider and an extreme left-winger. 49 It probably took the BBC longer than other broadcasters to recognise their own limitations. The BBC’s Political News Editor, Katy Searle, appeared to accept the Corporation’s ‘Westminster bias’, telling the BBC Radio 4’s Feedback programme ‘that traditionally our focus here at BBC Westminster has been across the road the House of Common and House of Lords, Jeremy has forced us to look beyond that’. 50

  There was one particular report by Kuenssberg, in November 2015, that following a complaint from a viewer, was found by the BBC’s regulators (at the time the BBC Trust) to have failed to meet the Corporation’s standards of accuracy and impartiality. It involved an interview with Corbyn following a horrific terrorist attack in Paris. In the edited interview, Corbyn appeared to suggest that he would have opposed a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy being enacted by the French security forces. However, a viewing of the unedited interview showed that Corbyn said he was against such a policy in general, but supported the decision taken by the French authorities in Paris in the particular circumstances of the recent terrorist outrage.

  Negative coverage of Corbyn persisted long after he had convincingly won the Labour leadership, indeed, to some extent, it intensified. Researchers for the Media Reform Trust analysed press coverage of Corbyn’s first week as leader. Out of a total of 494 news, comment and editorial articles, in the eight daily and Sunday papers they monitored, they found that 60% of articles were mainly negative with only 13% mainly positive and 27% taking a more neutral stand. 51 These findings appeared to be substantiated by research conducted at the same time at London School of Economics, which looked at the coverage in the month of Corbyn’s election in September 2015 and the subsequent two months of his leadership. They observed that scorn and ridicule had been key components in the coverage and concluded:

  The results of this study show that Jeremy Corbyn was represented unfairly by the British press through a process of vilification that went well beyond the normal limits of fair debate and disagreement in a democracy. Corbyn was often denied his own voice in the reporting on him and sources that were anti-Corbyn tended to outweigh those that support him and his positions. He was also systematically treated with scorn and ridicule in both the broadsheet and tabloid press in a way that no other political leader is or has been. Even more problematic, the British press has repeatedly associated Corbyn with terrorism and positioned him as a friend of the enemies of the UK. The result has been a failure to give the newspaper reading public a fair opportunity to form their own judgements about the leader of the country’s main opposition. 52

  In terms of associating Corbyn with the ‘loony left’ the LSE Report found that the press came to the view that ridicule was a more effective way of denigrating Corbyn than fear:

  Corbyn is systematically ridiculed, scorned and the object of personal attacks by most newspapers. Even more problematic were a set of associations which delegitimised Corbyn as a politician, calling him loony, unpatriotic, a terrorist friend and a dangerous individual. It has to be noted though that whereas ridicule and scorn increased in time, the more hard-hitting and emotive frames such as calling him a communist or a terrorist friend diminished over time. 53

  In 2016, a year after his election as party leader, Corbyn faced a second challenge: the coverage of which was monitored by the Media Reform Coalition which, this time, looked at both the press, the broadcasters’ and some online coverage of Corbyn’s campaign. They analysed a total of 465 articles and reports, drawn from eight online news sites, as well as forty television news bulletins on BBC and ITV. Their sample also covered four national newspapers and three online-only news sites. They found that:

  …a marked and persistent imbalance in favour of sources critical of Jeremy Corbyn, the issues that they sought to highlight, and the arguments they advanced. This was the case across both the online and television sample. Online news stories overall were almost twice as likely to be written by, or focus on sources critical of Corbyn compared to those that were supportive. The BBC evening news bulletins gave nearly twice as much unchallenged airtime to sources critical of Corbyn compared to those that supported him (an imbalance that was not matched by ITV which gave considerably more equal attention to opposing voices. 54

  The following year, Corbyn suddenly faced the test of a General Election when Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, called a snap election in June 2017. The campaign has been described by ITV’s Political Editor Robert Peston as: ‘The most relentlessly negative campaign that any of us have ever seen’. 55 Media monitoring undertaken by Cardiff and Loughborough universities (which has been a regular feature of past election campaigns) demonstrated that whilst the BBC’s coverage was less biased against Corbyn than it had been, there was still some way to go. Cardiff researchers reported that:

  In the run up to election day, Corbyn’s popularity was improving according to the polls – and now exceeds May’s – but this was not reflected in the editorial construction of public opinion. BBC presenter Jonny Dymond expressed regret about his use of vox pops after the campaign, acknowledging they had failed to accurately reflect the public’s changing mood towards Corbyn. 56

  And Loughborough University’s monitoring of press coverage of the 2017 campaign revealed:

  the Labour Party received the overwhelming majority of negative evaluations published by the press, largely due to the hostile coverage provided by higher circulation papers such as the Sun, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Newspaper treatment of the Conservatives was broadly more sympathetic. 57

  The election, which many had forecast would be Corbyn and Labour’s nemesis, proved not to be the case at all. Whilst the Conservatives were returned as the largest single party they lost their parliamentary majority and were forced to rely on the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to stay in power. Meanwhile Labour, far from experiencing an election meltdown as had been predicted, in fact captured thirty seats from the Conservatives. The right-wing press had campaigned against Labour, and Corbyn in particular, with as much venom as they had against Ed Miliband but with, apparently less effect. Many believed that it was a combination of the waning power of the press combined with the rise of social media (Figure 11.4).

    FIGURE 11.4 The Daily Mail front page, Wednesday 7 June 2017. Courtesy of Solo Syndication.

  But to what extent did the 2017 General Election campaign represent the start of a process in which the influence of the Conservative-supporting press could be seen to be on the wane? They were no less voracious in their attacks on Labour than they had been in the past, indeed on election day under a headline ‘Apologists for Terror’ they featured pictures of Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott (all associated with ‘loony left’ campaigns in the past), followed by thirteen pages of anti-Labour propaganda 58 . Throughout the election, there was a degree of bile and disdain adopted towards Corbyn by the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph which outstripped even the hostility they had shown to Miliband. But public opinion was unmoved, indeed throughout the campaign the polls showed growing support for both Labour and Corbyn. At th
e start of the election campaign, incumbent Prime Minister Theresa May enjoyed a 38% lead over Jeremy Corbyn when the pollsters asked, ‘Who would make the better Prime Minister’; by polling day that lead had shrunk to just 11% – an unprecedented narrowing for an election campaign. 59

  A new feature of the campaign that clearly reached a younger audience were the hyper-partisan left-wing news blogs – Skwawkbox, Another Angry Voice, The Canary and Evolve Politics, being the main ones. 60 Despite their relative novelty, often more than matched the traditional media in terms of their social media reach, succeeding in getting articles and videos shared many millions of times across social media platforms. According to the BuzzFeed News website, which has developed its own social barometer for measuring online news impacts, ‘Nine out of the top 20 most-shared articles came from non-traditional news outlets’. 61

  In terms of influencing the result – to the extent that any media can be said to influence the result – it is this ability to spread the online message virally that appears most potent. BuzzFeed found that Labour (and Momentum and the left partisan news blogs) were far more successful at sharing material across social media in general and on Facebook in particular, than were the Conservatives. BuzzFeed’s social barometer analytical tool tracked hardly any pro-Conservative material being shared on Facebook as widely as was the case with Labour material. The most popular article of the entire campaign, that they tracked, was a pro-Labour post on a site called Films for Action which was shared 177,000 times and was read by four million people – it was simply entitled ‘This Facebook Comment About the UK Election Is Going Viral’. 62

  A particularly potent example of the effectiveness of Labour’s activity on social media was when the left news website Evolve Politics picked up a story from a specialist animal rights magazine which they headlined: ‘Theresa May’s Tory manifesto Scraps the Ban on Elephant Ivory Sales After Bowing to Millionaire Antique Lobbyists’. 63 The original story was completely ignored by the mainstream media, but the Evolve story was shared more than 70,000 times on social media; it was then picked up by the Independent website and the Daily Mirror. BuzzFeed commissioned a YouGov poll to try and ascertain the extent to which this story had reached the public. They found that 14% of the public said they recalled the issue but in the eighteen to twenty-four group that figure rose to 30%. The poll found that of those who knew about the ivory ban, half had encountered it via social media. In the original Evolve story, prime responsibility for getting the ban lifted was attributed to the then Conservative MP Victoria Borwick; she subsequently went on to lose her Kensington seat by just twenty votes.

  Following Labour’s better than expected election result in 2017, the hostility of the right-wing press to Corbyn briefly died down, only to suddenly fare up again in February 2018 with an almost nostalgic theme, summed up in the Sun’s front page – ‘Corbyn and the Commie Spy’. The Sun’s story was enthusiastically taken up by the press, despite overwhelming evidence refuting the claim. The smearing of Labour and its leaders has a long and dishonourable history going back to the Daily Mail’s notorious Zinoviev letter in 1924 – a forgery which painted Labour leaders as secret agents of Moscow. In 1995, Labour leader Michael Foot won a large libel settlement from the Sunday Times when it wrongly suggested that he was a KGB ‘agent of influence’ and; as documented in this chapter, the Daily Mail (again) made a sustained and unsuccessful attempt to paint Ed Miliband – Red Ed as they (and virtually they alone) dubbed him – as a far leftist with a communist father “who hated Britain”. Now it was Jeremy Corbyn’s turn – a far easier target in many ways because of his long and public record campaigning for left-wing causes.

  But the attack on Corbyn was, unlike the generalised smears against Miliband; they were based on apparently detailed evidence from a former Czech spy backed up by files found in the archives of the Czech secret police. Following the Sun’s revelations, the rest of the right-wing press weighed in. Dominic Sandbrook (who played a role in the earlier smearing of the Milibands), denounced Corbyn in the Mail under a headline: ‘The useful idiot: Jeremy Corbyn’s assignations with a secret agent were part of the gullible British Left’s love affair with a totalitarian Russian regime that murdered millions’. But in fact, Corbyn had no love for the Soviet Union nor its Eastern bloc allies. Corbyn’s politics grew out of the ‘new left’, which was determinedly opposed to the Soviet brand of Communism. As Robert Colville, Director of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, noted in the Daily Telegraph ‘he (Corbyn) was a socialist not a Communist; Team Trotsky not Team Stalin’. 64 Times columnist, Daniel Finklestein, couldn’t make up his mind if Corbyn was for or against the Soviet Union, writing: ‘the Labour leader was always plain about his attachment to the Soviet Union’ but then going on to remind us that in 1988, when Corbyn was supposed to be acting in the interests of the Soviet Union and its allies, he was publicly calling on Moscow to rehabilitate Trotsky. 65

  Shortly after the stories alleging Corbyn’s links with Eastern bloc spies appeared, his close colleagues on the Labour left Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell were also drawn into the conspiratorial net with the Daily Mail claiming that they too ‘were ALL spying for the Russians along with 12 other senior Labour figures’ (original emphasis). 66 The hue and cry should have died down as authoritative secret service sources in both Prague and London denounced the Czech informant as a liar and fantasist – at one stage, he claimed to have organised either, or both, the Live Aid concert and the Free Mandela concerts in the UK. Even more definitive refutations came from officials working in the Czech and German archives (German, because it wasn’t long before the Stasi were brought into the picture) – both categorically denying that there was any evidence in their files that Corbyn was either a spy or even an ‘asset’ (in the parlance of the espionage industry).

  One might have thought that that would have been the end of the matter, but the squashing of the original story only succeeded in diverting the press to pursue their earlier vendetta against Corbyn for his support for the reforms to press regulation recommended by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry. 67 In refuting the allegations made by the right-wing press, Corbyn hit back in an online video, saying:

  A free press is essential for democracy and we don’t want to close it down, we want to open it up … The general election showed the media barons are losing their influence and social media means their bad old habits are becoming less and less relevant. But instead of learning these lessons they’re continuing to resort to lies and smears. Their readers – you, all of us – deserve so much better. Well, we’ve got news for them: change is coming. 68

  The words ‘change is coming’ acted like the proverbial red rag to a bull. Corbyn’s supposed past support for the Soviet Union was linked to his alleged desire to control the British media. The Mail ran an article by John Stevens linking the two, under the headline: ‘Corbyn’s Response To Spy Row: No Answers And A Chilling Threat To Britain’s Free Press’. 69 The Sun, in its editorial column, warned: ‘Controlling the press is a first step towards the one-party state Corbyn’s hard-left extremist’s dream of’. 70 The Mail offered its ‘assistance’ to BBC journalists, advising them that the purge wouldn’t stop at the press: ‘The Corporations’ staff should watch out. If this Marxist comes to power he’ll be gagging them too’ 71 it fulminated.

  Notes

  1. G. Levy ‘The man who hated Britain’ Daily Mail 28 September 2013.

  2. For an extended discussion of the targeting of Ed Miliband see I. Gaber ‘The Tory targeting of Miliband’ in D. Wring, S. Atkinson and R. Mortimore (eds) Political Communications: the 2015 Election (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017) pp. 273–91.

  3. ICM for the Guardian recorded a doubling in Labour’s lead over the Conservatives from 4% to 8% in the period before and after the speech www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/0ct/21/icm-poll-data-labour-conservatives accessed 22 January 2014.

  4. R. Littlejohn ‘Back to the future with Marxist Miliband�
� Daily Mail 24 September 2013.

  5. ‘Obituary Ralph Miliband’ The Times 10 June 1994.

  6. ‘Obituary Eric Hobsbawm’ The Times 2 October 2012.

  7. D. Sandbrook ‘Miliband’s Marxist father and the real reason he wants to drag us back to the nightmare’ Daily Mail 26 September 2013.

  8. Levy op cit.

  9. Daily Mail ‘An evil legacy and why we won’t apologise’ 1 October 2013.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Press Gazette 26 June 2017. www.pressgazette.co.uk/nrs-national-press-readership-data-telegraph-overtakes-guardian-as-most-read-quality-title-in-printonline/.

  13. R. Lustig ‘The newspaper that really hates Britain’ 4 October 2013.

  14. J. Freedland ‘Antisemitism doesn’t always come doing a Hitler salute’ Guardian 5 October 2013.

  15. Daily Mail Comment 11 April 2013.

  16. A. Rawstorne ‘Hardly bog standard … Ed’s days at the Eton for Lefties’ Daily Mail 2 October 2012.

  17. Ibid.

  18. M. Burleigh In Hampstead parlours, intellectual apologists for Stalin like Ralph Miliband’s great friend Eric Hobsbawm and his tutor Harold Laski loved talking in abstractions as millions died in horror’ Daily Mail 2 October 2013.

  19. A. Pierce ‘Revealed: how the unions got Red Ed in a headlock’ Daily Mail Comment 4 July 2013.

  20. Daily Mail ‘The spectre Of Red Ed’s thought police’ 22 March 2013.

  21. Littlejohn op cit.

  22. R. Pendlebury ‘Wife who still can’t forgive brother-in-law Ed’s betrayal’ Daily Mail 27 March 2013.

  23. A. Pierce and R. Pendlebury ‘Treachery and a very bitter wife’ Daily Mail 13 June 2011.