Steven Durrant
Much has been said about how clueless traditional media has been in failing to register building support for Corbyn and Labour’s program in the run up to the General Election.
A core dynamic in this was brilliantly expressed by George Monbiot in The Guardian on Tuesday:
“The broadcasters echo what the papers say, the papers pick up what the broadcasters say. A narrow group of favoured pundits appear on the news programmes again and again.”
While a swathe of other reports and research documents anti-Labour bias, it’s worth recalling just how far back in recent history the shunning of Corbyn and the broader anti-austerity movement goes. The signs of something building were there in the years prior to the moment in June 2015 when Corbyn became party leader.
The ConDem coalition years saw massive anti-austerity protests and the rise of groups like Occupy, UK Uncut, People’s Assembly, Coalition Of Resistance Disabled People Against Cuts, Black Activists Rising Against Cuts and many more. These were generally stereotyped, ridiculed or ignored.
Even the urban riots of 2011 warrant a mention. There was a bigger political dimension to them (albeit a small “p”) than the establishment dared give credit for. It was easy and convenient to entirely write the riots off as criminal madness. Though that was a big factor, many taking part in the unrest were those young people who had seen their Education Maintenance Allowance cut or the sky-rocketing of student fees. One election cycle later and they were out in numbers putting Captain Ska at No. 1 and supporting Labour. But as with the groups mentioned above, the media tended to belittle, smear or write them and their concerns off from the outset.
From the moment Corbyn’s name was on the ballot for leadership, the “unelectable/disaster” meme was born. It was repeated incessantly for the next 2 years.
One seminal event in his first leadership victory was the mass Labour abstention on the Welfare Reform Bill. Anti-austerity politics made a big breakthrough with that victory but the commentariat bubble continued to take austerity as a given.
In the first instance, scant substance was needed to support the “unelectable/disaster” buzzwords – Corbyn was an unelectable disaster because people said so. This caught on in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and while there were legitimate strong differences around policy and internal dynamics, these were carefully and deliberately inflamed from outside.
Nonetheless, Corbyn was twice elected leader by a landslide. It didn’t really count of course, because it was all down to the Trots – there couldn’t be anything much deeper going on. Across two summers, huge and diverse crowds converged to hear Corbyn everywhere he went (an identical dynamic to the treatment of Bernie Sanders crowds, written off as Occupy and student types). The problem was that these tens of thousands of ordinary people weren’t in touch with ordinary people, rather they were deemed a “cult”.
Establishment media even became directly involved in attempts to destabilise Labour from within. BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg helped co-ordinate the resignation of Shadow Cabinet members, a breach of basic journalistic ethics and boundaries which she appears to have gotten away with.
Most political attention since last June has understandably been focused on Brexit. This was also used as a stick to beat Labour with, despite just about everyone being in a mess on the issue. Meanwhile the politics and widespread misery of austerity continued to be underplayed or obfuscated.
When Theresa May announced the election, the press drooled along after the “strong and stable” meme without bothering to look beneath the surface. The only question would be the size of her increased majority. We can’t blame a political party for trotting out daft catchphrases so much, but we can blame supposedly independent, inquiring journalists for falling in line.
Even after so many recent mistaken predictions, they refused to see how they could be wrong this time. The 2015 election, Trump and Brexit were misreads where generally right-wing forces were underestimated. Corbyn’s being left-tilted probably underscored an assumption that such a miscomprehension of his electoral chances was an impossibility.
In the campaign weeks it became obvious that May and her policies had many problems, while the enthusiasm grew for Corbyn on social media and on the streets. But we were told this wouldn’t count for much, that the young don’t vote etc. (As if millions of late voting registrations weren’t going to be utilised.)
The targeted street-based capacity of Momentum and social media buzz for Corbyn were severely underrated. Vast amounts of content were produced and shared, not from Labour members necessarily but from the many – sick of the current regime.
We all make mistakes, but mainstream media has consistently failed to properly register the public disdain for austerity that has been building for several years. Working class voices of dissent were only likely to be treated as appropriate to establishment narratives if they were complaining about immigration.
It’s notable that many people, especially young people, no longer look to newspapers and scheduled broadcast news at all. These platforms could be going the way of the cassette tape and the Rubik’s Cube, but not in a cool way.
This isn’t to say that alternative media isn’t laden with issues, problems and challenges but it is at least evolving while the same mainstream dinosaurs endlessly repeat echo chamber talking points, stubbornly and structurally incapable of giving due attention and respect to the building of a progressive mass movement.
