The Media, and Similarities between Trump and Corbyn
The UK election is hotting up. May arguably called it early because the Conservatives were going to romp through, gaining a vastly increased number of seats, and marginalising Labour and an effective opposition into the sidelines of UK politics. This might well still happen, given that the Conservatives have stolen the right-wing UKIP vote (given that Brexit looks certain to happen, and people are wondering what UKIP can now add), and given that the left is splintered across five parties: Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP (Scottish National Party), Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalist party) and the Greens. This means that, at best, the only alternative to the Tories is a fragmented coalition, perhaps. Either way, without tactical voting on a huge scale, the left has an uphill battle to unseat a consolidated Conservative seat.
Polls were showing a massive advantage to the desperately mediocre Grey Vampire, Theresa May. Things have changed a little as a poll today has shown the lead now cut to single digits. That's still a big lead, mind, but better than the nineteen point lead it was at the start of the campaign.
For my foreign readers (i.e. most of you), Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the left-wing Labour Party, the largest opposition. Supported by the far left in the party, he has not enjoyed the support of the parliamentary Labour Party (i.e the elected MPS in Labour), but has had huge popularity at grassroots, including from the Momentum organisation. Indeed, this is the case such that he has stormed through two leadership elections forced on him by the unhappy MPs, because his grassroots support was and is so high (and this from Labour, the biggest political party by membership in Europe, outside of Russia).
Where May has denied Corbyn and the nation the opportunity of a live debate because she has claimed her time is better spent meeting real voters (who have mainly turned out to be Conservative Party members in tightly controlled locations), Corbyn has been attending mass gatherings and genuinely meeting the people (I wrote about this here). His rallies may not be on Trumpian scales, but he has been doing pretty well, on that front.
The Media
The thing about the UK is that the media is heavily biased to the right-wing. Papers that support the right-wing are: The Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Financial Times, The Sun, The Spectator, The London Evening Standard. The left-wing have the Guardian and the Mirror, with the smaller "i" newspaper holding a centrist position. This puts right-wing newspaper circulation vastly above the left. One analysis concludes:
There are 33.66 copies of right-wing newspapers for every sale of a left-wing one. What is more the Mail, Express and Star are far more right wing than the Guardian is left wing.
The importance of the print media cannot be undervalued here. But even objective (and less objective) news reporting in TV media has been trashing Jeremy Corbyn over a long time. Loughborough University have been analysing the bias, and have found:
The media is attacking Jeremy Corbyn far more than Theresa May through the election campaign, according to a new analysis.
A “considerable majority” of the reports on Labour are critical of the party and its manifesto, a report from Loughborough University claims. Newspapers are being far more balanced in their coverage of the Conservatives, the report said, with positive and negative reporting balancing each other out.
What's more, the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn's party are coming from the most popular newspapers, with The Sun and the Daily Express particularly focusing their negative coverage on Labour. The Mail and The Times have also been hostile to Labour, the academics report, but have balanced that out with positive reporting on the Conservatives.
The power of the media is something that is always called into question during election times. Another fascinating Guardian (from Gaby Hinsliff) read states:
The “It was the Sun wot won it” myth of the all-powerful media is invariably overdone. Sadiq Khan won the London mayoralty despite the London Evening Standard championing Zac Goldsmith; the Daily Mail’s backing in 1997 didn’t help John Major and in the 2005 Tory leadership contest it backed Ken Clarke only for David Cameron to win. The Sun, meanwhile, tends to spot winners, not make them. James Stanyer, professor of communication and media analysis at Loughborough, says the most likely impact of campaign coverage on voters is “to reinforce what they’ve already decided rather than really alter their opinion in any radical way”.
But the slow drip of information over a longer period can, he thinks, affect closer contests. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘Oh, Brexit, we didn’t see that coming’, but if we’d looked over the last 25 years of unremittingly negative stories about the EU, we might have.” Corbyn’s attempts to establish credibility have, he says, been hampered from the start by “continuous negative coverage”.
There are undoubtedly questions here for journalists, and in an age of social media, reporters are held sometimes aggressively to account.
The Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman – whose challenging of a squirming Tim Farron over whether he considers gay sex a sin divided Twitter – thinks journalists are becoming caught up in a bigger backlash against conventional politics. Voters are drawn to insurgent parties who increasingly label the media part of the establishment – and, in some ways, she argues, they are right. “The media became too complacent – both Brexit and Donald Trump came as a surprise to many. So we have to redouble our efforts to listen and learn, stick to the facts, and remain rigorously impartial even if that means taking criticism from all sides.”...
“Given a choice of a Labour party that’s malleable to the interests of the rightwing media or a manifesto that’s going to change the country and redistribute wealth, the members would always choose the second,” says Zarb-Cousin [Matt Zarb-Cousin, who recently quit as the leader’s spokesman]. “The question then becomes how do you deal with the context. What I’d like to come out of this campaign is more of a recognition of just how institutionally biased the media is. There is this conventional wisdom that we should have a strategy to deal with it, but can we just work on the premise that it’s biased against Labour?’
After all, he argues, Miliband’s efforts to build good relationships got him nowhere. “They’d get a page lead in the Daily Mail maybe and then come election time all the papers would throw the kitchen sink at them.”
May and the Media
We have problems with a fair and balanced communication of ideas. It is why, in the Conservative manifesto, they have dropped implementation of press regulation as demanded by the Leveson Inquiry. This, to me, is overt scandal, but has been thoroughly under-reported. The BBC opines:
The big newspaper groups in Britain - such as those that control the Daily Mail, the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express - can hardly believe their luck. Not only have they got a Conservative prime minister who, in their view, is certain to get a big majority on 8 June, but now she has relieved them of two of the biggest threats looming on their horizon.
You can bet your bottom penny that Friday's editorials will be gushing in their praise for this decision. I can almost see them now. "With this bold, brave decision, Theresa May is the first prime minister in years to show her deep commitment to a truly free press…" And so on.
Victims' groups are already complaining that this is a "stitch-up".
They say the extensive contact between Mrs May and leading editors and proprietors shows that, after their extensive lobbying effort against Leveson 2 and Section 40, she has delivered what they want in return for the gushing news and opinion coverage of recent weeks.
It is true that no prime minister since Margaret Thatcher - not even Tony Blair in his pomp - has had such approval from Britain's newspapers as Mrs May; and, moreover, it is obviously the case that Leveson 2 and Section 40 were discussed at length in those private meetings between the prime minister and senior figures in the press.
Corbyn, on the other hand, routinely gets attacked by the left, too, with the Guardian not being his biggest fan as they see the more centrist Labour camp as offering a more realistic chance of elected opposition.
[caption id="attachment_10588" align="alignright" width="268"]
YouTube/RevolutionBahrainMC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZbzzg0yLHo marked "Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed)", which YouTube defines as the "Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)" license.[/caption]
It gets worse, though, and here we see some connection to aspects of the media scenario in the States. Both the Guardian and Sky News (very surprisingly, given their Murdoch affiliation and right-wing agenda) have complained that May and the Tories are restricting their press access. Sky News have evidently annoyed May's team a couple of times. BuzzFeed have had access to Sky's complaints:
Sky News has said it is being cut out of coverage of the Conservative election campaign because of its reporting on Theresa May's campaign and issued a public complaint.
A spokesperson for the broadcaster took the unusual step of going public with their concerns and told BuzzFeed News that Conservative ministers were avoiding having their policies being scrutinised on air by Sky's presenters. They also said the news channel had struggled to gain access to the prime minister's events – with the blame directed at individuals at the heart of the Downing Street operation.
"Since early in the election campaign, Sky News has not been getting live interviews on election issues with Conservative ministers," a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "Also, we weren’t initially invited to follow the leader’s tour. We understand this to be because members of the prime minister’s team are unhappy with aspects of our political coverage. Sky News stands by its journalism and is committed to fair, impartial, and accurate reporting of all the political parties."
One source also claimed Sky News did not receive advance briefing of the Conservatives' manifesto launch on Thursday, despite some friendly newspapers being given previews of some policies.
The highly unusual intervention comes after a number of confrontations between the channel and Theresa May's team. On the first day of the snap election campaign, when at short notice the prime minister announced a public statement on an unknown topic in Downing Street, veteran presenter Adam Boulton speculated on air that one possible explanation could be her health.
Steven De Foer, in the Guardian, reports on his foreign press status and not being granted access, too ("I’m a foreign reporter frozen out by Theresa May. She is behaving like Trump"). This Belgian reporter declares it is similar to Trump:
Just over a year ago, at a meeting in Virginia during the Republican primaries, Donald Trump’s team threatened to remove me from the room because I had no press accreditation. For three weeks they had failed to respond to my requests, and the venue was open to anyone.
Even at that stage, Trump’s relationship with what he terms “the lying media” was toxic. Still, I hung in there, despite the menacing glares and the threat of ejection. A reporter from the New York Times told me: “Incredible. You’re lucky to be based in Europe, where something like that would be impossible.”
But, he goes on to say, that is exactly what has happened to him in the tightly controlled surroundings of the Tory press team. Well worth a read. The connections to the mdeia circus around Trump, both before election and after, do not go unnoticed here.
What about Trump?
Corbyn doesn't get good press. He can't, because he hasn't bribed them, his manifesto is not in their interests, and they have generated a readership of scared isolationists. He is an outlier. So, if my facebook feeds are anything to go by, he is using social media to try to gain some ground. The problem here is that the Tory campaign team has this down to a tee, too. In the last election, Labour only spent £160,000 on social media advertising. On the other hand, the Conservatives spent £1.2m. Labour, this time round, has promised to match them pound for pound.
As Hinsliff's earlier article includes:
He [Matt Zarb-Cousin] sees Facebook campaigning as one way to reach voters in an unfiltered way, encouraging them to question the way things are reported. Yet as Ayesha Hazarika, a former aide to Ed Miliband [ex-Labour leader who lost the last election], points out, Facebook messages tend to be shared among the likeminded, they don’t necessarily reach new supporters. For that, she argues Labour still needs a press operation capable of telling its story in the mainstream media. After all, she argues, Labour is rising in the polls now it is actually unveiling policy and getting more air time – suggesting there is still no substitute for getting out there.
“If people don’t think we have to persuade the public, and the readers of newspapers – I mean, they’re not Sun readers, they’re voters. They’re the people, and if you want to seek to govern you seek to win their trust. Even if some read newspapers you don’t like.”
The interesting parallel here is that we have two outliers, in terms of established political entities: Corbyn and Trump. But both stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yet both have a difficult relationship with the established press, though the established press outside of FOX News in the States is more centrist, whereas here it is centre to right. And, in the UK, May on the right is doing what Trump did in attempting to control access, whilst Corbyn is trying to circumnavigate the press because he has little to no support there.
We live in a new era of "fake news" - a selection board of sources available on the internet that anyone can dip into at will and see as on par with any other source, no matter what the objective credibility might be.
The Guardian, in another article, states:
I’m not – repeat not – arguing for some bizarre political equivalence between Trump and Corbyn. But the position of the aspiring president and hopeful prime minister a few weeks before polling day is instructive.
Trump received cool-to-downright-chilly coverage during his campaign. The endorsement count against him was humiliating, going on humbling. Then, as now, you were constantly reminded of research that shows a paltry 7% of American journalists admitting to Republican allegiances – and 90% of Washington-based journalists voting Democrat.
You also remember the conclusions of Professor Tim Groseclose at George Mason University. “There’s something in the DNA of liberals that makes them want to go into jobs like the arts, journalism and academia more so than conservatives. Even if you’re just trying to maximise profits by offering an alternative point of view, it’s hard to find conservative reporters. So it’s natural the media is more liberal.”
Is that American situation replicated in Britain? There are no equivalent UK statistics, but – from personal experience at least – things aren’t so very different over here. Labour voters, past and potentially present, throng the desks at the Telegraph and Express. Of course the strong, top-down political leanings of most papers – conditioned by reader research – are an antidote to this. And of course the civil war within the party over the last few years is reflected along newspaper benches. You can sometimes feel that debate heaving, just off page.
There are odd scenarios afoot with regard the press in both countries, and its relationship with political hopefuls and established elites. It would be great, from my own point of view, if Corbyn could do a Trump: without mainstream media assistance, motivate groundswell and grassroots support to produce an upset. I am under no illusions, though - I don't think Labour will win, but perhaps they could defend more seats than they have been expected to. Maybe, just maybe, the Tory landslide will be more of a soil spillage. I do think that the media has vast influence, both in print and on TV, and I do think this provides an ongoing challenge for the left since it is a sort of lobbying outfit.
But, you know, I live in hope.