That is a mischaracterization of what I wrote. I mentioned both Sanders and Biden because they are two old lefty white dudes, like Corbyn. Their religious beliefs are inconsequential as far as I am concerned.
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Sanders consistently polls as one of the most popular politicians in the US. Since people started paying attention to him in 2016, Corbyn has polled as one of the least popular in Britain. That, plus the Brexit factor, makes it pretty difficult to extrapolate any message from the UK disaster to the US.
Under the same media, Corbyn also somehow accomplished a gigantic positive swing in 2017.
Look, the media is not fair, it never has been fair, it never can be fair. But that doesn’t mean media contacts can’t be managed and cultivated, messaging shouldn’t be carefully crafted, certain loudmouth idiots can’t be told to shut up, so on and so forth. It doesn’t mean you can’t properly stage manage party events.
The “blame the media” narrative is not even wrong, it’s an odious psychological poison preying on the need to believe you made no mistakes and bad shit just happens and you can’t do anything about it. It reinforces the bunker when the problem is that the bunker is already too small.
It freaks out people who care about civil liberties when you make dark whispers about “reforming the media”. It angers voters when you imply that they only voted against you because they can’t see through lies. Your own followers start demanding more biased and outright delusional press in ‘retaliation’, which damages the parts of the media that would be your natural allies, because it turns out people don’t wanna buy Pravda.
If you ask the people who did not vote for you to choose between you and their media that they already watch, they will choose the media 100% of the time. If you disagree, ask yourself: does Trump’s complaints about Fake News make you want to vote him at all?
(And unless you individually fact check all his claims yourself, no, that is not about the mere fact that his claims are wrong.)
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Let me underline something here. The question of corbynism vs centrism is not about economics. I mean Corbyn’s corporate tax proposal was lower than it was under Blair. What it boiled down to is the rhetoric and leadership of the party.
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First of all, I am not Jeremy Corbyn, so it’s not germane to speak as though he had posted what I posted. And I didn’t and don’t suggest anything about “reforming the media” so that’s a straw man and all.
(The Labour party has been conspicuously restrained in complaining about even the most egregious instances of bias against them, precisely because they know they won’t win that fight in the media)
But as a media consumer, I interrogate what I am reading. I can see that the Guardian systematically used unflattering photos of Corbyn in news stories (if you’re capturing a frame from live video, it’s not an accident when you pick a photo where the subject’s eyes are closed). I can tell, when they’re posting an article a day about his anti-semitism, that a lot of those “anger at” pieces didn’t mention any actual antisemitic word or deed, even if you clicked through the insinuating hyperlinks. I can tell when news articles contain unsourced assertions that Corbyn is a hate figure; etc.
So, what I do suggest is that it is farcical to have elections if my fellow media consumers don’t apply even that minimal level of interrogation to what they’re consuming. And – in my opinion – while people are aware of the concept, very few of them habitually question who is telling them things, and why, and why now etc.
The reason I focus on the Guardian is that in the past (e.g. with Ed Milliband), it has been somewhat possible to counter the overt smearing of Labour leaders by seeing how the Guardian’s coverage compared to everyone else’s. But with Corbyn we have seen for the first time what happens when every single outlet agrees that, no, you don’t have permission to vote for this person.
As to whether a “good” candidate is obligated to cultivate the media, that really depends on what terms the media demands in return. If the deal is that you have to rule out genuine progressivism or be portrayed as a baby-eater, then I don’t think there’s anything admirable in agreeing to that.
None of what I’m saying is onerous. You don’t need to be some marginal paranoid Travis Bickle ranting about media lies on a street corner or getting in fights with everyone you know. You can still get your news from the Guardian or the BBC or even the Times; just, every story you watch or read, take a second to ask “is this bullshit?”, and if so, note that this is someone else’s agenda, not yours. It’s easy, it makes a big difference, the effect is cumulative, and you will discover your own opinions.
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When “every single outlet” tells you that it is raining outside, it might be time to get out your umbrella.
You think the media photos of Corbyn were less flattering than the media photos of Boris Johnson?
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Funny you should ask that, because recently some of the less flattering news footage of ol’ mophead has tended to just disappear, or get swapped with stock footage from old times when he looked a lot less disheveled. Probably just coincidence.
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The wreath gaffe was well-covered, and ended up getting it more attention as a result than it would have had the actual footage been used.
Johnson had plenty of bad coverage in the run-up to the election; even Sky luxuriated in the story of how he hid in the fridge, for example. That doesn’t mean the coverage of Corbyn was flattering, but anyone who thinks the newspaper photos of BoJo were flattering and the ones of Corbyn not has an odd sense of photographic taste.
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I think the construction of that person’s media image is a very different story, and it highlights the urgent need for critical media consumption in a very different way. I could try to summarise how I see it after more than a decade of grinding my teeth at that story, but I couldn’t persuade you to see it that way – either you’ve spent years looking at the same seams that I have, or you haven’t.
So I don’t expect anyone to decide that Corbyn (in particular) has been systematically misrepresented just because I said so. No one should take my word for it. But when I say that habitual suspicion of your news will reveal interesting new things, you don’t need to take my word for that. You can just try it yourself and see.
My experience is that, yes, intelligent people are aware of the principle that news comes from humans, and those humans have agendas. But it’s also my experience that almost no one reads “their” news with that principle in the foreground. Odd as it sounds, I surmise that it’s connected to politeness somehow. Like it’s rude to accuse John Humphrys of trying to control you. But it isn’t, and he is.
The system is broken… for everybody and it has been broken since forever
We can all sit down and imagine what it would have been it the system was based in proportional representation, but by no means this is a solution for everything
In spain there is a proportional system based on the 52 provinces, but of course, each province elects a different number of MPs, in theory based on population but some “corrections” to avoid over representation of the big cities. The result is that a seat in Madrid might cost the third party four times more votes than the first party in a low population area. The allocation of seats was conveniently arranged by the UCD in the 70s to ensure they got enough MPs elected in rural areas which they though they controlled.
Another solution is to have just one national district but then votes to regional options in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would be diluted to nothing
Is not that simple and losers will always blame “the system”
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