{"id":18045,"date":"2022-06-24T18:34:09","date_gmt":"2022-06-24T16:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=18045"},"modified":"2022-06-24T18:52:31","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T16:52:31","slug":"jeremy-corbyn-on-uk-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=18045","title":{"rendered":"Jeremy Corbyn on UK media"},"content":{"rendered":"

Declassified UK<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In June 2019, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo<\/span> visited the UK and was recorded<\/a> saying privately: \u201cIt could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It\u2019s possible. You should know, we won\u2019t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It\u2019s too risky and too important and too hard once it\u2019s already happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compared to the extensive coverage of alleged Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, Pompeo\u2019s remarks barely registered in the British media. I ask Corbyn why he thinks that is.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a supine media in this country,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThe British self-confidence of saying we\u2019ve got the best media in the world, the best broad\u00adcasting in the world, the best democracy in the world. It\u2019s nonsense, utter, complete nonsense. We have a media that\u2019s supine, that self-censors, that accepts D-Notices, doesn\u2019t challenge them, and the vast majority of the mainstream media haven\u2019t lifted so much as a little finger in support or defence of Julian Assange.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds: \u201cAnd so the idea that we\u2019ve got this brave British media that is always exposing the truth is utter nonsense. Even the liberal supposedly left-leaning<\/span> papers like the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, where are they on all of this? Nowhere. Where were they kicking off about Pompeo\u2019s remarks? Nowhere. We obviously kicked off about it, protested\u2026We were just told it was a private briefing\u2026It wasn\u2019t. It was a quite deliberate message.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought.<\/p>\n

The paper was a key part of the \u201canti-semitism crisis\u201d that engulfed Corbyn\u2019s leadership. From 2016-19, the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a01,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles.<\/p>\n

In the same period, the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party\u2019s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example,\u00a0found<\/a>\u00a0that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u2019s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.<\/p>\n

The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber<\/span> commented<\/a> after the 2019 election: \u201cAs for the Guardian<\/em>, we will never forget that during the \u2018Labour antisemitism controversy\u2019, they beat even the Daily Mail<\/em>\u00a0to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour\u2019s disadvantage\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have absolutely no illusions in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, none whatsoever,\u201d Corbyn tells me. \u201cMy mum brought me up to read the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>. She said, \u2018It\u2019s a good paper you can trust\u2019. You can\u2019t. After their treatment of me, I do not trust the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continues: \u201cThere are good people who work in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, there are some brilliant writers in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, but as a paper, it\u2019s a tool of the British establishment. It\u2019s a mainstream establishment paper. So, as long as everybody on the left gets it clear: when you buy the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, you\u2019re buying an establishment paper\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Declassified UK: In June 2019, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the UK and was recorded saying privately: \u201cIt could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It\u2019s possible. You should know, we … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}