Media misrepresentations of the Labour party are being used strategically to create left wing folk devils and moral panic

An academic study published by the London School of Economics (LSE) which examined media and communications, specifically Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: from Watchdog to Attack dog, has shown that enduring, aggressive and non factual political and media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn were designed intentionally in a strategic attempt to thoroughly discredit him as a political actor. However, Corbyn is of course a legitimate democratic actor who is the leader of the main opposition party in British politics. Furthermore, he has presented a credible and increasingly popular alternative to the neoliberal doxa.   

One particularly successful way of neutralising opposition to an ideology is to ensure that only those ideas that are consistent with that ideology saturate the media and are presented as orthodoxy. The Conservative’s election campaigns are always a thoroughly dispiriting and ruthless masterclass in media control.

Communication in the media has been geared towards establishing a dominant paradigm and maintaining an illusion of a consensus. This ultimately serves to reduce democratic choices. Such tactics are nothing less than a political micro-management of your beliefs and are ultimately aimed at nudging your voting decisions and maintaining a profoundly unbalanced, pathological status quo.

Presenting an alternative narrative is difficult because the Tories have not only framed all of the issues to be given public priority – they set and stage-manage the media agenda – they have also dominated the narrative; they constructed and manage the political lexicon and now treat words associated with the Left, such as welfare, like semantic landmines, generating explosions of right-wing scorn, derision and ridicule.

Words like cooperation, inclusion, mutual aid, reciprocity, equality, nationalisation, redistribution – collective values – are simply dismissed as mere anachronisms that need to be stricken from public conversation and exiled from our collective consciousness, whilst all the time enforcing their own bland language of an anti-democratic political doxa. The political manufacturing of a culture of anti-intellectualism extends this aim, too.

Words like competition, market place, small state, efficiency, responsibility and so on, now crowd out any opportunity of even a fleeting glance of another way of socio-economic organisation. They’ve become our ‘common sense’ without our consent. 

Anything presented that contradicts the consensus – a convincing, coherent, viable alternative perspective – is treated to a heavily staged editing via meta-coverage by the media. Anyone would think that the media regards the UK as a one-party state.

This clearly co-ordinated campaign of discrediting the opposition leader began from the moment he became a prominent candidate and ramped up after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of attempted delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice and media platform; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through use of the ‘guilt by association’ fallacy, mainly used with tenuous allegations of terrorism and antisemitism.

The LSE study found that 75 per cent of stories about the opposition leader are either distorted or failed to represent his actual views on subjects.

Dr Bart Cammaerts, the research director, described “an overall picture of most newspapers systematically vilifying the leader of the biggest opposition party, assassinating his character, ridiculing his personality and delegitimising his ideas and politics”.

The report also says“Denying such an important political actor a voice or distorting his views and ideas through the exercise of mediated power is highly problematic.”

Many of us have written at length about the oppressive, authoritarian-styled narratives in the media and the political circumstances in which they have arisen, as independent journalists. The language use itself  on the right warrants study – the left community has been stereotyped and stigmatised with labels such as “cult”, “Marxists” (which has undergone a politically engineered semantic shift, now being used as an insult), “rabble”, “dogs”, “Stalinists”, “Trots”, extremists”, “hard left” and so on. 

This language has been widely and purposely used to create folk devils and moral panic. It is the process of arousing social concern over an issue which may be constructed – usually seen as the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media, but it is also a tactic used widely by politicians on the right of the spectrum.

Open letter from credible key public figures in support of Jeremy Corbyn

Now, an open letter has been written in full support of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn which has collected 30 signatories from a wide range of high-profile public figures, including musicians Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Thurston Moore, Kate Tempest, Robert Del Naja and Lowkey, and it also includes respected academics such as David Graeber, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, the NME has revealed.

It’s unlikely to be accommodated by media outlets like the BBC and Guardian, however.

In the new letter, the signatories – also featuring a range of major Jewish authors and public figures – describe Corbyn as a “life-long committed anti-racist” and claim that “no political party or political leader has done more to address [antisemitism] than Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.”

Read the full letter below:

“To the Editor:

“The coming UK election is indeed a landmark and monumental one as signatories to a recent letter attest. However, we are outraged that Jeremy Corbyn, a life-long committed anti-racist, is being smeared as an anti-semite by people who should know better. Antisemitism is a problem within society and is present within all political parties and movements, including Labour. It must be confronted and rooted out at every turn. No political party or political leader has done more to address this problem than Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. In the last two years, the speed of investigations has increased fourfold, staffing committed to dealing with the issue has doubled, legal experts have been drafted, and rules changed to expedite sanctions. But the prevailing evidence speaks for itself: Labour’s political opponents and much of the media have trivialised and weaponised this issue for ideological ends.

“Progressives around the world are looking to this election and to the Labour Party as a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world. It has never been more important that voters are made aware of the truth of what the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn stands for: the eradication of all racism, including antisemitism, wherever it rears its ugly head.”

The text concludes with the full list of signatories, listed below: