The runup to the invasion of Iraq was, as is well know,
accompanied by a complicit and cowardly press that rolled out every lie as
though it were golden and adhered strictly to the Bush administration
guidelines. I think it was the moment when the liberal readership, which is
really the core newspaper readership for the majors, became disenchanted – and have
never returned. Though the right entertains itself with a narrative about a
timelessly liberal press, in reality, that liberal moment endured for around 3
decades in the U.S., and was spotty, at best, in criticizing the Cold War
foreign policies it reported on.
However, the level of distortion in the British press
coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the Labour leadership is, to my mind,
unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it. While Britain, famously, has a
suck press culture that mostly entertains itself by hounding celebrities to
death on the tabloid level, and bloviating with Oxbridge pomposity about the
wonders of neo-liberalism, on the other, it mostly adheres to a code of at
least ersatz neutrality when reporting the news. Corbyn, however, has the
effect on editors at the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent, the
Telegraph, and the Times of very bad acid. Remarkably, Corbyn seems to have the
hide of an elephant. Normally, a politician subject to abuse like this would
get so tied up with denials and explanations in response to these bogus slings that
he ends up looking like Laocoon. Corbyn, though, doesn’t really seem to care.
Which truly eggs on the press hysteria. The reports of his antisemitism, of his
sympathy for Osama bin Laden, of his advocacy of segregating women in trains
because of his inherent sexism, etc. – which all are childish distortions of
things he has said – have had no effect on his popularity. They have had an
effect on the press however. Unable to accept the fact that their circle jerk
is not working, they now bemoan the end of the Labour party and the inevitable
thousand year Reich of George Osbourne.
Well, the election is in five fucking years. And my guess is
that a lefty anti-austerity program is going to look pretty good under two
scenarios: a., Britain’s economy continues to generate benefits for the richest
and stagnation for the medium income set, or b., Britain is caught, like the
rest of the world, in a downturn emanating this time from China, which will
make the British bet on the finance as their leading economic sector seem
extremely stupid.
Surely I am not the only person who suspects the business
cycle might not be too kind to the Tories. This is another driver, I suspect,
of the establishment hysteria. They really hate Corbyn’s policies because they
suspect they might seem pretty attractive under these scenarios.
I am prejudiced. I think most of what Corbyn supports should
be pretty standard. Including revamping the foreign policy to emphasize peace
rather than war, which, so far has the century traveled into insane violence,
seems radically pacifistic to New Labour ears.
Those much laughed at demos of 2003? I’m hearing an echo in
this race. Maybe ignoring a million people wasn’t the greatest idea after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment