Media Matters
Corbyn may think they’re finished but he should beware
Jeremy Corbyn has a theory about the press. He thinks it is in terminal decline and that, as a result, he can ignore or threaten Right-wing newspapers.
At Labour’s conference last autumn, he mocked the Daily Mail for being ineffectual. It had devoted fourteen pages in a single issue to attacking him before last June’s election, and yet he had come close to winning. He challenged its editor, Paul Dacre, to double its coverage of him during the next general election. His suggestion was not only that the paper no longer had the power to wound Labour leaders, but also that its aggressive opposition was a positive boon.
Whether Corbyn really believes everything he said may be questioned. But he appears to think the age of the ‘press barons’, as he calls them, is over, and that social media now constitute the decisive arena for political debate.
What a transformation this is. Labour largely attributed its defeat in 1992 to the venom of the so-called Tory press, in particular the Sun. That was why Tony Blair courted Rupert Murdoch so assiduously after 1994. To a large extent, Gordon Brown continued the tradition, and became close to Dacre, and friendly with Rebekah Brooks, then editor of the Sun. Even Ed Miliband flirted with the Right-wing papers at the beginning of his leadership before becoming disenchanted with them, and they with him.
Now Corbyn’s mockery has given way to open hatred and threats against the press in a way unprecedented in modern British politics. After the Sun revealed his meetings with a Czech spy in the 1980s, the Labour leader produced a video in which he accused it and other papers of ‘lies and smears’. More alarmingly for these titles, he undertook to clip their wings when Labour came to power. Addressing the ‘press barons’ with their ‘bad old habits’, he said, ‘Well, we’ve got news for them. Change is coming.’
I’ve got news for Corbyn: apart from the Mail’s Jonathan Rothermere, press barons are an extinct breed, and his lordship allows his editors to run the papers as they think fit and, in the case of the Mail and Brexit, contrary to his own europhile predilections. But I can see that the Labour leader is invoking an old stereotype in order to whip up the comrades’ ancestral animosities. There is surely little doubt that, if he ever comes to power, he will regulate newspapers in a pretty draconian way. This is not a happy prospect for those who cherish a free press.
Scarcely had these threats tumbled from Corbyn’s lips than the Mail scored a bull’s-eye in revealing the shameful past of Max Mosley, a champion of tighter newspaper control, and the benefactor of Impress, the new state-approved regulator shunned by the mainstream press. Even more to the point as far as Labour is concerned, Mosley is an intimate friend of its deputy leader, Tom Watson, and has given a whacking half a million pounds to fund his office.
The Mail’s revelations – which were taken up by the rest of the media, including, eventually, the ultra-cautious BBC – did not damage Corbyn. The Labour leader hates his comparatively moderate deputy and his deputy hates him. He and John Mcdonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, insisted that Watson accept no more money from Mosley. In a strange way, Corbyn found himself for a moment on the same side as the Mail, the paper he most hates. On the other hand, he won’t have been happy to have seen Impress discredited by its association with Mosley, since the state-approved regulator is the apple of his eye.
We may be certain that the mutual hatred between the Labour leader and the Tory press will persist. Corbyn may be correct in thinking he has nothing to lose. The Right-wing newspapers loathe him, and he might as well fight fire with fire. But I think he is seriously mistaken if he believes they are only a pathetic shadow of their former selves, and that social media are all that matter.
Roughly speaking, the Mail, Sun and Daily Telegraph boast a combined print readership of some 10 million, which is approaching a quarter of the total electorate. It’s actually more than a quarter of the people likely to vote, since the average age of these print readers is over 50, and they are more apt to turn out than disgruntled ‘snowflakes’. These papers also have enormous online readerships and, although in digital form they are less viscerally anti-corbyn than in their print editions (online papers tend to be prioritise entertainment over politics), they are still potent adversaries of Labour.
Despite his mocking rhetoric about declining Tory newspapers, Corbyn may realise in his heart (having been enlightened by Seumas Milne, his clever, Wykehamist, Marxist spin doctor) that they still carry enormous clout. Why would he seek to curtail them if they were really as irrelevant as he claims? Of course social media are important. But only a fool would write off the traditional press.