Sunday, November 20, 2016

Guardian Media Group needs an online extra in the struggle against Brexit

I am getting more convinced they have decided not to report Corbyn. Negative reporting during the leadership election did not do the trick so now they seem to just prefer the Lib Dems and the House of Lords plus the occasional Conservative MP.

Saturday story mostly about apparent splits around Keith Starmer. Thing is I cannot find what the difference is in what various shadow cabinet people have to say. They accept the decision from the referendum. There are policies for parliament to discuss. I recently saw John McDonnell on Andrew Marr show. The opportunity he sees is to meet with other left political organisations in Europe. I can't see where this clashes with anything Starmer has said.

Paragraph 12 just in the middle, the bit that interests me.

The Labour leader was praised at Westminster for his robust performance against Theresa May at this week’s prime minister’s questions, when he accused her government of being in a “total shambles” over Brexit.

Surely if the Guardian was mostly concerned with Brexit rather than rubbishing Corbyn, this is the sort of thing that would relate to the headline and be further up the story?

Then today Andrew Rawnsley writes about the difficulties for Liberal opinion faced with Trump and Brexit. Nine paragraphs in -


You can say the new “populists” are phoneys and presume their mendacities and contradictions will be exposed once people have experience of how they wield power. Jeremy Corbyn was doing that yesterday when he had a pop at the “fake anti-elitism of rich white men like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump”. The Labour leader makes a good point. But there was a better one he could have made. Why have a former commodity broker and a billionaire property developer proved more effective at mobilising voters discontented with their economic lot than did the Labour party at our most recent general election?

This is I think the only reporting of Corbyn's speech in the Observer. Corbyn was not fronting the Labour Party at the last general election. A bit more space could be given to the history around Blair and Brown and others who kept popping up during the EU referendum as arranged by Will Straw and Lord Mandelson. How well did this work out? Lord Darling sharing a platform with Osborne for example.

Trouble is that Guardian Media Group seem to be set on this path. They worry about the universities, UK image as well as research funding. Corbyn may be reaching a wider audience, much more likely if reported.

So the Guardian etc should be read alongside Twitter and YouTube as a way to reach the sources they choose to ignore and devote their journalism to hiding.








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