No exaggeration to say that this excerpt below from the UK Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow reads like it comes out of the Onion. Corporate journalists are often at their funniest when they do not intend to be.
What does the Oldham result really tells us Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership? A Q&A
Almost all the media reporting from Oldham suggested that Labour was facing a real challenge from Ukip, partly because some traditional supporters had doubts about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Yet Labour won handsomely. Is that because the journalists were all just biased and wrong, as the Corbyn camp suggests? (See 10.26am.) Or were there other factors at play?
Here’s a Q&A that may untangle some of these issues.
Q: All this stuff about Corbyn being unpopular – did the journalists just get it wrong, or make it up?
No. Sometimes journalists do distort things to fit a political agenda but over the last few weeks there have been multiple reports from serious, reputable journalists who have either witnessed first-hand Oldham Labour-leaning voters criticising Corbyn, or reported Labour figures echoing these concerns. For example, there was Bagehot in the Economist, this report in the Daily Telegraph, Rafael Behr in the Guardian, George Eaton in the New Statesman and Helen Pidd in the Guardian.
I did not arrive in Oldham until yesterday afternoon but I was curious about this and I spent about an hour and a half talking to people in the Spindles shopping centre and I encountered the same phenomenon too…
Sparrow discovered by walking around in a store for an hour and a half that Corbyn does not have 100% support. Amazing. What’s even more amazing is that Sparrow thought that was a way to check the claims of the “serious” and “reputable” journalists who idiotically talked up the UKIP’s chances in the byelection.
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2 Comments
The media paper, radio and TV, and their minions are all bought by their corporate right wing employers.. So it’s little surprise that they are biased in their reporting. As long as their ability to put food on the table is locked into pleasing their right wing editors, and not to offering an alternative to the far right capitalist mumbo jumbo, the far right distortions will prevail; to no one’s surprise.
I wrote an article on Corbyn for Inquisitr and believe the vitriol against him from Oldham is true. Quite blatantly, the media has attacked him, ruthlessly as well, and the labour party’s descent against him is also horrific.