The Media Reform Coalition analysed nearly 500 pieces across eight national newspapers, including The Sun, The Times, Guardian and Daily Mail, and found 60% of their articles were ‘negative’, meaning they were openly hostile or expressed animosity or ridicule.
Out of the 494 articles across the papers during Corbyn’s first seven days at leader, 60% (296 articles) were negative, with only 13% positive stories (65 articles) and 27% taking a “neutral” stance (133 articles), the report says.
If you’ve read the UK press, you know this understates the situation, if anything. Ridicule hardly covers the general slant of the press.
And yet, Corbyn is the least unpopular of the UK’s leaders. He has negative ratings, yes, but they are the least negative.
The actively hostile press in Greece could not stop Syriza, nor could they stop the population from voting NO in the austerity referendum. Of course, Syriza decided to continue with austerity anyway, but the media failed.
In the US we have the media openly calling Trump a fascist, and that hasn’t slowed him down a bit. (I’m anti-Trump, as it happens, lest anyone think I approve of him.) To be sure, they keep giving him massive amounts of oxygen, by reporting on everything he says, because he knows how to be newsworthy, but their ridicule has not slowed him down.
One suspects, indeed, that it has made him stronger. Those who support Trump distrust the media. That the media is against Trump is a positive to them. This certainly isn’t an insane metric; for decades, the media has pushed mainstream candidates who have not improved Trump supporters’ lives one bit, after all.
Regardless, the ideological mechanism of control through the press is failing. In France, LePen rises. In Britain, Corbyn. In the US, Trump and, to a lesser extent, Sanders (who is bad on Imperialism, but good on many domestic issues). This trend continues elsewhere, such as in Spain and Portugal.
This isn’t entirely a good thing, as I presume is evident. It is just a thing, good or bad. The establishment is losing control.
It is, however, an opportunity. If you’re someone whose ideas were considered non-mainstream, you finally have your chance. Whether those ideas are good or bad, well, that’s another matter.
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Bruce Wilder
To the extent that politics is a political society thinking aloud, we seem to have lost the ability to deliberate intelligently or morally. The decline of journalism into the abyss has been part of that.
I don’t know that that development opens up the field at all. Where’s the capacity to consider or digest any even half-way sophisticated argument?
Donald Trump talks like a 3rd grader. That’s not a clever insult so much as it is an analytic description. How does a polity that is so debased that it wants leaders to talk like 3rd graders work its way toward adaptive reform responsive to reality?
jnjk
Irregardless,
*cough*
geoff
I disagree with your assertion that the US media is openly calling Trump a fascist. From what I have read and seen, they are in fact bending over backwards to avoid calling him a racist and a liar, which he obviously is. Perhaps their strategy (assuming they are in some way anti-Trump, which I do not) is simply to let the man hang himself through his overtly racist comments and obvious lies (the “cheering 9/11 New Jersey Muslims” for example). That’s obviously not working.
realitychecker
Trump is a big fat monkey wrench in the rigged and corrupt nightmare machine made up of the two parties and the corporate media. The machine WE allowed to be put in place over decades because we didn’t ever have the guts to fight like we gave a damn.
I am so fucking grateful that SOMEONE is shaking things up. I don’t care if he says and does some things I don’t like. We have no right to expect or demand a perfect messenger after we have shown ourselves to be such spineless pukes.
Without Trump, we’d just be relegated YET AGAIN to bending over for some supposed lesser evil. And continuing down the road to hell. We all know that is true.
You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Time to get real, boys and girls. There are no unicorns in our future.
V. Arnold
Irregardless;
Usage
Irregardless is widely heard, perhaps arising under the influence of such perfectly correct forms as irrespective, but should be avoided by careful users of English. Use regardless to mean ‘without regard or consideration for’ or ‘nevertheless’. Oxford Dictionary
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
If the Deep State does not want Trump, it will show Trump (and realitychecker) what “getting real” is.
If the Deep State does not want Trump, I see it as having 3 options:
(1) Use the computerized, unaccountable voting computers to give the GOP nomination to someone else besides Trump–or to give the general election to Hillary, if she can’t win it on her own.
(2) Find–or fabricate–a scandal which will force Trump to withdraw from the race.
(3) “Lone nut with gun” or “Tragic vehicle accident”, probably an aircraft crash.
(Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, Squire.)
Selah.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
*sigh* I meant “computerized, unaccountable voting MACHINES”.
I CAN HAZ EDIT FEECHUR, PLZ?!? 😛
ekstase
I think you’re right. The ways that information was siphoned to us aren’t holding it back anymore. And we have now got a world full of people who’ve developed a taste for the truth.
It’s a fascinating time to be alive, if one can handle the ride.
Bill H
@ekstase; Just because the mass media propaganda is failing does not mean that anything resembling truth is prevailing.
V. Arnold
This isn’t entirely a good thing, as I presume is evident. It is just a thing, good or bad. The establishment is losing control.
Hmm, I think the establishment may be losing control of effectively disseminating it’s propaganda (and I’m not certain that’s true); but the establishment(s) is obviously in full control of its society(ies), as recently witnessed in France and England.
The U.S. isn’t even in doubt; even voting no longer matters in the national elections.
In the U.S., a chronically uninformed/misinformed citizenry will always make the wrong decisions; as witnessed by the candidates for president on both sides; corrupt liars, loons, hawks, fascisti, clowns, and majority neo-liberal…
someofparts
http://usuncut.com/politics/time-magazine-snubs-bernie-sanders-person-of-the-year/
Time Magazine – because you’ve got to put something in the bottom of that bird cage.
realitychecker
To Ivory Bill Woodpecker:
Yes, of course the Deep State will consider those responses to the Trump phenomenon. Should we accept that as defeat and just surrender, or should we support Trump as being antithetical to the Deep State uglinesses?
“Getting real” means dealing with a lot of ugliness, because we have assented to living with too many delusions for too long.
OR, we could just go on pretending that all is well and the good guys are running things just fine.
Which do you choose?
kdfj
Does the GOP have “superdelegates” of the sort that made the Democratic primary voters irrelevant in 2008? Why rig the vote covertly when you can do it overtly? (And IIRC isn’t the Republican nomination result purely advisory anyway?)
markfromireland
Ian,
This has happened before, you might like to do a bit of research on the loss of trust for newspapers amongst the British populace in particular working class newspaper readers. The disparaging expression which I heard and employed as a child:
“He read it in a newspaper” and its variants such as “Read that in a newspaper did you?”
The meanings of which are that somebody is a credulous fool comes from that time.
You could do a lot worse than starting with Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory”.
mfi
Ian Welsh
Never heard that before MFI. Thanks.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
I said “if the Deep State does not want Trump”.
Maybe it finds him acceptable.
I do not find him, or any other Republican, acceptable.
I may actually hold my nose and vote for the Democratic presidential candidate.
Ivory Bill Woodpecker
To borrow from Bill H above, just because the corporate mass media opinion-shapers largely oppose Trump does not mean Trump is a good guy.
markfromireland
@ Ian
The cultural impact of WWI is a fascinating and very broad topic and well worth reading up on in its own right. This particular aspect of it is particularly germane to our current circumstances.
mfi
V.Rainov
@MFI
That’s a massive topic, with many many ramifications for us now. I was surprised (sort of ) that the centenary passed with almost nothing but pop. history stuff.
markfromireland
@ V.Rainov
Not really surprising, that war led directly to the fall of the European imperial system. So analysis free pop history would be the order of the day. Can’t have the peasantry thinking. Not good for business.
mfi
realitychecker
IBP
When the Establishment of both parties, and the corporate media, are all squarely against someone, maybe, just maybe, that someone brings something positive for us regular folks. IOW, whatever breaks down what we are currently trapped in is most likely an improvement.
Lesser evilism will doom us all if we don’t get away from regarding it as an acceptable, indeed, the only ‘reasonable,’ paradigm. Just look at where that paradigm has taken us already.
mgdv
Not to mention the uncomfortable implications of how the idea that a single terrorist attack could somehow justify waging a war of world conquest was widely regarded as transparently absurd, and proof that the rulers of the Central Powers were completely barking mad.