Jeremy Corbyn he's in the SA

One can only imagine where that leaves supporters of a team that has finished below them for 21 successive seasons in the delusion stakes.

Christ you’re some man for meaningless stats and graphs. Have you a correlation graph for the amount of sh!te you talk? X axis being the length of time you talk and Y axis being sh!te talk.

Spurs fans tend to be a far more grounded lot. Its its not working out with the leader, we’ll move him on as well.

Trying the Michael Foot formula again is a bit like asking Arsene Wenger every year since 2004 to give the same recipe a go for another year and see what happens.

Corbyn is open to legitimate criticism in the same way that any party leader is and nobody has ever said otherwise. Jones is absolutely entitled to give what he sees as legitimate criticism. Other Guardian writers such as Polly Toynbee have been rather less measured in their hatchet job articles and have regularly printed outright falsehoods.

I asked you for an evaluation of the media’s performance as regards Corbyn, and you haven’t given one other than to say the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph are not pro-Labour. Fascinating insight, that.

The study I posted clearly shows that there is a concerted media effort to smear Corbyn.

The Miliband photo was obviously als an attempt to smear him at the time.

That inherent pro-right-wing media bias, focus on smearing, and concentration of ownership of media within the hands of so few people should be of concern to anybody who values democracy.

I gave you an answer.

Are you saying that “Red Ed” was treated so much better than Corbyn that allowed him to destroy Corbyn’s polling figures? That is laughable.

The point about whinging over the media is not taking any responsibility for his poor leadership. You hide behind it as it suits you.

Facts don’t care about your feelings Mike

Stats don’t always tell the whole story.

Again, I asked you for an evaluation of the media’s performance as regards Corbyn - you didn’t give me an answer.

You put merely put up a load of polls, which is fine, but that’s not an answer to the question.

Miliband was the victim of negative media coverage for sure, but certainly not to anywhere near the same parody-like extent as Corbyn is.

I’d also be interested to know if you think media representation, particularly misrepresentation, affects voting patterns.

The Brexit campaign (for which you were on the “Remain” side if I remember correctly) being a pertinent case in point.

Toynbee is an utter cunt. As far as I am concerned, if Brexit can happen, then Jel can be elected PM in four years time. All bets are off.

Two studies were written about Jeremy Corbyn and getting “undue” pressure from the media, more than his previous incumbents. Bart Cammaerts of the LSE wrote the one you mentioned up there. He had previously written a piece, before Corbyn got elected, wrote a strong endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. A good piece here on it;

The study was not comparative and made no attempt to examine coverage of past leaders of opposition parties, or of coverage of other politicians during that time frame. It also contains several statements that cannot be substantiated from the work undertaken by Cammaerts and his team such as that Corbyn had been ‘treated with scorn and ridicule’ in a way ‘that no other political leader is or has been’.

…

It seems fair to ask whether this study was undertaken as a serious academic endeavour or to lend credence to Cammaerts’ own beliefs and serve as a defence to Corbyn and protect him from criticisms levelled at him by other politicians and the media.

https://medium.com/@rose_hasler/bias-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-understanding-the-truth-behind-the-recent-academic-studies-on-cd3fd1700b76#.wjkrpdmd0

The other study is reviewed as well in the piece, including that authors links.

You seem to think I said media bias doesn’t exist, and now are bleating on about Brexit. My point is that Corbyn trails Red Ed’s progress in the polls consistently. Milliband got a terrible time from the press from the word go, and unlike Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, didn’t have stuff to his name like IRA sympathies to his name (which the British public dislike). The only study which you have to back up your assertion is a flawed one from a biased researcher. Anyone who follows British politics knows Red Ed got a tonne of abuse from 2010-2015, but he still polled far far better than Jeremy Corbyn’s Debating Society.

The title of the piece you quote is “Bias is in the eye of the beholder”. This is ironic as it completely fails to point out any flaws in the methodology of the study and instead an ad hominem attack is made on the researchers’ motivations.

If it can’t point out any problems with the methodology of the study, the author would have been better off not wasting her time in writing the piece as it’s pretty pointless otherwise and merely falls into being another anti-Corbyn (or in this case anti-academic studies which prove the depth of the media bias against Corbyn) opinion piece.

By not pointing out flaws in the methodology of the study it merely unwittingly backs it up.

My personal view is that it is undeniable that Corbyn has come under considerably worse media attack than Miliband - Miliband was not attacked in the three nominally “left” (ish) papers - the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror as Corbyn has been.

Transparently ridiculous things like “not bowing far enough” at the Remembrance Sunday commemorations as well as the manufactured “anti-semitism” smear campaign were not visited upon Miliband.

If you’re correct @Sidney then why is he attacked more than Milliband? In particular why is he attached by “left-wing press”?

because the left wing press is full of Blairites.

He isn’t. A study which used no comparisons to other opposition leaders and written by a Corbyn supporter says so.

This is absolutely crucial for Sidney as he cannot explain how Corbyn has trailed Red Ed’s numbers so badly.

The difference between Ed Milliband and Jeremy Corbyn is that with Ed they had to dig into his father’s past, with Jez and his pal McDonnell you only need to show their sympathising with Gerry Adams et al. For Sidney that is no big deal, but for Brts it is.

As for the “manufactured” anti-semitism campaign. :joy:

Let’s have a look at Ken Livingstone’s comments on the Jews.

2005 - Livingstone in hot water with the Jewish community after comparing a Jewish reporter with a concentration camp guard.
_- Hosts (and warmly hugs) cleric Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, a man criticised for excusing suicide bombings and being an anti-Semite. _

1 March 2012 - Livingstone in hot water with the Jewish community after it is reported that in a meeting with Jewish community leaders Livingstone says Jews won’t vote for him as they are rich. This leads to a letter being written to Ed Miliband to express concern at his views.

_An excerpt: _

At various points in the discussion Ken used the words Zionist, Jewish and Israeli, interchangeably, as if they meant the same, and did so in a pejorative manner. These words are not interchangeable and to do so is highly offensive, particularly when repeated over and again as was done.

_Ken, towards the end of the meeting, stated that he did not expect the Jewish community to vote Labour as votes for the left are inversely proportional to wealth levels, and suggested that as the Jewish community is rich, we simply wouldn’t vote for him.

_

_
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/65425/ken-livingstone-jews-wont-vote-labour-because-they-are-rich

Corbyn broughtt Livingstone back into the fold as chair of the defence review. Then Ken starts talking Zionists again. :joy: “Manufactured” :joy:

Again, mate, you completely fail to pick out anything wrong with the methodology.

Blow yourself out.

Tell me, are you one of those people who deliberately confuse being anti-Israel’s actions with being anti-semitic?

You are , aren’t you? :relaxed:

Miliband is a ultimately a politician of the establishment and was merely a sort of Blair-lite as leader.

Media and media organisations tend to be a bit of an echo chamber. The Tory media, which is the majority of the UK media, will always attack anybody who is the Labour leader, bar Blair, and thus Miliband did take a pounding in the right-wing media.

But there is a certain spectrum of opinion that is considered as valid by the media in general and the media sees Corbyn as lying outside that whereas Miliband ultimately lay inside it. Nominally “left-wing” press also adhere to this spectrum of legitimacy. This is despite Corbyn’s policies being pretty mainstream social democratic in a traditional sense.

This spectrum of legitimacy has been established over decades by media ownership taking the media in general in right-wing direction, political results and future expectations of them, and constant reinforcement within the media bubble through media-savvy pro-business think tanks, ownership which is sympathetic to advertising interests, and content which is advertorial in nature. Miliband was willing to work within that kind of system whereas Corbyn is seen as hostile to it.

“Consensus” brooks no disagreement and woe betide those who disagree. We’ve seen it regularly in this country.

In the US Trump lies outside that spectrum of legitimacy too, although for very different reasons than Corbyn, and I’d argue both the Trump and Brexit campaigns were/are classic insider/establishment campaigns posing as anti-establishment for strategic gain because they realise the political landscape has changed in terms of hostility to “establishment politicians”.

The Israel lobby is a huge influence on media and politics in general in the UK. Because Corbyn has always been anti-Israeli government policy, this is a convenient avenue of attack against him in the media in a way it couldn’t be with Miliband.

Corbyn is portrayed as having dodgy friends when the Tories have far, far dodgier ones such as the Saudi regime and Islamists in Syria, as well as being slavishly pro-Israeli government policy and completely beholden to financial interests, but this is nearly always conveniently overlooked.

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Read it. The study makes no research comparison with other leaders coverage, it merely states without any backup that his treatment was worse.

The research was written by a guy who has written glowing praise of Corbyn before his election. He has a history of writing about Labour needing to be more radical. The first thing he did with the research was personally post it in Jeremy Corbyn Facebook groups. As a piece of research so widely quoted without question in the media (how ironic), it is discredited.

Jeremy Corbyn being attacked over his past with Sinn Féin and the IRA is the type of thing you are talking about. This is “outside” the normal spectrum and is easy peasy for the media to attack him over. You might yourself be a terrorist sympathiser, but most decent people in Ireland and Britain revile Gerry Adams et al.