The left and the media. From Harold Wilson to Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn
Criticism of the way the media covers the Labour Party is not new.
Harold Wilson, fed up with criticism, wanted the political editor of the Observer Nora Beloff in the 1960s sacked. He failed but Wilson remained very suspicious of the media. His first spin doctor (in 1963/4) Tony Benn had lifelong concerns.
On 3rd May 1979 there was a General Election. Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government had fallen on a vote of confidence (by one vote) at the end of March 1979.
The Tories won 339 seats and Labour 269 seats (Liberals 11). Tony Benn wrote in his diary:
My majority went down (in Bristol) from over 9,000 to 1,890; the Liberal vote slumped and the Tories picked up the extra votes.. I declined steadfastly to go on any of the Election post-mortem programmes. The media was utterly corrupt in this Election, trying to make it a media event
The media continued to attack Labour under the leadership of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock but was notably kinder in the New Labour period. Some might say this was because New Labour’s policies were much closer to what media owners wanted. No doubt there is truth in that but there was also an understanding of how the media worked and how it could be used to positive effect at least in the first years.
That has gone again and the bias against Jeremy Corbyn lies not just in many of the paper’s Editorial policies but also in the information that feeds news stories for example from the studies of political scientists.
A recent study by Peter Allen at the University of Bath found that the biases of leading political scientists were having an unfortunate impact on the quality of the research they produced:
https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/political-science-punditry-and-the-corbyn-problem
The world however moves on. People don’t necessarily get their information from the mainstream media, for better and sometimes worse, so the biases that may have helped to stop Neil Kinnock or Ed Miliband reaching No.10 may be less significant now
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