SEPTEMBER 21, 2015
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=170912#170912
Red Neoliberals: How Corbyn’s Victory Unmasked Britain’s Guardian
by JONATHAN COOK
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/21/red-neoliberals-how-corbyns-victory-unmasked-britains-guardian/
In autumn 2002 Ed Vulliamy, a correspondent for
Britain’s Sunday Observer newspaper, stumbled on
a terrible truth that many of us already suspected.
In a world-exclusive, he persuaded Mel Goodman, a
former senior Central Intelligence Agency
official who still had security clearance, to go
on record that the CIA knew there were no WMD in
Iraq. Everything the US and British governments
were telling us to justify the coming attack on Iraq were lies.
Then something even more extraordinary happened.
The Observer failed to print the story.
In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies recounts
that Vulliamy, one of the Observer’s most trusted
reporters, submitted the piece another six times
in different guises over the next half year. Each
time the Observer spiked the story.
Vulliamy never went public with this monumental
crime against real journalism (should there not
be a section for media war crimes at the Hague?).
The supposedly liberal-left Observer was never
held accountable for the grave betrayal of its
readership and the world community.
But at the weekend maybe the tables turned a
little. The Observer gave Vulliamy a platform in
its comment pages to take issue with an editorial
the previous week savaging Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader.
In understandably cautious mode, Vulliamy called
the paper’s stance towards Corbyn “churlish”,
warning that it had lost the chance to stand
apart from the rest of the British media. All had
taken vehemently against the new Labour leader
from the very beginning of his candidacy.
“we conjoined the chorus with our own –
admittedly more progressive – version of this
obsession with electoral strategy with little
regard to what Corbyn says about the principles
of justice, peace and equality (or less inequality).”
What do these two confrontations between Vulliamy
and the Observer –13 years apart; one public, one
not – indicate about the changing status of the liberal-left media?
To understand what’s going on, we also need to
consider the coverage of Corbyn in the Guardian,
the better-known daily sister paper of the Observer.
All the Guardian’s inner circle of commentators,
from Jonathan Freedland to Polly Toynbee, made
public that they were dead against Corbyn from
the moment he looked likely to win. When he
served simply to justify claims that the Labour
Party was a broad and tolerant church, these
commentators were in favour of his standing. But
as soon as he began to surge ahead, these same
liberal-left pundits poured more scorn on him
than they had reserved for any other party leader in living memory.
In a few months Corbyn has endured more contempt
from the fearless watchdogs of the left than the
current Conservative prime minister, David
Cameron, has suffered over many years.
The Guardian’s news coverage, meanwhile, followed
exactly the same antagonistic formula as that of
the rightwing press: ignore the policy issues
raised by Corbyn, concentrate on trivial or
perceived personality flaws, and frame stories
about him in establishment-friendly ways.
We have endured in the Guardian the same patently
ridiculous, manufactured reports about Corbyn,
portraying him as sexist, anti-semitic, unpatriotic, and much more.
We could expect the rightwing media to exploit
every opportunity to try to discredit Corbyn, but
looking at the talkbacks it was clear Guardian
readers expected much more from their paper than
simple-minded character assassination.
Red neoliberals
The reality is that Corbyn poses a very serious
challenge to supposedly liberal-left media like
the Guardian and the Observer, which is why they
hoped to ensure his candidacy was still-born and
why, now he is leader, they are caught in a terrible dilemma.
While the Guardian and Observer market themselves
as committed to justice and equality, but do
nothing to bring them about apart from promoting
tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global
neoliberal order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that
the apple cart needs upending.
If it achieves nothing else, Corbyn’s campaign
has highlighted a truth about the existing
British political system: that, at least since
the time of Tony Blair, the country’s two major
parliamentary parties have been equally committed
to upholding neoliberalism. The Blue Neoliberal
Party (the Conservatives) and the Red Neoliberal
Party (Labour) mark the short horizon of current
British politics. You can have either hardcore
neoliberalism or slightly more softcore neoliberalism.
Corbyn shows that there should be more to
politics than this false choice, which is why
hundreds of thousands of leftists flocked back to
Labour in the hope of getting him elected. In
doing so, they overwhelmed the parliamentary
Labour party (PLP), which vigorously opposed him becoming leader.
But where does this leave the Guardian and
Observer, both of which have consistently backed
“moderate” elements in the PLP? If Corbyn is
exposing the PLP as the Red Neoliberal Party,
what does that mean for the Guardian, the parliamentary party’s house paper?
Corbyn is not just threatening to expose the sham
of the PLP as a real alternative to the
Conservatives, but the sham of Britain’s
liberal-left media as a real alternative to the
press barons. Which is why the Freedlands and
Toynbees – keepers of the Guardian flame, of its
undeserved reputation as the left’s moral compass
– demonstrated such instant antipathy to his sudden rise to prominence.
They and the paper followed the rightwing media
in keeping the focus resolutely on Corbyn rather
than recognising the obvious truth: this was
about much more than one individual. The sudden
outpouring of support for Corbyn reflected both
an embrace of his authenticity and principles and
a much more general anger at the injustices,
inequalities and debasement of public life brought about by neoliberalism.
Corbyn captured a mood, one that demands real,
not illusory change. He is riding a wave, and to
discredit Corbyn is to discredit that wave.
Character assassination
The Guardian and the Observer, complicit for so
long with the Red Neoliberals led by Tony Blair,
Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, thought they could
kill off Corbyn’s campaign by joining in the
general media bullying. They thought they could
continue to police the boundaries of the
political left – of what counts as credible on
the left – and place Corbyn firmly outside those borders.
But he won even so – and with an enormous lead
over his rivals. In truth, the Guardian’s
character assassination of Corbyn, rather than
discrediting him, served only to discredit the paper with its own readers.
Corbyn’s victory represented a huge failure not
just for the political class in all its narrow
neoliberal variations, but also for the media
class in all its narrow neoliberal variations. It
was a sign that the Guardian’s credibility with
its own readers is steadily waning.
The talkback sections in the Guardian show its
kneejerk belittling of Corbyn has inserted a
dangerous seed of doubt in the minds of a
proportion of its formerly loyal readers. Many of
those hundreds of thousands of leftists who
joined the Labour party either to get Corbyn
elected or to demonstrate their support
afterwards are Guardian readers or potential
readers. And the Guardian and Observer ridiculed them and their choice.
Belatedly the two papers are starting to sense
their core readership feels betrayed. Vulliamy’s
commentary should be seen in that light. It is
not a magnanimous gesture by the Observer, or
even an indication of its commitment to
pluralism. It is one of the early indications of
a desperate damage limitation operation.
We are likely to see more such “reappraisals” in
the coming weeks, as the liberal-left media tries
to salvage its image with its core readers.
This may not prove a fatal blow to the Guardian
or the Observer but it is a sign of an
accelerating trend for the old media generally
and the liberal-left media more specifically.
Papers like the Guardian and the Observer no
longer understand their readerships both because
they no longer have exclusive control of their
readers’ perceptions of what is true and because
the reality – not least, polarising inequality
and climate degradation – is becoming ever more difficult to soft-soap.
Media like the Guardian are tied by a commercial
and ideological umbilical cord to a neoliberal
order a large swath of their readers are growing
restless with or feel downright appalled by.
In 2003 the Observer knowingly suppressed the
truth about Iraq and WMD to advance the case for
an illegal, “preventive” war, one defined in
international law as the supreme war crime.
At that time – digitally the equivalent of the
Dark Ages compared to now – the paper just about
managed to get away with its complicity in a
crime against humanity. The Observer never felt
the need to make real amends with Vulliamy or the readers it betrayed.
But in the age of a burgeoning new media, the
Observer and Guardian are discovering that the
rules are shifting dangerously under their feet.
Corbyn is a loud messenger of that change.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special
Prize for Journalism. His latest books are
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed
Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"PEPIS" group. Please feel free to forward it to anyone who might be interested
particularly your political representatives, journalists and spiritual leaders/dudes.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pepis?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PEPIS" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
