After the latest tabloid assault on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, from which he has survived with his party’s popularity ratings more or less unscathed, our free and fearless press has moved its campaign to trash Jezza no further forward.
The media establishment could, but will not, understand why Jezza remains popular, and that running guilt-by-association scare stories, and jumping up and down to the point of wetting themselves over his occasional stumble over an interviewer’s questioning, will not serve this process well, if at all. But they aren’t for understanding.
Worse, those within it that usually get many complex political issues find it just as hard as the fingers-in-ears-I-can’t-hear-you brigade. Take the usually assured and sensible Ian Dunt, who has dismissed Jezza with “It's been years now and we've not heard any original or incisive political thoughts from Corbyn. He's so very boring”. He’d have hated Attlee.
After Corbyn failed to answer a question to the satisfaction of The New European - a publication that has taken its eye off the Brexit ball in order to kick Labour - James O’Brien, one of few LBC hosts to be consistently sensible, sneered “I take it all back. He’s a veritable master of the straight answer. Utterly unlike all those other politicians. Amazed he exposes himself to proper questions so rarely. Clearly committed to fulfilling the membership’s desire to stop Brexit. This could hardly have gone better”.
And those responses are as nothing when put alongside the screaming and baying denunciations of papers like the Mail and Sun. But Jezza must be doing something right, as Jim Pickard has hinted when he tells “Buried in the Electoral Commission figures is fact that Tory party's income from membership has slumped from £1.46m to £835,000 in a year, for some reason.....compares to Labour getting £16m from membership subscriptions, up from £14m the previous year”. Labour is popular. Now ask why.
John Shafthauer can tell them. “for the media types who still don't get the Corbyn 'cult': - He talks about issues that actually affect people who support him (austerity, housing, etc) - Other politicians largely don't - You don't think these issues are important because they don't affect you”. The Buses problem again - “We in the media don’t use buses, so they aren’t important”. Except IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU IN THE MEDIA BUBBLE.
He went on “You never see any serious discussion about why people support him because it would look incredibly bad on all the people who largely stood on the sidelines while austerity fucked everyone over”. But it didn’t affect most of the media establishment, so there they are believing that it therefore doesn’t exist. There was more.
“Because of austerity cuts to disability funding, we homeschool our son. I don't really believe the other parties of centrists rivals within Labour would undo that. Millions of people across the country have similar stories, & all of them are ignored or deemed ‘cultists’”. Quite. But they aren’t cultists. And it’s not a cult.
Labour is a massively popular party. That is down to Corbyn’s leadership, his message, his policies, his understanding of voters’ concerns, and thus his leadership.
This is not a challenging concept to grasp. But too many in the media refuse to do so.
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