PRESS FLAK Czechmate for right-wing attack on leftie leader

Guardian included 1 of Corbyn's popular (with younger aud) online vids

Jeremy Corbyn was accused by right-wing papers of being a Soviet spy - an absurd story that was quickly proved false, but led to massive TV and radio coverage. Remember this if exploring the proposition that circulation decline means the loss of press power over politics and public opinion; listeners and viewers who never pick up a newspaper are exposed to their agenda as the broadcast media routinely take their news agenda from the papers.

The story very clearly showed up the current binary approach between Labour (left) and Tory (right) parties:

[Corbyn accused] rightwing papers of being controlled by billionaire tax exiles, with the party repeating that it planned to hold a media ownership review if it got into power, and sending a lawyer’s letter to a Tory MP over an ill-judged tweet.The Conservatives, meanwhile, have sought to stoke the row in an attempt to get it picked up by broadcasters – while at the same time trying to pretend they are above the fray by arguing, none too subtly, that it is the party that supports the press and the existing structure of independent regulation. [Guardian 'spying row' article]

Clause 1 of the Editors Code (Accuracy) appears to have taken a typical battering, free of consequence or censure from the regulator, with the right-wing press' combined attempted assault on Opposition leader Corbyn. Branded a traitor and a spy, his response has been to go on the attack, promise Leveson part 2 (the PM has taken the opposite stance), and action to tackle the lack of diversity of ownership, characterised as 'billionaire tax exiles'.

Labour and Corbyn are calculating that by using social media they will win this battle and thwart the attempted character assassination, with only older voters significantly influenced by the press. A bold volte face for a party which slavishly sought press favour under Blair's, who notoriously flew to Australia before becoming PM for a meeting with Murdoch.

Corbyn's 2018 Labour are calculating that the declining press industry is losing its grip on public opinion and are using social media to distribute short videos, quotes etc to engage with a primarily youth audience to counter the mainstream media discourse and flak that he faces.

They did, though, also turn to the law - a legal letter forced a Tory MP to delete a libellous anti-Corbyn tweet, apologise and make a charitable donation.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wooed the press, long maintaining personal relationships with Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre respectively, while in No 10. But personal attacks on Corbyn motivate the party’s supporters, particularly younger voters, who don’t read the Sun, Mail or Telegraph, and who don’t necessarily remember the cold war.Ed Miliband broke with the Murdoch press in 2011 following the phone-hacking scandal, promising to break up the Sun and Times empire if he was elected. A controversial attack on his Marxist father Ralph, described by the Daily Mail as “the man who hates Britain” led to a furious row with Dacre’s newspaper in 2013. But if both moves were popular at the time, he nevertheless was badly beaten in the 2015 election.

The PM (May) used the story in PMQs, and later pontificated on the free press

“A free press is one of the foundations on which our democracy is built,” in an attempt to claim a moral high ground.Labour ... repeat[ed] that the party wanted to carry out the second part of the Leveson inquiry into press regulation and insisting that its media review would aim to boost diversity in British media, without specifying any details as to how.In doing so, it risked entrenching an already adversarial relationship with the rightwing press – but the Labour calculus is that, except possibly with older voters, in the social media era that does not matter.

Guardian: Spying row: how Corbyn seized chance to take on the Sun.

POLITICAL INFLUENCE MPs slam incessant inaccuracies

Remember that Clause One of the Editors Code concerns accuracy, a rather basic requirement of news media, and a legal requirement for broadcast media (but not the self-regulated press of course).

The unsubtle, untrammeled flak (Chomsky filter...) that has seen MPs labelled traitors over Brexit votes carries a strong whiff of fascism. Death threats were received by those government MPs who dared defy government policy, which of course closely mirrors the editorial policy of the right-wing press, especially the Mail - which historically supported fascism, including Britain's own wannabe Hitler, Oswald Mosley.

The short quote of one Tory MP would be a useful one to learn ("newspapers that seem entirely disinhibited in the inaccuracies they peddle“):
"Some of this was fuelled and orchestrated by newspapers that seem entirely disinhibited in the inaccuracies they peddle and the vitriolic abuse they are prepared to heap on those who do ­anything they consider to be at variance with their version of what Brexit should be. This both obscures the real issues, and encourages an atmosphere of ­crisis and confrontation between binary ­positions that leads directly to the death threats that we have received.”

Anna Soubry, another rebel, said such reports fostered a climate of extremism. “That’s the thing that concerns me about all of this. We’re increasingly having a form of politics in which debate is not based on ideas. It’s based on complete and total misconceptions. It’s whipping up a storm by newspapers. It’s poisoning public life.”

Tory rebels urge Theresa May to form cross-party alliance for soft Brexit https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/17/tory-rebels-urge-theresa-may-to-form-cross-party-alliance-for-soft-brexit?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

PRESS Facebook not IPSO for S*n slurred MP

NB: Taken from a source with a clear left-wing subjectivity.

Let's start with a fact that everyone should know. The S*n is a despicable hard-right propaganda rag that nobody should read. They have no respect for the truth or basic human decency. If they decide to attack you for any reason, they will print lie after lie to smear you, even if you've just survived a horrific football stadium disaster at the hands of a negligent police force.
On evening after The S*n mocked a footballer with black ancestry by comparing him to a gorilla and attacked the city of Liverpool on the eve of the Hillsborough disaster, hacks at The S*n decided to turn their fire on the Labour MP and Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon.
The S*n's political editor Tom Newton Dunn attacked Burgon for supposedly joining "a heavy metal band that delights in Nazi symbols". Everything about the story is fact-averse nonsense. [SOURCE: The S*n's attempted hatchet job on Richard Burgon is spectacularly idiotic.]

Did this MP turn to IPSO?

Nope. He tweeted. And articles such as the above are the result.

Does that undo the impact on public opinion (anti-Labour, what Chomsky would recognise as anti-left-wing [he actually wrote of anti-communism when originally writing the propaganda model at the height of the Cold War] FLAK)? No. This is part of long-term influencing of public opinion, just as the 1000s of anti-EU articles, no matter how absurd (the EU insists British bananas must be straight is a fairly typical example of the dripfeed over decades), clearly impacted on the Brexit vote.

It does suggest IPSO is poorly regarded.

Here's more from the original article: