The media believes it is beyond critique – but it too needs modernising

Rachel Godfrey Wood writes on the media onslaught against Jeremy Corbyn.

One of Jeremy Corbyn’s most significant, albeit unintentional, achievements is something which even the most hardened leftist would have thought impossible: to provoke the British media to plunge into new depths of mendacity and defamation. It’s not surprising that the mainstream media would be hostile to Corbyn, but one might have expected them to come up with something better than Ware’s paranoid Panorama ‘expose’, Gilligan’s McCarthyite conspiracy theories, or, indeed, giving him grief for suggesting that using a nuclear weapon wouldn’t be a great idea. As Aaron Bastani argues on a recent video on Novara Media, perhaps the most startling feature of these attacks is their appallingly low level of quality. That makes them all the easier to laugh it off, but it by no means makes them harmless.

The reaction of the right to Corbyn’s speech in Brighton on Tuesday was textbook: you can’t blame the media. When faced with criticisms of the media, particularly that which is privately-owned, a lot of right-wingers and liberals will simply shrug and point out the fact that people buy the newspapers, implying that this imbues the media with a certain democratic legitimacy. After all, how could the media be doing any more than representing the views of their consumers? This argument rests on a purely neoliberal understanding of markets, information, and democracy. Markets are considered the best mechanism for processing people’s preferences, and information is a good like any other, so any influence of the media over politics is simply a legitimate reflection of their commercial success.

At a stroke, this argument removes the media establishment from a sphere within which they can be legitimately criticised and challenged. This argument depends on rather heroic assumptions about people’s consumption habits and political aspirations: for example, assuming that because people buy a newspaper or watch a TV programme, they therefore subscribe to all the ideas it portrays, and are happy for the owners of these enterprises to therefore act as their own democratic intermediaries. Moreover, it overlooks the blatant dishonesty involved in much of reporting.

So what is to be done? The role of the mainstream media in propping up support for the status quo is so essential, that undermining that credibility is a pre-requisite for any successful leftist project. The most vivid example of this is in Greece, where the ‘Oxi’ vote won 61% in spite of total media opposition. The good news for the left is that, in most instances of popular discontent, the media is so embedded within the status quo that it cannot help but undermine its own credibility, and recent weeks have shown us that the British media is no different.

The media has built up a sense of entitlement which has become increasingly apparent in recent days, with journalists apparently outraged at Corbyn’s alleged failure to ‘play by the rules’. Even joking criticisms of the media by Corbyn have been criticised as ‘attacks’. This raises the possibility that the hysterical response of the British media in response to Corbyn may actually be a pre-requisite for serious democratic change. In the long run, though, that won’t necessarily be enough: the British media have shown themselves capable of taking hits, making partial concessions, and then reconstituting their key ideas in powerful ways. For example, the recent acknowledgement by the media of the moral need to take in refugees fleeing Syria was quickly followed up by a questioning of whether they were all ‘real’ refugees and a new push to justify military action in Syria.

Therefore the question of the democratisation of the British media will need to be raised seriously by the left. This has been touched upon briefly by Corbyn during his campaign, and is guaranteed to provoke predictable howls about authoritarianism by the right-wing and liberal establishment, for whom any form of democratic control of the media is anathema. However, concerns won’t come solely from the establishment: ordinary people, including many who sympathise with Corbyn’s proposals, will have legitimate concerns about any proposals to implement democratic reforms on the media.

This poses a serious challenge to Corbynistas: to come up with serious proposals which aim to dismantle the umbilical cord that currently exists between the media and the British establishment, without simply replacing it with a new form of top-down control. Corbyn has already shown an ability to turn Blairite language on its head, adopting terms formerly monopolised by the right. The left needs to show that it has an agenda for the media which is both modernising and meritocratic. This is a challenge, but by no means impossible. After all, there is nothing remotely modern or meritocratic about the media we have now: change is long overdue.

Rachel Godfrey Wood is an activist for Left Unity and a PhD student at the Institute of Development Studies. This article first appeared on new pro-Corbyn blog Leaders of the Opposition.