[D66] Red Neoliberals: How Corbyn’s Victory Unmasked Britain’s Guardian

[J.N.]

"should there not be a section for media war crimes at the
Hague?"

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/21/red-neoliberals-how-corbyns-victory-unmasked-britains-guardian/

September 21, 2015
Red Neoliberals: How Corbyn’s Victory Unmasked Britain’s Guardian

by Jonathan Cook

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.