Shooting the messenger
Terrorizing journalists will be a core strategy of the Corbyn campaign

“This is beyond poor journalism,” The Canary’s Kerry-Ann Mendoza raged last Monday. “This is propaganda. This is a complete distortion of reality, with the apparent purpose of misleading viewers.”
Setting aside the irony of accusations of propaganda coming from the founder of The Canary — a sort of hyper-partisan Ministry of Truth for the credulous alt-left — just what was Mendoza getting at? What sinister Orwellian scam was the establishment media up to this time?
Earlier that morning NHS Providers chief executive Chris Hopson had appeared on the Today programme with a warning, to politicians of all stripes, as the election was getting under way.
As head of the organisation that represents NHS trusts employing over 1 million healthcare workers, with a combined budget of over £80bn annually, Hopson knows better than most the extreme sensitivities that surround medical politics; and the extreme pressures the service is under at the best of times.
He also knows that things can get wildly out of hand, rhetorically, during a general election campaign. And that the “proper, mature, evidence-based debate about what the NHS needs”, as he put it, is invariably bumped by “cheap political slogans”, by all sides.
But in his wildest dreams I doubt Hopson or the Today team could have predicted that this short slot just after 7am would have led to fevered accusations that the BBC had gone into “full propaganda mode to rescue Boris Johnson”, as the Canary screamed, with a “contrived political storm about ‘weaponising’ the NHS”.
“It’s no coincidence,” Aaron Bastani, co-founder of another Corbyn spin-site Novara Media, tweeted just after the show, “that ahead of the election the BBC is claiming the NHS ‘shouldn’t be politicised’”.
That the NHS is subject to simplistic political slogans during a general election is axiomatic. That this does the health service no favours is an important point that needs making as this campaign gets underway and, as I write, a group of Labour members chant that the NHS is “Not for sale! Not for sale”, during a speech by Jeremy Corbyn.
What’s less clear in all this is where the BBC was at fault, let alone why the incident proves BBC-Tory collusion. Why was it such “poor journalism” to have a senior NHS leader on the show? And why was it “no coincidence” that the BBC should be “claiming” such things, when the warning about the health service being weaponised came from NHS Providers in the first place?
These questions are entirely rhetorical, of course. I know what Bastani, Mendoza, and the enraged Corbynite tweeters were getting at when they claimed that NHS Providers is a “right wing pressure group”; called Rob Burley, editor of BBC Live politics, “Goebbels” for defending the inclusion of NHS Providers on subsequent TV slots throughout the day; and said that the whole incident shows “just how deep the BBC is in cahoots with Tories”.
The logic, if you can call it that, goes like this: Labour wants to put the NHS — and the Tories’ alleged plan to sell it to Donald Trump — at the core of its general election campaign. By warning politicians not to resort to cheap slogans and scare stories about the health service, NHS Providers, via the BBC, was deliberately trying to block Labour from doing this. Which means a deliberate plot by the BBC to help the Conservatives; a “very powerful example of state propaganda” — Mendoza again.
With the addition of the barefaced insult of saying that it’s politicians of all stripes that tend to go over the top about the NHS, which if you’re of a certain mindset, equates to a direct slur on Jeremy Corbyn. How dare the BBC suggest that Corbyn is like other politicians?
Whether the Canary truly believes it was deliberate collusion between NHS Providers, the BBC and the Tories, I don’t know. Actually I doubt it. I think that was just a handy mixer for the real shot in the media’s eyes. The war-cry to its readers, that “moments like this need to be called out at maximum volume — in the hopes of restoring honesty to political debate”.
Unleashing hell on the BBC, and rewriting the whole incident with the BBC as the active voice, not the broadcaster of another’s views, is less about pointing out bias — if this incident exemplifies one thing, it’s the extraordinary ignorance of such claims — than about putting the whole media on alert. The message: report what we want, how we want it, when we want, or else.
It’s not enough to report negative news about the Tories. Take Kay Burley’s forensic bruising of the Conservative Party’s dire election campaign so far, or the BBC’s wall-to-wall coverage of Jacob Rees Mogg’s catastrophic comments on the Grenfell disaster, the government’s handling of a report into Russian meddling in British politics, and the Alun Cairns scandal from the last week alone.
All this is simply ignored as an inconvenient truth against the victim theory of collusion.
If it was up to some, it would go further. The whole media profession would line up to shower Corbyn with the sort of uncritical praise and reality-distortion that the alt-left media sites and on-side commentators like Owen Jones provide under the mask of journalism. Corbyn would simply be out-of-bounds from serious media scrutiny altogether. And if that can’t be achieved, his supporters, filled with resentment, are going to try to stop any journalist that tries.
Reporters on the road have to put their questions to Corbyn physically flanked by crowds of hostile Labour members. Who often answer them before Corbyn has a chance; hector and boo any journalist who asks an inconvenient question, especially if their name happens to be Laura Kuenssberg; and scream and whoop, vengefully back, when Jeremy responds.
Not even Donald Trump has thought of that. Yet Corbyn has sat back, Stalin-like, with a smirk, and enabled it to happen, barely able to disguise his inner satisfaction.
That’s one tactic. Another is to cry foul when journalists won’t help spread a fake news story that hurts the Tories, as the Canary and Skwawkbox will happily do, even if it’s been disproved hours before. Take the ‘story’ last week that Ken Clarke said he won’t be voting Conservative this time. Ken simply didn’t say that, a quick search will reveal. This didn’t stop Corbynistas, including Diane Abbott, screaming at the media for not reporting it.
Journalists are already considered fair game for public shaming, simply for doing their jobs. With the election under way the strategy to extort journalists into submission with the threat of mass social media action is being stepped up into an all-out non-stop war — coordinated through various whatsapp groups between LOTO staffers and ‘friendly’ media — to prevent journalists from publishing what the Corbynites do not want people to hear.
Over the next four weeks this is going to get worse; more aggressive, more hyper-sensitive, more vengeful, more extortionate, until journalists feel afraid to put a critical word to press for fear of the consequences. It can not be allowed to succeed.
