Bias is in the eye of the beholder: Understanding the truth behind the recent academic studies on the media and Jeremy Corbyn

In an article published in June this year Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, wrote that media researchers need to adopt new identities and see themselves not simply as “media researchers” or “policy academics” but as ‘activists who are able to embed our scholarly work in wider social movements’.

Freedman argued that ‘research activism’ was a way to diversify media ownership, democratise the media policy process and push for more ethical forms of journalism. In July The Guardian published a letter Freedman had circulated, which had been signed by over one hundred academics in media departments in universities across the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. It stated that Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn had been subject to ‘the most savage campaign of falsehood and misrepresentation in some of our most popular media outlets’ due to his ‘never having been part of the Westminster village or the media bubble and that he has never hidden commitment to socialist politics’. The letter ended:

Why the media being unelected was a cause for concern, or what an elected media might look like were not specified. Amongst the signatories to this letter of support for Corbyn were two media researchers: Bart Cammaerts and Jeremy Schlosberg.

A month after signing the letter, both separately published ‘research’ into the media bias against Jeremy Corbyn. Both came to the same conclusion that Corbyn had been subject to aggressive biased treatment by a hostile media. The first was an LSE study led by Bart Cammaerts, and covered newspapers, while the second was by Justin Schlosberg with the Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck, University of London and focused on online articles and television news bulletins. Both purported to present evidence in the form of detailed analysis of what many Corbyn supporters (including the academics themselves) had previously argued was the case; that Corbyn’s portrayal in the mainstream media was not an accurate reflection of the reality of his leadership, his abilities or his views.

Both of the studies generated a great deal of media coverage and extensive redistribution on social media. Cammaerts posted the LSE study to two Corbyn Facebook groups including Jeremy Corbyn for PM. Corbyn himself has referred to them in an interview and at the rallies that he is currently holding round the country. What was not set out in the studies was the extensive connections between the academics who carried out the research and their personal support of Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the links between the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), the Labour party and the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.

Bart Cammaerts, senior lecturer in the Media and Communications department, led the LSE study ‘Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From Watchdog to Attackdog’ published on 1 July 2016. The LSE Media Policy Project, a part of the Department of Media and Communications at LSE, is listed as a partner of the MRC on their website. The study examined reporting related to Jeremy Corbyn in eight British newspapers between September and November 2015. The study was not comparative and made no attempt to examine coverage of past leaders of opposition parties, or of coverage of other politicians during that time frame. It also contains several statements that cannot be substantiated from the work undertaken by Cammaerts and his team such as that Corbyn had been ‘treated with scorn and ridicule’ in a way ‘that no other political leader is or has been’. Prior to leading this study Cammaerts wrote a blog post on the LSE website (based on an article he had written in a Belgian newspaper), ‘Jeremy Corbyn is the New Left’. This was published on 24 August 2015 in the run up to Corbyn’s selection as leader of the Labour party, and well before the period covered by his study — indeed it was written just under a year before the study’s publication. In the blog post Cammaerts claimed the ‘Labour establishment’, including ‘New Labour dinosaurs’, such as former party leaders and prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, had waged a ‘viciously negative’ campaign against Corbyn in the run up to the leadership election and that had been ‘eagerly amplified by the attack dogs of the mainstream media’. Like the later Guardian letter, the blog post strongly endorsed Corbyn and his politics, with Cammaerts describing him as:

There are strong — and from an academic viewpoint troubling — echoes of this blog post in his subsequent study. For example, in the blog post, Cammaerts referred to Corbyn as representing ‘a different kind of politician, a man of principles and convictions rather than a smooth operator willing to do anything to get into power and be ‘electable’’ The study describes Corbyn as ‘a political maverick; a political transgressor and deviator who refuses to align himself with the mores and quirkiness of the British Political establishment’. In the section of the study covering associations made with Corbyn, a graph is used showing mentions of Corbyn in the press including being a ‘loony’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘radical left/Marxist’ and ‘1970s-1980s’. In the August 2015 blog post, Cammaerts wrote that Corbyn was ‘depicted as a ‘loony lefty’, an ‘unelectable, radical, and potentially the worst thing that could ever happen to the British Labour party and the left in general. His firmly leftwing ideas are deemed to be ‘unrealistic’, Marxist and of a bygone era’. It seems fair to ask whether this study was undertaken as a serious academic endeavour or to lend credence to Cammaerts’ own beliefs and serve as a defence to Corbyn and protect him from criticisms levelled at him by other politicians and the media.

Justin Schlosberg, the current chairman of the Media Reform Coalition, published a separate study into supposed media bias against Jeremy Corbyn on 28 July 2016. Produced by the MRC and Birkbeck, University of London, this was titled “Should he stay or should he go? Television and Online News Coverage of the Labour Party in Crisis”. The study covers different media and a different time period, that immediately after Corbyn overwhelmingly lost a vote of no confidence in his leadership from Labour MPs, but comes to similar conclusions to Cammaerts’ study. Schlosberg, a member of Momentum and a self-described media activist, lecturer and researcher, includes some similar unsubstantiated statements including ‘unlike newspapers, television news providers are subject to relatively strict rules on impartiality and balance. From the outset, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership presented a disruptive challenge to routine interpretations of journalistic balance in this sense. In particular, it marked a break from long-established political consensus round issues ranging from welfare to war.’ As with Cammaerts’ study the sampling procedure appears to be ad hoc and could result in inconsistencies. Here Schlosberg relied on two search engines and searching the terms ‘Corbyn’ and ‘Labour’ in the title for the online news sites.

Schlosberg and Cammaerts would have crossed paths, when the former completed his MSc in the LSE Department of Media and Communications between 2008 and 2009. Cammaerts has been a lecturer at LSE since October 2005. Schlosberg then did a PhD at Goldsmiths between 2009 and 2012, and was one of the co-founders of the MRC, alongside Freedman and other Goldsmiths academics during summer of 2011. The MRC emerged in the context of the phone hacking crisis and appears not to have been founded with any ostensible political links. However as will be covered later it has strong ties with organisations with a political objective, and its launch events are attended by senior Labour politicians (all who now have direct involvement in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet). In an article co-written by Schlosberg and another media academic which appeared in a book co-edited by Freedman (Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives, 2016), Des Freedman is quoted stating that ‘the left has a responsibility in this context to amplify these arguments about the flaws of an entrenched media power as part of a broader argument about the operation of the capitalist state’. In the same article Schlosberg writes that the MRC had limited resources but it had the capacity to show evidence of media failure through studies and data. Thus scholarship could be tied ‘directly to the concerns of other social justice movements’.

The MRC has undertaken two major media reform initiatives and these have always been alongside the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF), and Freedman is a current member of the CPBF’s committee. The CPBF was founded in 1979 with the intention of promoting solidarity between media workers and other trade unions, and to influence related policies in the media Labour Party and the TUC. It was created against the backdrop of possible job losses following the introduction of computers and crack down on unions at the time. Members included journalists and also academics such as James Curran, who is currently an academic at Goldsmiths and was one of the co-founders of the MRC. The CPBF’s first statement of purpose reflected its’ roots in the labour movement and argued for liberalisation of publications and more effective means to address bias in the media. The MRC and CPBF have together been campaigning for media pluralism, and together they launched a petition and a campaign at a public meeting in Parliament on 28 April 2014. The chairman of the meeting was Tom Watson MP, and speakers included Caroline Lucas MP, John McDonnell MP and Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary. The campaign continued with a Media Democracy Festival being held at Goldsmiths on 17 October 2015. This call for a more democratic media would be repeated in the Corbyn media bias letter to The Guardian. Jeremy Corbyn had been due to make an appearance at the festival but did not in the because of his election as Labour leader. The media plurality campaign would later receive support directly from Jeremy Corbyn who in an article in the Free Press, the Journal of the CPBF, in October 2015, was quoted as saying ‘A society in which 70% of UK newspaper circulation is controlled by three wealthy families is clearly unfair and undemocratic. The work being done by the Media Reform Coalition and others is vital for pushing the media plurality which this country is so desperately in need of’.

Last year the CPBF and the MRC also launched a joint media manifesto in Parliament. The manifesto called for, amongst other things, controls on media ownership and independent regulation of the press. John McDonnell MP hosted this launch. Speakers included Justin Schlosberg, Tom Watson MP, Amelia Womack, Tony Burke, the Assistant General Secretary of Unite, and Andy Smith, the joint President of the NUJ.

We now turn to Des Freedman, who was the founding chairman of the MRC and is still heavily involved in both its work and that of the CPBF. Freedman was previously a member of the Socialist Worker Party (SWP) and left on 16 February 2010 as part of a mass resignation in protest at Lyndsey German not being allowed to speak at a Stop the War event. Lyndsey German and John Rees believed that the SWP’s isolationist strategy was to its detriment and that in fact a collaborative approach, alongside the Labour Party and organisations like the Stop the War Coalition, was needed in order to achieve real social change. Later in 2010 German and Rees founded Counterfire a left wing pressure movement aiming to carry on the anti-war message and fight austerity. A number of articles written by Freedman have been published on the site, including one written with Schlosberg titled ‘Corbyn: media manipulation and the militarisation of debate’ published at the end of July 2016. Counterfire mainly relies on its website to spread its message but also distributes a free-sheet and holds the annual Dangerous Times Festival. This year it was held on 28 May and Freedman appeared in a panel discussing media control.

In other years speakers at the festival have included Corbyn, Owen Jones and Paul Mason. The links between the Stop the War coalition (German is convenor of the Stop the War Coalition), Counterfire and the current Labour leadership remain strong. Corbyn attended the Stop the War Coalition Christmas party, having served as chairman for four years, and is pictured below alongside Seumas Milne and John Rees.

James Meadway, who resigned from the SWP alongside Freedman, Rees and German and is also involved in Counterfire is currently acting as John McDonnell’s chief economic adviser.

The perception that Jeremy Corbyn is the victim of media bias has become a strong part of his narrative, and reference to Cammaerts and Schlosberg’s studies are even contained in a section on media coverage on his Wikipedia page. However by looking at the organisations behind the studies, and the authors’ own views it is possible to see a motivation very different to that usually associated with academic studies. The MRC has strong and continuing links with the current Labour Party leadership, and indeed Corbyn has been previously involved directly in their campaigns — a fact that has not been mentioned either by the MRC or Corbyn himself. The issue of media bias and the control of the media does need consideration, but these two recent studies do that cause no favours. The creation of academic studies for political purposes is nothing new, but it needs to be understood for what it is rather than retweeted or held up as powerful evidence of a mass media conspiracy. At the beginning of next month the MRC has organised another event — ‘the Media, the Movements and Jeremy Corbyn’, with attendees including Diane Abbott MP, Lyndsey German and James Schneider alongside Freedman and Schlosberg. It is difficult to disentangle Freedman’s notion of the ‘research activist’ from that of the more traditional notion of activist, albeit the research activist is working within the academic field using their particular skills and knowledge. Just as it is hard to see the forthcoming MRC event as distinct from Momentum and Corbyn campaign events.