What was that about defending local journalism, Jeremy Corbyn?
Behind Local News on why words matter when it comes to defending the free Press.
Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. Three weeks ago, you were a champion of the local Press, saying we did important work, and encouraging us to hold the powerful to account.
So where did this come from in your speech to your roaring supporters at the Labour Party Conference this week?
It turns out that the billionaires who own the bulk of the British press don’t like us one little bit.
Now it could be because we’re going to clamp down on tax dodging. Or it may be because we don’t fawn over them at white tie dinners and cocktail parties.
Or it could even be because Tom Watson has been campaigning for the second part of the Leveson media inquiry to be set up — something the last Prime Minister promised, but failed to deliver.
We must, and we will, protect the freedom of the press to challenge unaccountable power.
Journalists from Turkey to Myanmar and Colombia are being imprisoned, harassed or sometimes killed by authoritarian governments and powerful corporate interests just for doing their job.
But here, a free press has far too often meant the freedom to spread lies and half-truths, and to smear the powerless, not take on the powerful.
You challenge their propaganda of privilege by using the mass media of the 21st century: social media.
Now of course, we know part of a leader’s speech is to pander to the crowd — it never looks good on telly if you’re only getting a subdued round of applause. And you don’t have to look far on social media to find Labour supporters shouting bias at any coverage of you which is is less than fawning. Even Gogglebox was accused of having an agenda against you this weekend, because someone watching your speech criticised you.
And yes, the media is far from perfect, and there will be many legitimate examples of Labour feeling hard done to, and ignored, in certain national publications. We get that. And you have the right to call it out, even if doing so so soon after being widely perceived to have failed to get to grips with widespread anger at anti-semitism in your party runs the risk of looking like point scoring.
But have you considered what impact your comment, to your most fervent supporters, has on the ability of local journalists to do their job — the job you say you want us to be able to do?
Here’s what you said less a month ago:
I’d like to pay tribute to the Manchester Evening News journalists, who have also been trying to find out how many people are dying on Manchester’s streets with their powerful investigation ‘The deaths they don’t count’. And, I’d also like to single out the Hackney Gazette, which over five weeks, using Freedom of Information requests, undercover reporting and witness testimony, powerfully exposed the hidden homeless problem in one of London’s poorest boroughs, resulting in new commitments to action from the council.
This type of journalism needs support and the government has a role in helping develop a business model to strengthen and underpin it.
Solving the business model is one thing. Being able to operate in a world which actively supports the role of the Press to hold the powerful to account is another, and this country’s grown ups, including you as the leader of the opposition, have a crucial role to play here.
There’s no point saying you’ll defend the right of the Press to be free before demonising it in front of your supporters. Because your words are already damaging the free Press.
The people we presume you’re aiming you fire at — a relatively small number of journalists based in London— are not the people who have to deal with the fallout of your comments. That’ll be the local journalists covering council meetings, or trying to hold local power to account.
They’ll find that those with something to hide, or an agenda to pursue, will be emboldened to challenge the right of the local Press to hold power to account.
They’ll probably even take your advice about social media too:
You challenge their propaganda of privilege by using the mass media of the 21st century: social media.
MPs shouting bias. Councillors shouting bias. Hospital Trusts, Councils, Quangos, even the privatised companies you seek to nationalise all taking comfort from the fact the leader of the opposition is happy to shoot the messenger, not the message. And they’ll do the same. In fact, in many cases, they are.
Social media is amazing when it’s on your side. And at the moment, you have many supporters on Twitter and Facebook who are on your side. But tides do turn, and that’s why we need an honest, accurate local press to thrive in the digital age.
That prospect is a hundred times harder to envisage when the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition seeks to paint ‘the Press’ being only like the one part you don’t like, and then encourages people to take to social media instead.
Facebook is keen to tell people it’s a platform, not a publisher. While the subtext of that statement is open to challenge, the principle isn’t. It has no agenda other than keeping people on its site. It doesn’t fact-check, edit, and then check again before it publishes. It doesn’t guarantee the right to reply. It doesn’t have teams of journalists working hard to make sure they paint the most accurate picture they can.
Facebook, Twitter et al also don’t fight on behalf of people. They help people congregate for sure, but campaign for them? Give them the publicity they need for the powerful to be accountable? No. And it has to be said, telling people to use social media to challenge the Press does rather sound like the comments of a rather well-known leader of a large country on the other side of the Atlantic.
From the Liverpool Echo’s battle to support the Hillsborough campaigners, to the Yorkshire Post’s fight for devolution to the region, to the Northern Echo battling for improved health service in the North East, there are countless examples of the powerful being held to account by the local Press.
And we do it in imaginative ways too. The fiasco that was the Northern Rail timetable changes only captured the national media’s attention after titles including the Yorkshire Post, Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News and Westmorland Gazette came together and spoke with one voice to Government.
Those are the big campaigns we all know about. But what about the Hull Daily Mail’s story about a woman whose daughter was almost killed when a rotting kitchen cupboard in her council house fell on her? You’ve probably not heard the story, but thanks to the HDM, tens of thousands of people have. That’s how local newsrooms hold power to account, day in, day out, across the country.
While we’re sure your response would be to say ‘oh I wasn’t talking about the local Press, have a look at the Daily Telegraph’ your words carry weight, and they damage the ability of the local Press to do its job.
The last Labour government was hardly helpful when it came to the local Press’s right to hold power to account. Quangos grew like mushrooms, constantly in the dark, the Freedom of Information Act had more holes in it than a swiss cheese, the revised Local Government Act made it far harder to cover councils, and don’t get us started on what Foundation Hospital Trusts have meant for NHS accountability.
But the last Labour government never challenged the right of the local Press to do its job. But your sweeping comments about the Press in the UK do. challenge our ability to do our jobs. That, hopefully, is unintentional, but the impact is still the same.
As Jennifer Williams — whose work you praised just a few weeks ago — pointed out on Behind Local News, the atmosphere at Labour events towards the media has got worse in recent times. Supporters don’t differentiate between the local and national journalists.
Jennifer later took your cheerleader-in-chief, columnist Owen Jones, to task for not understanding how local Press works. He asked, apparently surprised, why we take it so personally. The answer: Because it is personal, even if it is unintended.
Demonising the media through broad brushstroke statements — which, ironically, is what you probably feel you’ve been victim of from those who attack you in the right-wing Press — damages the ability of the local Press to do its job, the very job you say it needs financial support to be able to sustain.
You may not have the keys to Number 10, but you have the power to be a strong advocate of the local Press’s right to hold the powerful to account, and be prepared to be held to account by the local Press too.
Time will tell whether it’s your views from late August, or the barn-storming from the stage at your conference in Liverpool, which come to pass as party policy. Above all, actions must speak louder than words. If you care for the right of the local Press to hold the powerful to account, then prove it.
