Category: Media bias

Media bias

Labour Party complains to regulator over coverage of cemetery visit

From the Guardian: The Labour Party has formally complained to the press regulator Ipso about the coverage by several British newspapers of Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to lay a wreath at a cemetery in Tunisia.

In its complaint, the party said The Sun, The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and Metro had misrepresented the event, which the Labour leader attended in 2014.

Labour said subsequent reporting of the incident across the media had seriously misrepresented the event, misidentified those buried in the cemetery and underplayed the role of mainstream Palestinian leaders conducting the ceremony.

The complaint focuses on incidents where newspapers have specifically stated in news stories that the event was commemorating members of the Black September terrorist group or those who carried out the 1972 Munich massacre. Labour says there are no graves for such individuals and the event did not commemorate the Munich terrorists.

Labour acknowledges that the cemetery contains the graves of senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation individuals Salah Khalaf and Atef Besiso, who were assassinated in the early 1990s and have been accused by Israel of having had links with Black September, something the PLO has always denied. However, it insists Corbyn did not take part in laying wreaths on their specific graves.

[Read full article on Guardian website…]

40 senior academics condemn anti-Corbyn bias in media coverage of antisemitism

More than forty senior academics write to the Guardian to condemn what they see as an anti-Corbyn bias in media coverage of the antisemitism debate…

“One of the main concepts in journalism education is that of framing: the highlighting of particular issues, and the avoidance of others, in order to produce a desired interpretation. We have been reminded of the importance of framing when considering the vast amounts of media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged failure to deal with antisemitism inside the Labour party. On Sunday, three national titles led with the story while news bulletins focused on the allegations all last week. Dominant sections of the media have framed the story in such a way as to suggest that antisemitism is a problem mostly to do with Labour and that Corbyn is personally responsible for failing to deal with it. The coverage has relied on a handful of sources such as the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and well-known political opponents of Corbyn himself.

“Yet where are the Jewish voices who support Corbyn and who welcome his long-established anti-racist record? Where are the pieces that look at the political motivations of some of Corbyn’s most vocal critics?”

[Read full letter and signatories on Guardian website…]

BBC silent as top Tories exposed holding secret meetings with neo-Nazi leader accused of antisemitism

From Evolve Politics: The mainstream media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the seemingly never-ending Labour anti-Semitism saga shows that they *clearly* must care about the issue a great deal. However, given the unprecedented coverage they’ve given to Labour’s ongoing issues surrounding antisemitism, it seems slightly odd that the same people have offered nothing but eerie silence regarding three top Conservative politicians holding secret meetings with Steve Bannon, an openly racist White Supremacist neo-Nazi leader who is accused of outright antisemitism, and whose supporters were recorded chanting “Jews will not replace us“. Very odd indeed.

[Read full article on Evolve Politics website…]

Journalist Owen Jones calls out media bias

Owen Jones talks on BBC Newsnight about media framing of Jeremy Corbyn‘s response to the Russian spy poisoning.

Media bias called out

🔥🔥🔥

Posted by Momentum on Saturday, March 17, 2018

18

YouGov poll: Half say The Sun newspaper is bad for British society, just 5% think its influence is positive

From Stop Funding Hate: 50% of the British public believes that The Sun newspaper has a negative influence on our society, according to a new YouGov poll commissioned by Stop Funding Hate. Just one in twenty people (5%) see the newspaper’s influence as positive.

The Yougov poll also reveals a striking, nationwide consensus: Across every British region, age group, and demographic polled, more people see The Sun’s influence as negative rather than positive. In the north of England, 53% expressed this view. Among young people aged 18-24, the figure was 57%. Figures for London reflected the national average.

The public’s faith in the Daily Mail is also low: As with the Sun, in every age group, demographic and region, more people see the Mail’s influence as negative rather than positive. Overall, more than one in three people (38%) believe that the paper has a negative influence. Only one in ten (10%) see the newspaper’s influence as positive. The poll shows a greater variance across different groups (for example 28% of people over 65 see the Daily Mail’s influence as negative, with 18% seeing it as positive). Meanwhile almost half of people aged 18-24 (48%) believe that the Daily Mail has a negative influence on society.

Research by the European Broadcasting Union has previously found that the UK press is the least trusted in Europe.

Read more

“On planet reality the Tories are the radical economic extremists, not Jeremy Corbyn”

From Another Angry Voice: “Every single time you hear someone from the political right trying to make out that Jeremy Corbyn is some kind of hard-left economic extremist (as if the Tories are economic moderates in comparison), you’ve got to remember that they’re trying to convince you that black is white.

“In reality Labour’s core economic policies under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership (public ownership of the rail industry, water companies, mail service, health service, police services & national grid + a National Investment Bank) are quite normal centre-left policies that are commonplace across the developed world.

“Not only are these policies commonplace across the developed world, they’re all incredibly popular with the public. Renationalisation of our core infrastructure and services has overwhelming public support.

“There is a constant right-wing political narrative that Jeremy Corbyn is a terrifying hard-left economic extremist which rarely ever gets challenged by the mainstream media. But the really crazy thing is that while mainstream media hacks continually allow right-wingers to smear Jeremy Corbyn and Labour as economic extremists when they’re not, they’re simultaneously letting the Tories get away with implementing one crackpot economic policy from the hard-right fringe after another.”

[Read full article on Another Angry Voice…]

Owen Jones: We can no longer pretend the British press is impartial

Owen Jones writes in the Guardian: “Britain’s press is not an impartial disseminator of news and information. It is, by and large, a highly sophisticated and aggressive form of political campaigning and lobbying. It uses its extensive muscle to defend our current economic order which, after all, directly benefits the rich moguls who own almost the entire British press. Whether it’s the Sun, the Telegraph, The Times, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express, that means promoting the partisan interests of the Conservative party. The press has been instrumental in upholding the political consensus established by Thatcherism: deregulation, privatisation, low taxes on the rich and weak trade unions. It has traditionally defined what is politically acceptable and palatable in Britain, and ignored, demonised and humiliated individuals and movements which challenge this consensus.

[Read full article on the Guardian website…]

Newly revealed CCTV footage supports truth of Corbyn’s “Traingate” claims

Video from Double Down News:

EXCLUSIVE: New CCTV footage reveals Jeremy Corbyn told truth a…

EXCLUSIVE: We reveal never before seen CCTV footage that proves Jeremy Corbyn told the truth about #Traingate

Posted by Double Down News on Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Who ever could have imagined that Richard Branson, an owner of a privatised train company with a personal net worth of $5 billion, would have a motive to smear Jeremy Corbyn?

 

Poll reveals how many people actually think Corbyn pledged to wipe student debt

From Daily Mirror: Tories have repeatedly accused Mr Corbyn of tricking students into voting for him by saying he didn’t “see why” they should suffer with historic student debt. But a poll has found only 17% of those who read the Labour leader’s statement think he was promising to wipe out all student debt.

[Read full article on Daily Mirror website…]

Does mainstream media still have a role to play?

From The Jist: “51% of leading journalists educated and working in the UK in 2015 were privately educated, according to the social mobility think tank the Sutton Trust. Another 30% went to grammar schools while 19% went to comprehensives. Looking at the same group of people the Trust also found that 54% went to Oxford or Cambridge University.”

Three companies (Sun and Times owner News UK, Daily Mail publisher DMGT, and Daily Mirror owner Trinity Mirror) control 71% of the national newspaper market.

The anti-Corbyn bias and unwavering support of Theresa May amongst the right wing papers were arguably the sparks that caused the explosion in independent media over the past 18 months. Outlets like… EvolvePolitics and Another Angry Voice have sprung up to provide a counter narrative to the establishment media.

[Read full article on The Jist…]

9 things every voter needs to know about the Corbyn-IRA smear campaign

From Another Angry Voice: “We all knew perfectly well that the billionaire right-wing press barons and their lackeys in the Tory party would attempt to smear the hell out of Jeremy Corbyn during this election campaign.

“They hate his policies of standing up for ordinary people and repatriating vital British infrastructure and services out of the hands of multinational corporations and foreign government like China and Qatar.

“They hate his policies so much they’re absolutely fixated on trying to destroy his reputation with anything they’ve got, and his early involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process is seriously the best they can come up with, because they know it feeds into the anti-Irish bigotry that still unfortunately exists in Great Britain.

“In this article I’m going to set the record straight by detailing 9 things that every voter should know about the Corbyn-IRA smear campaign.”

[Read full article on Another Angry Voice…]

Labour MP Barry Gardiner highlights media double standards

Meme from Another Angry Voice:

#BarryGardiner #MediaBias #GiveCorbynAFairChance #GE17 #StopTheTories

Posted by Stop the Tories Channel on Saturday, June 3, 2017

 

Anti-Corbyn BBC headline makes out that being Prime Minister is a closed-book exam

The top BBC headline yesterday afternoon was that, on Woman’s Hour, Jeremy Corbyn was not able to recall the cost of Labour’s childcare policy off the top of his head.

Not that it hadn’t been revealed – Angela Rayner had announced it previously, and he had access to it.

Nor that he got it wrong, but that he couldn’t immediately remember it and had to look it up.

And the follow-up question was whether this meant we couldn’t trust Labour with our money.

Running the country isn’t a closed-book exam. You don’t have to know every relevant figure without notes.

If you don’t know it, isn’t it a good reaction to say so and look it up, rather than trying to bluff or refusing to answer?

#BBCbias #MediaBias #GiveCorbynAFairChance: The top BBC headline yesterday afternoon was that, on Woman's Hour, Jeremy…

Posted by Stop the Tories Channel on Wednesday, May 31, 2017

(Meme republished from @thesatireparty)

“If Jeremy Corbyn was wrong on Northern Ireland, so was Nelson Mandela”

Kevin Meagher writes in The New Statesman: “It was entirely legitimate for Corbyn and others to take an interest in the pressing affairs of Northern Ireland, especially as we now know that Margaret Thatcher’s government was engaged in secret talks with the IRA from the time of the Hunger Strikes.

[Read full column on The New Statesman website…]

Compared: Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC Online headlines on the Labour and Tory manifestos

Via The Pileus:

#BBCbias #Kuenssberg#GE17 #LabourManifesto #GiveCorbynAFairChance #BBC #BBCnews

Posted by Stop the Tories Channel on Thursday, May 18, 2017

Most people agree with Income Tax increases for high earners

From The Canary: A poll conducted by ComRes for The Daily Mirror surveyed 1,021 adults online on 11 May. It asked them about their opinions on Labour’s manifesto policies; how far left and right certain political figures and parties were; and broader thoughts on both Labour and the Conservatives.

#GiveCorbynAFairChance #MediaBias: MOST PEOPLE AGREE WITH INCOME TAX INCREASES FOR HIGH EARNERSA poll conducted by…

Posted by Stop the Tories Channel on Friday, May 12, 2017

Respondents also support:

  • Renationalisation of railways (52% agree, 22% disagree)
  • Banning zero hours contracts (71% – 16%)
  • Scrapping student tuition fees (46% – 37%)
  • Building 100,000 council houses per year (54% – 24%)
  • Keeping the pension age at 66 (74% – 15%)
  • Renationalising Royal Mail (50% – 25%)
  • Keeping the foxhunting ban (78% – 12%)
  • Giving Parliament a veto on the final Brexit deal (36% – 35%)
  • Creating a ‘national education service’ like the NHS (43% – 20%)

Read more

Theresa May and the British propaganda problem

From Another Angry Voice: “Let’s start with the facts: Huge swathes of the UK media are owned by radically right-wing billionaire sociopaths like Rupert Murdoch (The S*n, Times) Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro) Richard Desmond (Express, Star) and the Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator).

“These billionaires have immense power to manipulate public opinion and control the spectrum of political debate.

“Thus we have a public who actually believe that a cowardly self-serving opportunist who U-turns so often it’s impossible to guess which way she’ll be facing in the morning is somehow a “strong and stable” leader simply because they’ve been told it over and again by the media.

“It beggars belief.”

[Read full column on Another Angry Voice…]

An example of BBC anti-Labour bias…

#ChangeTheDebate #GiveCorbynAFairChance #BBCbias

Posted by Stop the Tories Channel on Wednesday, April 26, 2017

1 2