Jeremy Corbyn and Balance

I’ve just completed my book to be published in November by Bristol University Press called ‘The Lies We Were Told’. It is the story of UK austerity, the Eurozone crisis, how mediamacro swung the 2015 election, the Corbyn phenomenon, Brexit and more besides. These things are described as they happened in selected blog posts with new introductions, postscripts etc. (It can be ordered at a 20% discount here, rising to 35% if you join the publisher’s mailing list.)

During the process of selecting the blogs I needed to tell these stories, I came across one I had forgotten completely. It was called “Do we get the leaders our media deserves?”, and it asked why many of the successful (in terms of popularity) leaders of today are of the likes of Johnson, Farage and Berlusconi, while leaders with far more integrity and honesty like Ed Miliband appear unpopular. The post was written at the end of 2014, and a postscript for the book notes that Trump versus Clinton was in part a devastating example of this trend.

It is tempting to respond by saying this is just what voters want: politicians that make them feel good. There may be an element of that, but what has nothing to do with voters is how the Johnson type politicians get a easy ride from the media. When he deliberately stokes islamophobia, the criticism is disarmed with a cup of tea for waiting reporters. I have yet to see an interview with Farage where he is questioned about his support for far right parties in Europe and his Russian links. This interview with Johnson by Eddie Mair stands out in talking about past sins because it is so unusual. Most of the time the media seems content to reflect his easy charm.

While people like Farage or Johnson are normally treated with kid gloves, others get a much harder ride. The left tried it with Cameron and Osborne: posh Eton and Bullingdon club boys who were clearly out of touch with ordinary voters. Sometimes these attacks work, and sometimes they do not. No doubt the reasons why are complex, but it seems to me that two things matter a lot. The first is whether or not the person being attacked has the personality to deflect such criticism, and the second reflects the extent that attacks become part of the non-partisan media’s agenda.

Here is a time series of how Corbyn’s leader ratings have been getting steadily worse over the last year, and by far more than those of his party. This could be for many reasons. It could reflect disillusionment by Remain inclined Labour voters as events have shown Labour’s pro-Brexit position is not just opportunistic triangulation. It could reflect a lack of initiatives coming from the leadership (although it does not help that when he does make speeches they are blatantly misinterpreted). It could be that Labour’s problems with antisemitism are constantly in the news: although these stories do not have high impact among voters, for those that do notice they are seen as a negative for Corbyn.

I have argued before that the Labour surge before the 2017 election and the subsequent decline are part of the same phenomenon: the ability of the media rather than the politician to control the agenda outside of election periods. The MSM is clearly much more hostile to Corbyn than any other major political figure today, and the row over antisemitism shows that clearly.

Because this debate has become so partisan, I have to say the following. First, I am no Corbynite (read my posts during the Corbyn vs Smith campaign). I also think antisemitism within the Labour party is a real problem, and that large parts of the membership seem to be in denial about this. Not adopting all the IHRA examples (but with accompanying text to clarify meaning drafted in consultation with Jewish groups where possible) was a big political mistake. It created concerns in the Jewish community that the media was right to reflect. The idea that the non-partisan media’s reporting of this is just a smear campaign is nonsense.

All those things can be true, but it can also be true that the broadcast media has given the issue excessive prominence. How do I know this? The obvious comparison is with Islamophobia in the Conservative party. This has been given much less coverage, but I would argue that problem is at least as bad. As far as I know, Labour has never run a clearly antisemitic campaign for a major political post, but the Tory party have run an Islamophobic  campaign in which the Tory leader played a major part. Some say the difference is because Corbyn himself has been described as antisemitic, but the betting odds for next Prime Minister for Johnson and Corbyn are similar. To say that broadcasters cannot help reporting what is going on is very naive about how the media selects what is newsworthy and what is not.  

Many would argue this bias is because Corbyn has few friends in the media, and that may be a part of it [1], but I prefer more structural explanations. For the broadcast media balance seems to involve MPs in Westminster rather than their own viewers. Labour MPs are prepared to criticise the leadership in public while Tory MPs are not, and this means one story gets much more airtime than the other. [2] We can see this clearly with Brexit: because the two main parties went with the 52%, the point of view of the 48% (now more) who oppose Brexit was largely ignored by the media. Exactly the same can now be said about the Muslim community.

A good test of all this is to reverse roles. Suppose Jeremy Corbyn had written an article in which he had made fun of how orthodox Jews dress, and all the party had asked him to do is apologise but he had refused. Suppose the Labour party had no code at all covering antisemitism. Would the broadcast media have been happy to show pictures of him offering vegetables from his allotment to reporters and then forgotten about the whole thing? I’m sure natural charm has something to do with why some political leaders are treated differently than others, but I think that is only a small part of the story.

[1] It may explain, for example, the lack critical reporting. Most of the time it is presumed that Labour did not adopt all the IHRA examples because of antisemitism. Until recently the Israel/Palestine conflict was hardly mentioned, and neither was the fact that a select committee had suggested the IHRA examples were unsatisfactory on their own. Ludicrous statements about existential threats or rivers of blood go unchallenged. In some quarters it is deemed insensitive to question motives (Stephen Pollard, Jewish Chronicle editor, has said: “The left, in any recognisable form, is now the enemy”). In contrast a Conservative minister is happy to dismiss claims of Islamophobia by attacking a group that made the claim as unrepresentative, and no one in the media notes the Conservative Muslim Forum has made similar complaints.

[2] Whatever else this is, it is not good for democracy. Because Conservative MPs keep quiet about Islamophobia in their party, the issue only appears occasionally in the media. As a result, nothing is done about the problem. In contrast Labour are trying to do something about antisemitism, and their reward is constant attack.

Helping the broadcast media be informative on politicised issues

The broadcast media in the UK, and particularly the BBC, can do an excellent job at providing information in an accessible way. However, the moment a subject gets politicised, this ability seems to collapse. This is because the moment a subject becomes politicised, the non-partisan media puts ‘balance’ above all else, which in turn allows politics rather than reality to define what is understood as true. I’ve called this the politicisation of truth, and have identified four ways this happens:

1. Ignoring facts: ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ type reporting.
2. Ignoring expert pluralities: for uncertain outcomes, failing to mention that one side is a minority view. The economics of Brexit is an example.
3. Allowing politicians to create untruths. Labour profligacy caused austerity is an example.
4. Repeating politically generated untruths. For example 'the 364 economists were wrong'.

Here is an interesting discussion of the first two of these in the context of Brexit. From the discussion you can see that shifting existing practice will not be easy, so in this post I want to be positive rather than just complain.

Before doing so, however, I want to say why this is so important. If the broadcast media do not correct politicians when they lie, they provide an incentive for them to lie. That will quickly become apparent, so even if one side ‘starts it’, the other side will follow. This creates an incentive to tell even bigger lies and so on. In the short term the lies are believed and this distorts democracy, and in the longer term trust in politicians deteriorates even further.

We saw this with Brexit, and we have seen this with Donald Trump. Trump’s stream of well documented lies are ‘balanced’ against seemingly baseless or minor insinuations about Clinton. It is easy for people like those who read this blog to think everyone knows that Trump is a serial liar, but they do not. In fact:

“Trump has his largest edge of the campaign as the more honest and trustworthy of the two major candidates (50% say he is more honest and trustworthy vs. just 35% choosing Clinton)”

If you are reading this in the UK and thinking this could only happen in the US, who do you think was trusted during the Brexit campaign?

There is no one else who can inform the majority of people what the truth is. There are countless media organisations, think tanks and websites designed to present a partisan view. It takes both time and knowledge for people to find sources that can be trusted, and that is time most people will not spend. As Stephen Cushion and Justin Lewis note, people actively want the broadcast media to separate facts from spin, but this popular demand is being ignored because it is drowned out by politicos shouting about bias. As they also note, this information has to come in prime time viewing: doing it only in specialist programming watched by those who are already well informed completely misses the point.

The obvious way to avoid facts being distorted is to correct them. As Jeremy Shapiro says in his discussion above, this has to be done in real time. It is just no good saying we corrected that on our fact checking website a few days later, not only because of the delay involved but also because hardly anyone looks at that website. So, for example, in a debate between two sides, if one side says X and X is not true, the moderator should say so. If in an interview the interviewee says something untrue, the interviewer should say so, even if they want to get on to another point.

This of course immediately gets you into questions of how does the interviewer know what is true and where do you draw the line. Here I have some sympathy with journalists, who are sometimes expected to have everything at their fingertips. What academics in particular need to do is to ensure that this information is easily available from trusted sources, and protest when that information is ignored.

I think those in the physical sciences understand this. For example a few years ago there was a period in which climate change was only discussed by broadcast media in a politicised format, where typically a climate scientist would debate the issue with someone from denial organisations. But with almost all climate scientists agreeing about the fundamental facts, this ‘balance’ gave a completely distorted view of reality. As a result of concerted pressure from scientific bodies (and with help from MPs), the BBC finally recognised this and issued revised guidelines. (Here and here (pdf) is the BBC Trust review.) Their coverage of climate change may still not be perfect (or more seriously may have simply diminished), but at least the BBC recognised there were cases where evidence is more important than balance.

Academic economists as a collective are not so well organised, and we need to become more so. This is not about improving individual economist’s media skills, or getting certain people regularly invited on discussion programmes. It is about having a trusted source that can present what the balance of views of academic economists are, and what the key facts and arguments are, and make sure this appears in the inbox of all the media’s key journalists. It should make letters to newspapers signed by a long list of academic economists a thing of the past, because economists themselves would find out what the plurality of opinion was and make that widely known. If Brexit does not compel academic economists to organise in this way, nothing will. Only in this way will we stop politicians defining the public's perception of what is true and false in economics. 

Trump, Brexit and balance

It is with a dreadful sense of inevitability that I’m watching what is happening in the US general election between Clinton and Trump. Just as the media in the UK normalised the flat out lies of the Brexit campaign, so the media in the US is normalising Donald Trump.

In both cases this stems from an obsession with balance. With the Brexit campaign the media balanced the lie about £350 million a week to the NHS with Remain’s claims (based on analysis using consensus economics) about the economic damage that leaving the single market would do. With the US general election, Trump's stream of well documented lies are balanced against seemingly baseless insinuations about Clinton.

This is not about what you read in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Their audience is generally not the electorate that could vote either way. The Financial Times provided exemplary coverage of Brexit issues, and the non-tabloid press as a whole was not too bad. With Brexit the critical electorate were those that read the tabloid press, just as in the US it is those that watch cable news. Those sources deliberately and relentlessly distort news to favour one side.

Without major changes to how the media is regulated in the US and how the press is regulated in the UK, there is little that can done about this particular media bias against truth. So the best we can hope for in the meantime is that the big ticket events like debates, or widely watched programmes on the non-partisan media like the evening TV news in the UK, offer some redress to the partisan nature of much of the media. Which is why the failure of Matt Lauer in questioning the two candidates is so important.

The concept of balance needs to be rethought by media organisations. Facts, and lies about them, should be above balance. The consensus views of experts like academics should be above balance. Standing up for both is not a journalist expressing an opinion, but a journalist doing their job.

The media likes to think of itself as the protector of free speech, and of holding authority to account. But that matters little if at crucial points in the democratic process the media either distorts reality or hides the truth. If you think that is an exaggeration, how else could you possibly get a result like this:

“Trump has his largest edge of the campaign as the more honest and trustworthy of the two major candidates (50% say he is more honest and trustworthy vs. just 35% choosing Clinton)”

If you are reading this in the UK and thinking this could only happen in the US, who do you think was trusted during the Brexit campaign?