There is a danger of
missing the point about Labour’s surge and the media. The issue is
absolutely not that political commentators were surprised by Labour’s
sudden popularity among voters. Of course they were surprised,
because there was no evidence for it before May 2017. The dismal
showing of Labour in the council elections at the start of May was
real enough. Those on the left who say they knew it would happen are
using the word ‘knew’ in the same sense as football supporters
knowing their own side is going to win.
We all have a pretty
good idea why the surge happened. In style Corbyn was everything May
was not, and Labour’s policies were popular. What the media should
be worried about was that both those things came as a surprise to the
public. As I said here, a general election campaign is unusual
because the public get to see much more of the party leaders and hear
much more about their policies, and the broadcasters are duty bound
to be impartial. But the character of May and Corbyn did not change
overnight, and neither were the policies offered by either side very
different from the stance they took before the election. So why were
people so surprised?
Someone more cynical
than I might suggest that the media’s job is to distort reality: to
portray May as more competent than she was and to portray Corbyn as
incompetent. What happened in the election campaign is that the
electorate got a proper look at the two main leaders and their
policies, and realised what the media had been saying was false.
That cynical view is
completely appropriate to most of the right wing press, whose job is
to distort reality as much as they can get away with. (Remember that
damning article about May just before the election that was pulled by
the Telegraph?) But why did the truth about May and Corbyn not make
any impression on the public until the election? Did political
commentators know no more than the public, and were just as surprised
as the public about May and Corbyn’s character and their policies
during the campaign? If that is the case, they were poor journalists.
Or is it that they failed to communicate what they did know?.
Is the problem that the broadcast media feels duty bound to just present soundbites (May can do those), and the independent press in the UK is just too small? Or is the problem that the right wing media for one reason or another sets the parameters for other journalists. Is it that political journalists like winners and despise losers, so let the polls influence how they portrayed individuals and parties? I do not know the answers, but these are the questions the media needs to reflect on.
