The key talking points that emerged from the Vice news documentary ‘Jeremy Corbyn: The Outsider’ perhaps inevitably focused on the attitude towards the media. The headline quotes from the moment the documentary appeared online were about the leadership’s siege mentality with respect to the media. ‘Supposedly well-informed major commentators’ were dismissed as ‘shallow, facile and ill-informed’. The BBC are ‘obsessed beyond belief … with trying to damage the leadership of the Labour party.’ For praising Corbyn’s performance at prime minister’s questions, the New Statesman’s political editor was described by Andrew Fisher as ‘the worst judge of anything’.
The most concerning moment, however, came when the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland came up in conversation. Freedland had written a column entitled ‘Labour and the Left have an antisemitism problem’. This was dismissed as ‘utterly disgusting, subliminal nastiness’. It might be worth, therefore, considering what Freedland actually wrote.
The column in question contains no accusations of antisemitism against either Jeremy Corbyn, or anyone else in any senior position in the Labour party – in fact, Freedland stressed that ‘no one accuses [Corbyn] of being an antisemite’. His argument was simply an appeal to the Labour leadership to take the problem of antisemitism within the party seriously. It is impossible to miss that this problem has become more evident in the two-and-a-half months since.
Strikingly, Freeland even stressed that Jews have been warning of the phenomenon of antisemitism within Labour under previous leaders too, and on the wider Left – only to be met with accusations that these claims were made in bad faith, to stifle political debate. It is all the more alarming, then, that that is exactly the reaction that his article prompted: a sense that a Jew’s concerns about antisemitism can be treated at anything other than face value.
Freedland is a left-of-centre, Jewish journalist who has not hesitated to be both strongly critical of Israeli governments, and to express the real difficulty he feels at balancing his liberalism and Zionism. He is not the enemy.
And yet, one could not escape the sense when watching the documentary that that is exactly what many people in the media – even, perhaps especially, those who are sympathetic to Labour – were seen as. It is worth asking not just why praise from left-of-centre journalists was met with hostility, but also why Andrew Fisher had no reservations about doing this on camera. The hostility aimed at Laura Kuenssberg by activists this week demonstrates how widespread within parts of the party this attitude towards the media as a whole is. The idea, no matter how unfair coverage by parts of the media might be, that complaining about it will earn us any credit was surely tested to destruction in 2015. And if no attempt is going to be made to build bridges to those who are sympathetic to the Labour cause, how can the party hope to get our message out beyond the already converted?
Labour should never, of course, shy away from just and necessary criticism of the media. Labour members of parliament have received deserved praise for standing up to the worst excesses of parts of the press in the last few years, whether over phone hacking or, most memorably, over Hillsborough.
However, if the negative reception, even among commentators on the party’s left, to the Vice news documentary tells us anything, it is that alternative media is not proving a fruitful alternative to the hard work of engaging with traditional media outlets across the political spectrum. No number of Vice news documentaries could match the audience that can be reached through an appearance on the BBC. It is only through them that Labour’s message will reach the millions who engage with traditional media, and it is only through them that a route to power can possibly lie.
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Nick Garland is a member of Progress. He tweets @npjgarland
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