(ANTIMEDIA) — Just last week, prominent U.K. newspaper the Telegraph ran an article entitled “Jeremy Corbyn the mime artist: Don’t vote for the man with no answers.” The opening line – the one line most likely to be read beyond its overly biased title – reads “Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most radical prospective Prime Ministers this country has ever seen.”
The same day, this same newspaper ran another article entitled “Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation. At MI6, which I once led, he wouldn’t clear the security vetting.”
A day later, the Telegraph declared that a victory for Corbyn would mean a “hard Brexit and doom for the economy.”
Taken together, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that Corbyn has suffered a barrage of attacks courtesy of the mainstream media. Honorable mentions go to the Daily Mail, whose front page had a picture of Jeremy Corbyn with the massive headline “apologists for terror,” and the Sun, whose front page had an enormous headline that read “Jezza’s [a childish nickname for Jeremy Corbyn] Jihadi Comrades.” (You can see these headlines and others here.)
Following Corbyn’s surge in the general elections, the Telegraph ran another article, this time entitled “To the millions of people who voted for Jeremy Corbyn: you scare me.”
The attacks keep on coming, even though the recent elections indicate that the people are no longer buying the propaganda. Another leading U.K. newspaper, the Guardian, spent years bashing Corbyn even though they knew approximately 78 percent of their readers backed Corbyn in the first place.
Learning their lessons from their coverage of Brexit and Trump’s election bid, the Guardian is now changing their tactic and giving generous media coverage to Corbyn’s position as the leader of the opposition party. This is clearly not a genuine and sincere move but a calculated response to their dying status as an international newspaper (at the end of every article, the Guardian begs for donations).
We have seen this all too often before: the mainstream media rams a particular candidate down our throats and ignores the fact that the people no longer want that type of person or their ideology running the show. In the case of the 2016 U.S. elections, the U.K. general elections have again given rise to the idea that Bernie Sanders could have won the elections last year, but that the people were denied this opportunity.
The fact that someone as vile and dangerous as Donald Trump won last year instead of Hillary Clinton tells us one important thing: it didn’t really matter who the alternative to Clinton was because the people are fed up with the status quo. When people see a failing economy, a wave of terror attacks, or a refugee crisis, for example – they are hardly going to be so naive as to accept the candidate who runs on a simple platform of “We need to keep doing the same things we have been doing for decades.” As long as the candidate can distance themselves from these failing policies, it ultimately won’t matter how racist, authoritarian, or unpredictable they are.
Similarly, Corbyn may have operated on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum (for 30 years, one might add), but he ran on a platform of opposing the status quo, particularly when it comes to matters of war and terrorism. A recent poll found the U.K. public agrees with Corbyn’s view on the causes of terrorism.
After a number of attacks in which people see their own dying before them, the dialogue ceases to be incessant obsession about who their government should bomb in response (given they have been doing that incessantly since 2001 with no tangible results), but a rational discussion regarding how we can effectively stop innocent people from dying on their own soil.
The people aren’t stupid, but the mainstream media will most likely continue to find this out the hard way. While Corbyn didn’t outright win the election in the U.K., technically, the loss of confidence requires the incumbent, Theresa May, to resign. The power should instead cede to Corbyn’s side.
Unsurprisingly, May is refusing to budge and still wants to press forward with her plans to regulate the conversation on the internet. How else will she be able to stay in power, especially considering the internet is how we have learned of her deep and dark secrets regarding the role she played in fostering known terrorists?
However, the most important lesson to learn is that Corbyn achieved this partial victory (note that almost two-thirds of May’s own party want her to resign) in the face of an obsessive media onslaught that sought to completely undermine him at every turn. Despite this one-sidedness, a new poll has found that Corbyn would most likely win a second general election and become the country’s prime minister, further cementing the idea that the corporate media is once again on the wrong side of history.
Imagine who would really be in power in the United States and the United Kingdom if members of the mainstream media did their jobs and reported accurately instead of advancing an outdated and dangerous neoliberal, neoconservative agenda.
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