Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn makes a statement to MPs in the House of Commons, London following publication of Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war, July 2016. All rights reserved.When the British Labour Party voted for a new leader in September 2015, they also voted for a different kind of politics, one might even argue that they voted for a different kind of democracy. Jeremy Corbyn, elected on the 12 September 2015 as Labour Party leader, could in many ways be considered as a political maverick, a political transgressor and deviator who refuses to align himself with the mores and quirkiness of the British political establishment. However, the way the British mainstream media reacted to him could likewise be denoted as transgressive and highly problematic from a democratic perspective. From the moment he became a serious contender and going in overdrive in the months after his election as party leader, Corbyn was clobbered by the British mainstream media in quite astonishing ways.
At the same time, in a democracy the media has a legitimate role to critique and to question authority. Our study – a representative content analysis of the representation of Corbyn by eight British newspapers (n=812 articles) – aimed to capture and acknowledge this legitimate monitoring role of the media, while also identifying where and in what way the British media transgressed into behaviour unworthy of a democracy.
Our analysis found that more than 50 per cent of news reporting about Corbyn from 1 of September 2015 until 1 of November 2015 was critical or blatantly antagonistic. That’s news coverage – the supposed bastion of journalistic factual reporting and balanced impartiality. A healthy democracy, according to the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO), requires a press that is “free to editorialise and campaign” – but newspapers “must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact,” insists the press regulator. And newspapers are also obliged to “make a clear distinction between comment, conjecture and fact.” The analysis of our data shows that in the case of Corbyn this distinction became very blurred. Furthermore, when it comes to opinion and editorials these were heavily skewed against Corbyn with almost 70% of all opinion pieces and editorials being critical or antagonistic and deligitimising (see Figure 1).
