Fake journalism

...and Jeremy Corbyn

...What will we who lived in this country in the 1980s recall of the politics of that time as we get older? A female prime minister who dominated politics, for sure, and maybe the personality cult that built up around her. We’ll remember the strong and contrasting Pavlovian reactions the mere mention of her name could provoke. It still can. We won’t forgot her chief cheerleader Rupert Murdoch and the Gotcha so-called journalism of his so-called newspaper the Sun. 

We may remember the donkey jacket worn by a leader of the Labour Party at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday though some might struggle to recall his name. The Sun led with that story. So did most of Fleet Street. And the BBC. And they all regurgitated it for months, such was the national scandal they made it into. Plus ça change.

We’ll remember Spitting Images. It turned them all into figures of fun. When I first saw a short clip on Facebook (running from 7.25 to 9.20 in this longer video I found on YouTube), I thought Jeremy Corbyn was playing himself in a comedy sketch produced by the Labour Party. I watched it again and realised that a major television company had made it and broadcast it as a serious interview of Jeremy Corbyn by a so-called journalist. It was not a comedy. It was a travesty. 

If it were recreated using Spitting Image-style grotesque caricature puppets and if the brainless so-called journalist’s words were spoken by an actor in a silly voice, the Labour Party could have a hilarious party political broadcast to put a smile on our faces while exposing what’s really taking place in this interview.

Ten out of ten to Jeremy Corbyn’s team if they saw this coming and prepared him for it and for his perfect delivery of their scripted answers. But it looks more like an attempted ambush and that would make Jeremy Corbyn’s unprepared, unscripted and unflustered replies all the more impressive. 

‘That moment. When an attempted smear job falls…Flat. On. Its. Arse!’ says the Labour supporter who posted the clip on Facebook. Sadly, he may be wrong. What he sees could be very different from the impression this so-called journalism leaves in the minds of the casual, uncommitted viewer.  It may reinforce an already negative view people have of Jeremy Corbyn.

This is what Jeremy Corbyn and those who like his policies and style of politics - millions of us - are up against everyday in the mainstream ‘No fake news here’  media. 

For sure, few outside a small circle of Labour Party activists will remember Labour Briefing magazine, fewer still a controversial article it published in 1984.

So how did so-called journalists at Sky News come across it?  So-called journalists rarely go looking for important news of public interest. They wait for so-called news to come to them. It’s readily supplied by those who want free media publicity for whatever reason. This Labour Briefing non-story almost certainly came to Sky News from a dirty tricks team working for Conservative Campaign Headquarters.