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    John Booth review of Jones' 'This Land' Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on December 13, 2020, 12:18 pm

    Pretty damning on all his omissions:

    https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-corbyn-left-out.pdf

    On the media a/s smear campaign:

    '[Jones] is disappointingly poor on ‘Labour anti-semitism’. 31 When he says ‘the crisis led to months of media coverage’ he couldn’t be more wrong: the evidence points to years of adverse and often abusive coverage provoking and prolonging the ‘crisis’. In Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief, Greg Philo and Mike Berry write:

    ‘A search of eight national newspapers shows that from 15 June 2015 to 31 March 2019, there had been 5497 stories on the subject of Corbyn, anti-semitism and the Labour Party. The issue was also extensively featured on television and in new and social media.’32

    Their conclusion – from focus groups in different parts of the United Kingdom and a national poll conducted by Survation – was that the public perception of a highly exaggerated proportion of allegedly anti-semitic Labour members was due to the ‘volume of coverage and the persistence of the theme in reporting’.

    Jones’s own paper, The Guardian, and its sister publication, The Observer– both much read by Labour members and supporters – greatly contributed to it. I won’t hazard an explanation for Jones’s failure to detail 33The Guardian’s protracted hostility to Corbyn. The Observer’s critical 34reporting and commentary is easier to understand on at least one basis: it supported the Iraq war that Corbyn strongly opposed.35

    Both books also offer little detail on the contribution of the broadcasting media to the ‘crisis’. The BBC was consistently critical of Corbyn. One of the worst examples was the 2019 BBC TV Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-semitic?’. It opened with an unidentified former employee of the Israeli embassy, Ella Rose, attacking Corbyn. ITV’s political editor Robert Peston 36(previously in the same job with BBC) said in his Hugh Cudlipp lecture on ‘impartial journalism’ why he felt compelled ‘as a Jew’ to use material critical of Corbyn.3

    Without constant media amplification, the sustained five-year personal and political attack on Corbyn from inside and outside the party would not have been possible. It was largely because of journalists and their employers that a persistent and abusive Corbyn critic could claim credit for his defeat.38But we were unlikely to get a comprehensive account of that from these mainstream media authors.39'

    On Corbyn's resistance to the adoption of IHRA:

    'These books are right to say that Corbyn was a leader lacking important qualities for the job: many of his closest advisers and supporters attest to that, as the authors duly record. But the authors are ultimately unfair in their coverage of the Corbyn years because they lack one key journalistic requirement my old boss Ben Bradlee insisted was crucial to honest reporting: ‘No story is fair if it omits facts of major importance or significance. Fairness includes completeness.’

    Jones, for example, says of the Labour leader in his struggle over the IHRA definition: ‘It was another example of Corbyn choosing to die on the wrong hill’. In other words, he should have quickly accepted that his many opponents – MPs, peers, pro-Israel groups and most of the media – were going to win and so should have quickly conceded to that political reality. A more complete version of events would include the fact that many prominent Jewish figures in public life with strong records of fighting discrimination, including senior lawyers and scholars, believed there was much wrong with the IHRA definition and its controversial examples. They saw it as a potential censorship tool and a serious threat to free speech. This was not a case of Corbyn perversely seeking martyrdom, but of him resisting determined and often dishonest opponents seeking to turn criticism of the policies of Israel into the toxic smear called ‘anti-semitism’.48

    Both books describe the abuse that Corbyn’s critics say they suffered but fail to detail that to which Corbyn’s supporters were subject. These ranged from defamatory reports in Israel-supporting media, to meetings being broken up – with one at Party conference being cancelled because of a bomb threat.49

    Corbyn, for all his weaknesses and mistakes, was trying to move the country forward in a fairer and more hopeful direction by speaking the truth as he saw it.'

    And a weird conclusion after all that:

    'Time will tell whether such hopes for a different, more equal, more tolerant, more enlightened kind of country briefly tendered by Corbyn are nurtured by his successor.'

    Mate, I think you'll find that Time has already told us all we need to know about Starmer...

    I

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