The Labour leader is facing a deluge of criticism in the British press – treatment that has been dished out to almost every predecessor from Clement Attlee to Neil Kinnock. With an election six months away, and the rightwing papers scenting blood, just how nasty could things get?

If Ed Miliband thought the Saturday headlines were inauspicious, then the Sunday front-page headlines were ghastly. “Labour voters say Miliband unfit to be PM,” trilled the Sunday Times. Shadow education minister “plunges in the dagger”, said the Mail on Sunday. “Labour push to axe Miliband”, alleged the Sun on Sunday.

Alongside the predictable pro-Tory stirrers were splashes in the Observer (“Miliband in new crisis as senior MPs back leadership change”) and the Independent on Sunday (“Jewish donors drop ‘toxic’ Miliband”). Even the normally loyal Sunday Mirror carried a piece headlined “Miliband’s got six weeks to shape up.”

More bad news for Ed Miliband. Photograph: AP

Meanwhile, the TV and radio news and current affairs programmes were following custom and practice by using the negative headlines as a peg for interviews and speculative analysis, all of it suggesting that the Labour leader was toast.

Nor could Miliband take any heart from Monday’s national newspapers as the feeding frenzy continued: “Miliband has lost public confidence, aide admits” (the Times); “Labour admits Miliband crisis may cost it election” (Daily Telegraph); and “Labour’s turmoil as ‘posse’ plots a coup to replace Miliband” (Daily Express).

The Daily Mail carried a two-page article claiming Labour was “committing suicide” and an editorial that disingenuously denied suggestions that Miliband was being subjected to a rightwing plot. Look at the Observer’s report, it said, in which is was claimed that some 20 shadow ministers were on the point of calling for Miliband’s resignation.

His supporters may have been lifted just a little by articles in the Daily Mirror and the Independent claiming that “Labour’s big guns” were telling unnamed critics “to put up or shut up”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour leader Ed Miliband: is he as hapless a leader as the headlines suggest? Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

But such supposedly supportive pieces were fingers in the dyke amid the deluge of negative articles. According to the Guardian, even the attempts to shore up Miliband’s position were making matters worse.

National newspapers, having picked up the knife originally plunged into the Labour leader’s back by the New Statesman, have clearly been bent on finishing him off.

Editors have not had to work too hard. They have been aided and abetted in their attempt to terminate Miliband’s political career by citing criticisms from a range of Labour MPs. In time-honoured, if dishonourable, fashion, most of them have chosen to brief reporters on a confidential basis.

Stop there for a moment and ask some pertinent questions. Is Miliband as hapless a leader as the headlines and opinion polls suggest? Does the unanimity of the reporting across the political spectrum, as the Mail contends, give credence to the notion that Labour is suffering from a real internal revolt? Or is it all a media-manufactured pseudo-crisis? In other words, is this a genuine story?

First, never underestimate the agenda-setting capabilities of a dominant rightwing press. Second, consider the fact that Miliband was elected as leader without obtaining a majority of his parliamentary party colleagues.

Third, factor in the party’s nervousness engendered by Miliband’s poor poll ratings. But, fourth, in spite of Miliband’s personal standing, note also the likelihood of Labour doing well at next year’s general election.

Let’s disentangle this complexity. There is nothing new about pre-electoral anti-Labour propaganda in Tory-cheerleading newspapers. It is part of Britain’s post-war political history stretching back to Clement Attlee.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair: the only Labour leader to avoid a berating from Tory newspapers. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AP

Every Labour leader – with the single exception of Tony Blair – has suffered. Three modern leaders were subjected to especially harsh treatment. Gordon Brown was scathingly lampooned in 2010 as a ditherer, with papers giving huge coverage to supposed plotters within the party. Neil Kinnock was savagely mocked in 1992 as “the Welsh windbag” among many other insults about his competence. Michael Foot was witheringly derided for his inappropriate dress sense as well as his political stance in 1983.

There was a grain of truth in each case, but the attention paid to the various misrepresentations of their characters was disproportionate.

Michael Foot, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock: subjected to especially harsh treatment. Photograph: Corbis; Zed Nelson; Getty

So it is hardly new to witness Labour party leaders being demonised in the media. It was significant that Kinnock should have waded in on Miliband’s behalf on Sunday.

Aside from his assault on the “anonymity and cowardice” of the critics, he dealt head-on with typical portrayals of Miliband as “remote, cerebral and weird”. That, said Kinnock, is “a total contrast to the man as he really is”.

Lord Kinnock was speaking from experience and from the heart. He endured a prolonged character assassination throughout his party leadership that remains something of a political landmark.

After months in which the Mail, Express, Telegraph, Daily Star and the Sun had heaped abuse on him, the campaign culminated in an iconic Sun front page in which Kinnock’s head was superimposed on a lightbulb with the headline: “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Front page of the Sun newspaper during the 1992 election.

Following that vilification of Kinnock, and the subsequent loss of an election Labour was expected to win, the party’s emergent young guard – Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell – forged a news management strategy in company with Tony Blair.

Spin certainly helped in getting Blair into Downing Street but, once in office, its forceful application was resented by newspaper and broadcasting editors. Spin was transformed into a four-letter word of abuse that eventually undermined Labour.

Labour was so scarred by that experience it dismantled its spin machine and, in so doing, has left Miliband to face the consequences. Similarly, the central discipline imposed on MPs by Blair’s machine also disappeared.

The resulting lack of control has emboldened MPs to do what was unthinkable in the Blair era by offering themselves up to a media ever hungry for a political scandal.

They have no clear alternative to Miliband. They know there is no mechanism to elect a new leader. But they appear to have been rattled by a gradual decline in the party’s electoral chances as evidenced in opinion polls and the possible collapse of the party’s Scottish vote.

By contrast, the rightwing newspapers read the situation differently. Labour remains, even if narrowly, the party most likely to return the largest number of seats in May 2015. It is therefore in their interests to exacerbate any hint of internal Labour revolt.

They have latched on to complaints from disillusioned Labour supporters. Witness the bitter attack last week by Harold Wilson’s former press secretary, Joe Haines. Now aged 86, he has been one of the Labour party’s greatest loyalists so his article in the Telegraph, a paper he has long scorned, was significant.

He called on Miliband to resign not “because he is a PR disaster, though he is”, but because of “his inability to understand how the world of politics has changed.”

Haines wrote: “He is not a Marxist but he has some of the Marxist rigidity of thinking. Tony Benn is dead but his convictions live on in Ed Miliband.”

This mention of Benn, yet another figure demonised by a hostile press and who also caused deep splits in Labour’s ranks, was calculated to wound and to raise alarm bells. As a result, dissident Labour MPs followed Haines’s lead and the newspapers, in company with news broadcasters, have had a field day since.

Therefore, claims that the crisis has been entirely confected by the rightwing press are not, in this instance, entirely valid. Editors and political journalists have taken advantage of the situation, but they did not manufacture it out of thin air.

They have been helped to an extent by unguarded statements from MPs who should know better or, at least, show have grasped that their words could be twisted. For example, the normally reliable and sensible shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint was lured into saying “some of colleagues are having jitters”.

Headlines were bound to follow, and did. Far worse, of course, was the statement by shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt. What on earth did he expect to achieve by saying: “I never believed the answer to Labour’s problems was to show people more of Ed Miliband. It was a ridiculous idea dreamed up by his advisers who have served him badly.

“It has been a complete failure. It is making things worse, not better. Ed has excellent qualities but that is not the way to show them. It is absurd.”

No editor – right, left or centre – could fail to point to the significance of that opinion. Hunt’s subsequent Twitter claim that the Mail on Sunday story was “nonsense”, along with a pledge of support for Miliband, hardly compensated for his mistake. Meanwhile, mischief-making backbenchers, including Simon Danczuk, were given ample airtime throughout Sunday with their calls for Miliband to step down. The story may not have been “all got up by the meedja”, but the media was only too happy to give it legs.

There will be more to come. Despite Tory MPs making life difficult for prime minister David Cameron over the European Union, a diversion he could have done without while his opposite number was on the ropes, the questioning of Miliband’s leadership suitability has become a recurrent media theme.

However, rightwing newspapers do not appear eager to see Miliband removed as leader. Better, they clearly believe, to keep him in situ and berate him continually in order to undermine Labour.

Witness Boris Johnson’s sarcastic column in Monday’s Telegraph in which he suggested the Tories should “save the Panda” – a nickname for Miliband that emerged after an unwise description of him by the former Labour justice secretary, Jack Straw.

“It would be in our interests to protect the poor beleaguered Lefty,” wrote Johnson, “in case he is replaced by someone more threatening.”

The Sun disagreed in its leading article. Despite internal opposition to Miliband, Labour could win the election, it said, and implied that the “plotters” should redouble their efforts. It concluded: “As the saying goes: when you strike at the king, you must kill him.”

But the Times, in referring to Miliband as a “damaged, beleaguered leader”, believes Labour “is stuck with Mr Miliband for now, and he with them”.

That is probably the prevailing view among pro-Tory owners, editors and journalists. The rightwing press has Labour on the run and belittling its leader will soon become very nasty indeed. And don’t believe that the power of the press is on the wane.

Newspapers, despite falling print readerships, still set the daily agenda. Broadcasters follow their lead. Nor does social media have the collective muscle to combat the fire power generated by the press. Users may nit-pick but they have not yet been able to challenge the newspaper-generated climate.

Papers will play a crucial role over the coming months and it is obvious that editors now scent six months of blood. Doubtless the Sun is already preparing for Miliband’s lightbulb moment.