MZC

I built personal relationships with everyone I could in the lobby, but obviously newspapers have an editorial line and their own sense of priorities. When we talk about media bias people think we are alluding to a conspiracy but what you’re actually saying is that an editorial decision is taken that one issue is more important than another. There has been a constant focus on items that would portray Jeremy in a negative light. This feeds their own narrative about him. The way the media frames politics clearly influences public opinion.

I don’t buy into the argument that people make up their own minds irrespective of what the media says. Having had experience of handling rebuttal, it is obvious the media influences people considerably. Either a free press is integral to a functioning democracy or it isn’t. If it is then you must accept it has influence — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it is essential one minute and background noise that no one really pays attention to the next.

When we held events, rather than just covering the event and scrutinizing the policy, as they would with others, the press would seek out a trivial issue in an attempt to mock the whole thing. It felt like this was constant, desperate even. It was a campaign to undermine Jeremy. Sometimes I thought people did it because they were lazy and couldn’t be bothered to read up on the policy. A lot of them really couldn’t be bothered to engage with what we were trying to put forward.

I came to the opinion that it was best to use that to our advantage, to use their attempts to produce controversy to draw attention to what we were really saying and then maybe we could cut through. Instead of trying to manage the media and trying to engineer something that was never really going to work, we could try to ride their wave and steer the attention of the public in the direction we wanted.

But the conclusion is that the press make it incredibly difficult for a left-wing, anti-establishment Leader of the Opposition to communicate to people. I don’t think conventional strategies work in the current framework.