Some highlights from @jeremycorbyn#changethemedia speech this morning. 1. Public money to suppport regional and local news co-ops. You only need to look at the difference @TheBristolCable has made to the city's politics to understand the significance of this.
A national network of news co-ops that bring audiences and journalists together in a partnership to understand where they live, and the world beyond, will have a massive impact on the operations of government at all levels.
We will be able to start developing an understanding of the world on secure foundations, working with people we trust.
2. Democratic reform of the BBC. If we want to talk seriously about the UK media, we have to talk about the BBC. Elections are surely preferable to government appointment. It is important that the electorate have means to assess what people are doing in office ...
... and that election is supplemented with other democratic mechanisms including randomly selected audience panels, and defined, universal powers to engage in consequential decisions about the constitution of public speech.
3. Elections in private media operations. As with news co-ops, I hope this will inspire and energise journalists and would-be journalists. The best of them know that it is punishingly difficult to serve both the public and the demands of the editorial hierarchy.
4. A British Digital Corporation. This is a massive breakthrough. Corbyn is tying media policy to a much broader agenda of economic and social transformation. The current media system is integral to the operations of capitalism.
We make economic decisions in isolation, based on cues from a massive persuasion industry derived from, and constantly reinvigorated by, psychological warfare. Meanwhile the media ignore or misprepresent the broader context in which we must act.
A British Digital Corporation offers us a chance to develop new forms of democratic planning, that dispense with both the advertising mystique and the fictions that surround the fundamentals of the economic order - land and credit above all.
This is a bridge that we can build, in the here and now, to a better way of being together. The question is - do we want it enough? Are we willing to argue for it, to improve on it through discussion and reflection?
Time will tell. But this is a good day. #changethemedia and you have a shot at changing the world. Corbyn has said it out loud and no amount of elite ridicule or condescension can unsay it now.
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In his latest explainer @garyseconomics touches on a key issue, the lack of seriousness in the media about how successful economic reform would need to organised. We need high-level, widely shared, discussion of what we've been doing since 1979 ...
... where it has led us, and we need to change our political economy to improve living standards for the majority against a background of geopolitical instability and climate change. But post-2008 the media prefer to believe one weird trick will be enough to appease the gods.
Again, we could have public media that organises and manages just such a debate, that tests all kinds of propositions against the evidence in a way that is compelling and enlightening to the citizenry, who themselves participate actively and directly in the process. But we don't.
🧵Highly paid BBC presenters who express astonishment at the very idea of taxing wealth aren't doing much to dispel the widespread perception, well documented in Ofcom's audience research, that they are 'out of touch with ordinary people.' ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/res…
From 2028 the BBC will operate under a new 10-year Charter. It's important that we have a broad and deep debate about its structure and operating assumptions before then. As the public lose confidence in the wider establishment there's a danger that the BBC will go down with it.
For example, the 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey talks of 'a stark decline in public trust' in the UK's governing institutions: a full 45% of us 'almost never trusted' politicians to put the nation's interests first.') natcen.ac.uk/publications/b…
FWIW, some thoughts on the influencer and the party / Stephenson and the left conversation. There's bound to be tension between the dynamics of the attention economy and the needs of political projects. Individuals empowered by platforms can rapidly build vast audiences.🧵
Those individuals are not tied to collectives, and are only really vulnerable to the platform owners (which can snuff them out, or promote them, at will). They can embrace left-adjacent themes and drop them as opportunities present themselves. (I am old enough to remember ...
... Russell Brand jousting with Paxman and being courted by Miliband in 2015.) But the left's response has to be to build collective agents that are themselves capable of reaching large audiences by dint of convening large numbers of individuals as rule-bound plural subjects ...
In the new NS podcast the team discuss a focus group in Sittingbourne and Sheppey, made up of Conservative to Labour switchers. One presenter, the one who doubted Corbyn had much of a personal vote in Islington, was "a bit taken aback at how punchy and disappointed they were."
It's striking that a political journalist needs to go to a structured focus group to find out what people outside Westminster are feeling. But I suppose this reflects the existing balance of power: voters are a background feature in a drama with only a handful of speaking parts.
Marr noted that politics outside Westminster was different, and that Burnham and Sarwar are more interesting and self-assured than most Cabinet members. But the podcast was 100% Westminster-brained, in that its premise was that 20224 Con-Lab switchers were key.
In my self-appointed capacity as a purveyor of lukewarm takes I have now read That Article. What stands out is the intense focus of the Labour right on media and communications ... 🧵 theguardian.com/politics/2024/…
McSweeney seems to have understood that trusted independent left media posed an existential threat to the right's attempt to regain control: if members understood who the Labour right were, and what they wanted, the game would be up.
According to @AnushkaAsthana "they took aim at news websites they considered to be either alt-left or alt-right, including, perhaps not surprisingly, the Canary." She says their campaign had a material impact on that outlet, forcing them to become "much leaner."
Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.
A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.
Haha, the public don't care about x! (when x is something that's extremely important, that can only shore up oligarchic power in a formally democratic system when people have no idea what x is, and only have brain dead analogies to go on when they turn to the media to find out.)