Some thoughts, from a sideways angle, on why the Guardian infuriated so many Labour supporters after 2015: while researching my PhD and (later) book, I read pretty much every Irish Times story on Sinn Féin and the IRA, from the 70s through to the 90s and beyond. 1/
There was a lot of excellent reporting from journalists like David McKittrick, Ed Moloney, Suzanne Breen and many others: people who'd spent a lot of time painstakingly trying to figure out what was going on, so they could inform their readers. 2/
There were also verbatim transcripts of speeches at SF party conferences, IRA statements, interviews with leading figures, etc. It must have been a great resource at the time, and it's certainly a great resource today for historians and anyone else who's keen to know more. 3/
I don't believe the Guardian would be the same kind of resource for people wanting to research Corbynism. In fact, historians relying on the Guardian & the Observer would be badly, sometimes disastrously misinformed. They'd need to look elsewhere for some basic information. 4/
What's the difference? It's not that the Guardian had more reason to be hostile to Corbynism than the Irish Times had to be hostile to the Provos. The IT's editorial line deemed the IRA to be a terrorist organization that was engaged in a conspiracy against the state. 5/
It wasn't just a question of the Provos having the wrong ideas, from the IT's perspective: they were bombing and shooting people to death on a regular basis—mostly in the North, but they also killed soldiers & police officers in the South during bank robberies & kidnappings. 6/
Even so, away from the editorials and opinion columns, you could get reliable, fairly objective reporting—not from a pro- or anti-republican slant; just an attempt to tell people what the movement was doing and what it was likely to do. Anyone could learn from it. 7/
It should have been quite possible for the Guardian to publish the same kind of reporting on Corbynism: after all, Momentum activists weren't firing mortars at police stations, or planting massive bombs in town centres, even if you found their online antics very annoying. 8/
It's partly a question of methodology, I think: the best reporters in Northern Ireland actually put in the hours, cultivating sources in the republican movement at leadership and grassroots level. You needed to make the same effort to report on Corbynism properly. 9/
But that methodology was ultimately a political choice: the Guardian started off reporting on Corbyn's leadership from the perspective of his inner-party opponents, and it never really broke that habit. Comment wasn't exactly free, but more importantly, facts were scarce. 10/
