But these rules are selectively applied, hence Len McCluskey can be confidently accused of antisemitism. The problem is not that the media assume good faith on the part of everyone, but that they are particularly tolerant when it comes to the right. How did we get here?
https://twitter.com/smolrobots/status/1318523735993995266
The premise of the dogwhistle is that politicians are constrained to speak in code by a watchful media. But that's a relatively recent centrist construct. The term only gained currency in the 1990s. Before then, language was less ambiguous (e.g. "Rivers or blood" or "Swamped").
The 90s were when the problematic of immigration & asylum became hegemonic, as New Labour bought into the right's traditional narrative. The dogwhistle helped distinguish between an imputed racist motivation (bad) & a "legitimate concern" (good).
But this distinction was never neat (hence Brown's "bigoted woman" outburst). The boundary was increasingly pushed back & racists assumed to have special insights into the working class. The result is now a blithe indifference to a carpenter's Nazi face tattoos.
As the media have increasingly tolerated the far-right, they have simultaneously become sensitive to dogwhistles on the left, ever watchful to spot covert antisemitism or anything that might smack of sympathy for Russia or China (despite neither being actually "left").
This is not simply anti-left bias but the structural need to define boundaries of the acceptable & thus maintain the media's policing role. The more they tolerate and groom the right, the more they will come down hard on the left.
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