Thread by @jrschlosberg

A thread in response:

I’ve always admired the work of @medialens. Both their critical alerts on mainstream media coverage and their efforts to engage politely and constructively with journalists has been a big influence on my own research as well activism. However...

https://twitter.com/WillDan77572379/status/1384422579138670592

their critical review of this new book about @Guardian betrays, I think, a fairly recurrent and fundamental flaw in their analysis of the media...

Their review opens with a reference to what Chomsky and others have articulated as the ‘non-conspiratorial conformity’ of mainstream media journalists...

As I’m sure they’d acknowledge, what is meant by this phrase is that such ‘conformity’ does not tend to be the result of deliberate, collective planning or even conscious intention...

It’s a fairly basic truism that few if any journalists working in mainstream publications like the Guardian believe – secretly or otherwise – that they are ‘conforming’ to an agenda that ultimately serves the interests of elite power...

Addressing how and why non-conspiratorial conformity is achieved is essential to any radical critical understanding of how the media in western democracies can serve the interests of elite power, even when journalists often think and feel like they’re doing the very opposite...

But this is a question that @medialens seem strangely unwilling or unable to address. In my chapter I tried to suggest @guardian's culture of conformity in regard to the Corbyn project was shaped by a tendency among journalists to perceive it as the left flank of populism...

It was very surprising that @medialens editors misunderstood this point almost entirely to mean that I was somehow trying to excuse or defend the Guardian’s systematically flawed and inaccurate reporting on Corbyn, especially in relation to antisemitism...

They assert to the contrary that “Guardian hostility to Corbyn was about fear of mild socialism challenging the state-corporate status quo, not fear of populism”. The problem is that assumption contradicts the whole notion of ‘non-conspiratorial conformity’...

If Guardian journalists and editors really were consciously, deliberately and secretly trying to defend state-corporate power against the threat of ‘mild socialism’ in their coverage of Corbyn, that could hardly be considered ‘non-conspiratorial’...

What’s more, when I pointed out this coverage ran directly contrary to the Guardian’s mantra of ‘facts are sacred’ (which I suggested was a ‘cornerstone’ of its entrenched liberal ideology) @medialens somehow took this as a thinly veiled pat on the back...

I really didn’t expect this to need spelling out, especially to other radical critics of the media. But to clarify...

I was trying to argue that the Guardian’s belief in the ‘sanctity of facts’ combined with its defence of the (neo)liberal order against the threat of ‘populism’ are ideological constructs...

In other words, they form the very basis by which non-conspiratorial conformity is achieved. Its columnists and journalists didn’t attack the Corbyn project because they believed it to be a form of ‘mild socialism’ threatening state-corporate power...

They somehow came to accept and internalise the association between Corbynism and various forms of extremism in a way that became so entrenched that it proved unchallengeable even by overwhelming evidence to the contrary...

That is the power of ideology, and trying to understand the how and the why of such cognitive dissonance is clearly not remotely to do with softening the force of critique.