Corbyn’s hatred of the ‘MSM’ is a Labour tradition – one that has always led to electoral failure

On the face of it, hearing a politician referring to the media as “hostile” and “critical” to the sound of rapturous applause feels like a particularly modern phenomenon. In a climate where political rallies see reporters jeered, heckled and sometimes physically accosted, it is easy to think each new attack on the “MSM” is the latest symptom of a thoroughly Trumpian, twenty-first-century disease.

In the case of Jeremy Corbyn however, his words to gathered supporters in Broxtowe in late February echoed a mindset as old as the Labour party itself. By complaining about Sky News not asking about issues he thought worthy of a question, he exposed the unwelcome return of the kind of media hostility that has represented the party at its electorally weakest. This return to seeing the media as an enemy of the party’s cause is also not good news for anyone who wishes to see Labour return to government.

Hostility from Labour towards what we now call “mainstream” newspapers has appeared throughout the last century, and nowhere more than during its founding. The birth of the Labour Party (a name not actually adopted until six years after they formed) occurred within broader societal changes that saw more of British society attempt to better cater to the wants and interests of the mass, lower-class public. One aspect of this emerging culture, alongside things like the labour movement, association football and mass seaside holidays, was the birth of the modern “tabloid” press: the late Victorian equivalent of the “mainstream media”.

The massive success of new newspapers such as Daily Mail and the Daily Express was particularly troubling to many within early Labour. These newspapers were being bought by the same kinds of working and lower middle-class citizens to whom Labour most wanted to speak. The news they were selling to those people was comprised mainly of sensationalist “New Journalism” content such as crime reports, sports news and high society scandals. This journalistic diet stood opposed to everything that early Labour thought a newspaper should be. A newspaper to them, as Corbyn has echoed over a century later, should educate about the right kind of issues.

The issue this created was a party that was unwilling to engage with existing media, as it saw it as a rival speaking to the same audience that it too desired. Just over a century ago, Labour’s response was to cut out the middle person and make a newspaper of its own: the Daily Citizen. It ran for just over two years, and was priced and advertised to be a Labour alternative to the new tabloid press. It even tried to use the same sensational content that drove so many to buy the Mail, featuring page spreads on sports news and reporting on crimes from all over the world.

Its problem, and a big reason why it failed, was how the politicians behind the paper could not let go of their deep-rooted mistrust for popular news. The result was popular journalism written as if by people who hated every word they typed. Indeed, each edition of the Citizen ran a half-page section which scornfully quoted the very same newspapers whose audience they were trying to speak to, mocking them for their content and sentence structure. Labour recognised that millions of people liked reading about human-interest stories, but even their own human-interest tabloid deeply resented them for doing so.

While it is unlikely that Labour will again try to launch their own newspaper, this same resentment can be seen bubbling under the surface of the modern party. Corbyn’s near-total absence from radio and television studios since first becoming Labour leader speaks of an unshakable hostility towards what he and many others in the party see as an enemy. His recent Sky comments, mocking the intentions of the interview, could have fitted in perfectly into a century-old Labour daily paper’s mocking of the same “hostile” media.

This turn back to the past is undoubtedly part of Corbyn’s enduring appeal. It is, for those invested in his leadership, a shift away from the Blair years and closer to the roots of what the party originally was. No other political party values its own history more than Labour. To hark backwards, therefore, resonates with many ardent party loyalists. In this case, however, they are looking at one of the party’s worst traditions.

The Labour parties that won power, be it Blair’s, Attlee’s, and even the minority government of the 1920s, were ones that appreciated the value of modernising their attitudes to the media. The historian Laura Beers has written brilliantly about how Labour only became a real electoral force post-WWI in part because it lessened its old media hostility and saw the potential of speaking to the masses through media – like cinema, radio and popular news – that they regularly consumed and enjoyed. It is to this history, not one of aggressive media antagonism, that Labour should turn if it wants to become a government again.

Once it does this, then maybe its supporters might get asked more questions they are happier to answer.

Christopher Shoop-Worrall is a researcher of journalism history at the University of Sheffield, and media lecturer at UCFB