So despite being completely spoilt for choice for ‘who said the stupidest thing yesterday?’ nominations, Steve Ladyman MP is probably the winner. Paraphrasing, he suggested that without additional media coverage of televised Leader debates, Gordon would win hands down. It’s only because the TV and the Papers will say Gordon was rubbish that people will think Gordon was rubbish. In reality, he would be awesome.
In fairness, Ladyman had a lot of competition for his award from other contributors to the same programme. This spectacular piece of critical thinking from some Labour activist comes a close second:
“I think, you know, in a General Election, and people see Gordon Brown and David Cameron, then… well gosh! It’s no competition at all!”
But here we go again, you see – this idea that the media’s out to get you so there’s nothing you can do, that it’s the media’s fault that people are against Labour. That’s absurd. If Gordon had done nothing but apologised and acknowledged everything that’s gone wrong, then announced plans to put things right then the media’s reaction would have been completely different. Everyone would have been surprised and genuinely uncertain about how the country will react to it, and that uncertainty would have been the window through which speculation about a possible Labour recovery could have taken hold.
What we got instead was the clunking fist battering us over and over, telling us how fantastic things are and how the answer is to have a lot more of the same. The clunking fist beats us into submission, telling us to withdraw our criticisms, that we’re wrong, that the fault is ours and ours alone. They’re refusing to change, and it’s pretty safe for journalists and editors to predict how that’s going to go down with the voters…. like every piano in every cartoon you’ve ever seen.
That the media has condemned this last, sad, desperate attempt to motivate the Core Labour Vote shouldn’t come across as a vengeful media out to get Labour, but fairly accurate reporting of what’s happened.
Outside of the Labour Party it’s easy to see that it’s not the media’s fault, that Labour deserve most of the press they get and that actually they benefited for at least 10 years from a mostly uncritical and positive press and didn’t complain once about the ‘problem’ of a media that liked them. “The press are bored with us” another MP said yesterday (another candidate) -somehow, with the material this Government generates for excitable sketch writers and op-ed authors, I doubt that very much.
In the Lib Dems there’s that same belief, that it’s all the media’s fault and if they were nice to us things would be different. The media hate us, and we hate them back, it seems. The media’s job is to scrutinise and give their opinion. They’re a free press, we have to accept that if they say we stink of BO and we don’t shower, they’re going to keep saying we stink of BO.
