The Labour leader has moved ahead in the polls, showing a clear appetite for his positive approach to politics, writes Giselle Green. And it’s not just politicians that need to take note, it’s journalists too
Jeremy Corbyn may not have won the election battle but he did win the battle for electability.
Today a YouGov survey for The Times puts him ahead of Theresa May for the first time as voters’ choice for who would make the best prime minister. Some 35 per cent of respondents thought the Labour leader would make the country’s best leader, while 34 per cent backed May, and 30 per cent were unsure.May’s collapse began with her negative, soundbite-driven, policy-lite campaign and her ‘manifesto of misery’. In stark contrast, Corbyn’s meteoric rise was rooted in his positive, energetic and policy-driven campaign, and his manifesto of hope.
Where Corbyn refused to indulge in personal attacks, these were the lifeblood of May’s approach. Where her campaign was mirrored by the right wing media’s Project Fear (and Project Terrorist), his was bolstered by social media’s Project Hope.
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As Paul Waugh of the Huffington Post notes: “Whereas the Conservatives spent a small fortune on their targeted attack ads, Labour used Twitter and Facebook to mobilise their supporters. It was all about motivating their own vote rather than attacking the other side.”
Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian that Corbyn tore up the political rulebook which says “negative campaigns work better than positive one”. Even Nick Timothy, May’s former co-chief of staff complained that “the Conservative election campaign failed to get Theresa’s positive plan for the future across”.
In the EU referendum, it was the Remain campaign’s Project Fear that was discounted while the Leave campaign’s empowering and hopeful “Take back control” slogan cut through. Just as Donald Trump’s ‘Make America great again’ did in the US presidential election.
But it wasn’t just the Conservative Party’s negativity about Jeremy Corbyn that dominated the election. According to research from Loughborough University, newspaper coverage was in the main highly negative.
“In cumulative terms, no party achieved more positive than negative coverage”, the report reads, and “the most partisan newspapers gave greater editorial focus to attacking the party/parties they opposed, rather than advocating the party they supported. The Labour party received the most negative coverage.”
Cynicism: the dominant force in politics and media
“For far too long, cynicism has been the dominant force in British electoral politics, willing failure at every turn” wrote the Guardian’s Gary Younge after the election.
But the media’s cynicism and negative skew on news isn’t confined to election reporting. It’s rampant the whole time and is being blamed for creating an unbalanced and misleading view of the world, creating a gap…
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