Last Friday, having held Brexit negotiations throughout the previous night, Theresa May went to a nursing home and became a Dementia Friend, to a deafening silence from the mainstream media. The Alzheimer’s Society’s Dementia Friends programme is the biggest ever initiative to change people’s perceptions of dementia. It aims to transform the way the nation thinks, acts and talks about the condition. Theresa May is taking part, but disgracefully not one major media outlet reported on it, even though the Prime Minster’s participation is definitely a really big deal.
Last week, Jeremy Corbyn won a peace prize that nobody has ever heard of, and since then the constellation of crap Corbynista blogs, like the Canary, went into meltdown, as did RT and Press TV – Russian and Iranian state-funded media. All of them claimed that the non-reporting of Corbyn receiving the Séan McBride Peace Prize was further evidence of the media bias against the Labour leader, with headlines like, “Jeremy Corbyn wins an award for world peace and the silence from the mainstream media is deafening”.
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The thing is, the silence has been deafening for nearly every Séan McBride Peace Prize. As Channel 4 News’s Fact Check blog pointed out, it does not regularly get reported on.
They noted:
“We can’t find a single example of a British or Irish newspaper covering the announcement of the winner as a newsworthy event in itself – as, say, the identity of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is usually reported every year as a news story. A Google news search shows a similar general lack of interest in the Sean MacBride prize from the online news media.”
Not only that, they said, “we can’t find any evidence that the Labour leader publicised it himself…” and “A search of Labour press releases and Mr Corbyn’s Twitter feed for any mention of the prize comes up blank.”
Which really ought to be case closed. But that’s not enough for Skwawkbox, the strangely conceited blog that’s close to the Labour leadership office. In its third of five (FIVE!) posts on the subject it claimed that Fact Check was asking the wrong question. The real question, apparently, is: “Had Theresa May – highly unlikely as it is – been the recipient of the award, would the MSM have reported it?”
The answer is no. At least, not in the way the Skwawkbox imagines it: “It’s unimaginable that it wouldn’t have been a half-hourly item on rolling news stations, as well as all over the print media and in flagship news programmes.”
The Skwawkbox reckons “one striking aspect of ‘the case of the unmentioned award’ is how clearly it exemplifies and illustrates the impact and importance now of the ‘new left media’ (NLM) to the UK’s political landscape and narrative”. So here’s another interesting thought experiment: what if the alternative to biased mainstream political punditry didn’t have to be embarrassing hero worship and sulking when nobody joins in?
