Lovely
post from Mark Doran on Donald Trump's likely treatment by the US media
based on an analysis of the UK media's treatment of Jeremy Corbyn.
Doran argues, I think rightly, that
Trump will be disciplined into compliance – to become a "cookie-cutter
president", as he puts it. They will use the same techniques being
deployed by the UK media against Corbyn: "smacking" and "silence".
Doran: "The ‘smacking’ is what you get when something you have done, or
are merely said to have done, is used as something for which you can be
hammered in so many contexts that your own planned agenda is simply
submerged; the ‘silence’ is what you encounter when something you do
that is of possible value finds itself effectively unreported, in spite
of all your efforts to communicate it."
Doran goes on to analyse
in fascinating detail a day's coverage of Corbyn by the BBC. When you
see how the BBC is shaping our impressions of Corbyn at an almost
subliminal level – in a TV news animation, e.g., a star from the EU flag
(representing Brexit) detaches itself, turns red and plants itself on
to the centre of Corbyn's cap to make him briefly look like Chairman Mao
– you get a sense of quite how sophisticated this effort is. One might
be a coincidence or mishap, but the pattern surely cannot be.
This is the micro stuff going on all the time, below the attention level
of all but the most critically aware. It is bolstering the macro stuff -
the confected "rows" and "crises", like the supposed "anti-semitism"
one besetting the Labour party – also designed to persuade us in much
broader strokes that Corbyn would make a catastrophic prime minister.
