Wednesday 7 June 2017

Ian Dunt on Al Jazeera - UK journalism and the Brexit Election

I saw Ian Dunt on Al Jazeera this evening, talking about the lack of debate about Brexit during the election. His explanation is that most of the UK press supports Brexit so ask no difficult questions. Most of the broadcasters take their lead from the press.

I hope there will be a clip of this on YouTube or similar. I have found his Twitter feed, he was on BBC as well. Also a text with similar, more detail on economic consequences, mostly quite alarming, and then

None of this has been discussed during the election. It is not an elephant in the room. It is a stampede approaching at speed, to which we have stared, shrugged and continued with our little tea party. If historians do bother to assess what happened in this election they will be left aghast at our complacency. And they will condemn the vacuous proposals put forward by May and Corbyn in the strongest possible terms. We needed political giants. Instead, we got children.

Personally I can understand why Corbyn has been concentrating on other topics. When he did try to explain to Laura Kuenssberg that his priority was for jobs not limiting immigration there was no BBC reporting on the positive aspects of this. Conservatives were able to edit an attack ad without much change from the BBC approach. It was May who called it as a Brexit election, with support from the newspapers. Surely the main responsibility is with them?

Dunt on Al Jazeera said that journalists outside the UK are struck by the nature of UK reporting. Whatever happens in the election result some of this will feed back later.

Guardian reports social media response to tabloid attacks on Corbyn. They seem to me to be much less assured than during the referendum. Later in the year could be soon enough to look at the reputation of UK news sources online, that is both outside UK and inside on a scale to be determined. Social media will be some form of alternative.


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