Leftwing parties are up against a biased media

Gary Younge’s excellent article reveals the mountain that all centre-left parties have to climb to win elections against the massive disadvantage of a hostile, partisan press (The Tories can’t win without the rightwing press on side, Journal, 15 November).

It is a national scandal that our democracy is undermined and perverted by rightwing newspaper proprietors like Rupert Murdoch. This unfair advantage is now being added to by Russian state interference and oligarch donations to the Tories. There are also many examples of how the broadcast media, especially the BBC, amplify and fail to properly interrogate Tory propaganda aimed at distorting and misrepresenting Labour policies.

Professor Stuart Hall convincingly demonstrated just how the media reproduces and maintains rightwing hegemonic ideology by transmuting it into people’s “common sense”. It is no wonder that the Tory party has been in power for much of the last 100 years, to the detriment of the real national interest.
Philip Wood
Kidlington, Oxfordshire

• Gary Younge is right: “We can and do … make up our own minds. But we don’t make them up out of thin air.”

Mediating and distorting the message where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party is concerned is not restricted to the press; it pervades the broadcast media as well, despite Ofcom’s rules on impartiality and accuracy in election campaigns.

Andrew Marr’s repetition of Conservative party talking points, outlined in this article, is a case in point. Perhaps reading and reflecting upon Younge’s article would benefit the various journalists, producers, commentators and editors of the “impartial” BBC, from which public broadcaster we have a right to expect the highest standards.
Dr Bridget Riches
Bexley, London

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