Independent Media | Campaigning Journalism
The Editor of The New Statesman threw a tantrum about Corbyn on Twitter, then tried to delete it. Too late [IMAGE]
The Editor of The New Statesman magazine has attempted to delete a social media tantrum triggered by positive coverage of Labour’s election campaign in rival publication The Guardian. Unfortunately, he deleted it too late.
The tweet
Despite positioning itself as a left-leaning outlet, The New Statesman is steadfastly metropolitan liberal. High on virtue-signalling, low on reaching outside Primrose Hill. As a former editor described its origins:
essentially a paper of the middle-classes – ‘knowing, knowledgeable and somewhat superior’, as Alan Watkins later described it. It was the house journal, not so much of the Labour party in general, but of what have been called the Hampstead intellectuals.
Little surprise then that the outlet went on to become the home of Blairism. And its writers have spent the last 18 months raging about, and lamenting, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Repeatedly condemning it as the demise of the Labour Party. Much like its rival The Guardian.
However, when The Guardian chose to write some positive things about Corbyn this week – The New Statesman Editor lost it. He accused the paper of being “Corbynite Pravda”, referring to the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Continue reading below...
To help put this mildly positive Corbyn story in perspective, here are some past headlines from The New Statesman and The Guardian about the Labour leader.
To call The Guardian ‘Corbynite Pravda’ is as absurd as calling The Sun a watered-down Gay Times. There is just no correlation.
The tweet and delete comes just a day after an equally embarrassing episode by The Sunday Times Political Editor. On 4 June, Tim Shipman tweeted that the Labour leader is a “terrorist loving commie” and that he’d “never seen anyone less suited to high office”:
The political editor of the Sunday Times @ShippersUnbound tweeted this last night, now deleted. He's brought the Sunday Times into disrepute pic.twitter.com/Q12dN23M53
— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) June 5, 2017
Back to The New Statesman
It’s not been a great year for Jason Cowley.
Back in February, The New Statesman Editor was caught bending the truth. Right in the middle of an interview about fake news. In an interview with the BBC, Cowley stated:
In an era of fake news, people are realising that good journalism is worth spending money on. While much of the liberal media has been struggling to survive in a declining market dominated by powerful media groups, the New Statesman has not merely held its position but expanded dramatically – all achieved… with no marketing spend.
But Cowley left out an important detail. In order to boost flat circulation figures, it is literally giving away one in every three of its magazines for free.
As the outlet’s ABC certificate shows:
The New Statesman can only do that because, like its rivals in the mainstream media, it is bankrolled by wealthy investors. In this case, by millionaire Mike Danson.
The magazine is also finding itself getting trounced by new media like The Canary. Top web ranking site Alexa places The Canary ahead of the magazine by several hundred places for online readership in the UK.
Awkward.
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Featured image via New Statesman/Wikicommons
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