How The Guardian’s hunger for clicks fooled Remainers into blowing their tops
For a long time there has been a clearly stated Labour Party policy on Brexit.
People who remain fundamentally opposed to Brexit in principle don’t like it because Labour has chosen to recognise rather than repudiate the result of the 2016 referendum. Whether or not Labour is right to do so is not the subject of this post. There are many sensible, good faith, arguments on-going in both directions on that complex and nuanced question.
But on Brexit policy, as it stands, Labour has as clear a stance as any party.
You can read it here in the 2017 General Election manifesto.
Since then, little has changed, bar one important addition. At the September 2018 Labour Party Conference the option to include another referendum, if a successful Brexit agreement with the EU proves impossible, was adopted as policy.
Subsequently, Prime Minister Theresa May has returned from Brussels with a Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration which could not command the support of Parliament. So she ducked a division on it, pushing the ‘meaningful vote’ back into the New Year.
If recent developments at Westminster have left you confused, this excellent video from the FT will get you up to speed.
Anyone with more than a passing interest in British politics knows that the position of the Labour leadership is;
- Vote down the ‘May deal’
2. Attempt a Parliamentary vote of no confidence in the government
3. Attempt to force a General Election under the Fixed Term Parliaments Act
4. Approach the European Commission for an attempted renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement
5. Go back to the people, if such an approach fails. Another referendum.
Option 5 is, in fact, not necessarily limited to those circumstances. It may be invoked in the event of Parliament being unable to agree anything to avoid exiting the EU with no deal. The specific wording of Labour policy on the ‘People’s Vote’ is “campaigning for a public vote”.
You can read the full wording here.
So, those are the facts.
Then, on Friday December 21, just as Parliament went into the Christmas recess, this was published by The Guardian.
And all hell broke loose.
It was a remarkable piece of emotional manipulation.
First, there’s that word ‘Exclusive’. Technically true, since Corbyn wasn’t doing a whole round of media interviews at the time.
But we all know what ‘Exclusive’ signifies. Important. And new. Something we were not previously aware of. Exciting stuff. It makes the pulse quicken, when it relates to an issue you already feel strongly about.
This is a word media outlets always use to make you buy their stuff, or click on their content.
This was The Guardian milking a fairly routine workaday piece for all the clicks they could get. Fair enough.
But then it got silly.
Jeremy Corbyn has defiantly restated Labour’s policy of leading Britain out of the European Union
Boom!
Corbyn had re-stated what we all knew already about his aspiration to replace the unpopular May Withdrawal Deal with an arguably more equitable one. But this non-news was suddenly ‘defiance’ of his anti-Brexit party membership.
As a journalist (12 years in local & regional newspapers, BBC local & network TV & radio) and a PR hack (21 years of creating eye-catching copy, often from very thin underlying content) I spotted this trick immediately.
It used to be called ‘flamming’ in the trade. The over-egging of an angle to manipulate people into thinking they are seeing something more significant than they really are. These days it’s called ‘clickbait’.
Although I’m a Labour Party member, this post makes no comment on the quality of my party’s Brexit approach. It is written from a professional perspective to invite better media literacy.
With my disinformation analysis hat on (which usually focuses on the use of manipulative emotive tropes by the hard right, or the ‘fake news’ business model) I often pass on a piece of advice I picked up last year.
It was from Dr Claire Wardle of First Draft.
To paraphrase;
If you feel a visceral emotional response to a piece of content, take a breath and don’t react immediately. The chances are, you’re being manipulated.
That’s what The Guardian was doing. By dressing up old news as a new and dramatically disappointing development in the Labour leader’s Brexit stance, they were manipulating an already emotionally charged audience who delight in such things.
The hot-heads of Remain leaped on this non-news to pour vitriol on its intended target, as anyone who spent more than five minutes on Twitter daring to challenge their narrative will attest.
I don’t actually know if The Guardian has the replacement of Jeremy Corbyn at the top of the Labour Party as an objective. I do understand how the perverse incentives of a largely online business like The Guardian lead such outlets to mislead and manipulate.
Handily, the storm of controversy that followed has given The Guardian more content to report on. The news maker reporting on its own effects. Whether it has really damaged Labour’s electoral chances or not isn’t really the point here, either.
The point is, The Guardian has revealed that it is, essentially, no better than its rivals.
Postscript: I have now cancelled my ‘premium tier’ subscription to The Guardian and diverted that cash into openDemocracy.
