Hilary Benn's speech The media's war footing on Corbyn and Syria

Curtis, Mark
http://markcurtis.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/hilary-benns-speech-the-medias-war-footing-on-corbyn-and-syria/
Date Written:  2015-12-05
Year Published:  2015
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX18587

Britain's media is on a double-war footing. The first war is against Jeremy Corbyn, and is countering the threat that Corbyn's more popular policies may gain even wider support. The second war is for Britain's ongoing right to bomb somewhere whenever elites want.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Outside of North Korea, speeches by political figures are rarely universally showered with adulation. So the mainstream media's ravings in reaction to Hilary Benn's speech to parliament on Syria are especially noticeable. Across the spectrum, the speech has been reported as 'riveting' (Guardian), 'extraordinary' (Mirror), 'great' (BBC News at 6, 3 December) and that of a 'true leader' (Telegraph).

The reason for such lauding is obvious. Britain's media is on a double-war footing. The first war is against Jeremy Corbyn, and is countering the threat that Corbyn's more popular policies may gain even wider support (see my previous blog). The second war is for Britain's ongoing right to bomb somewhere whenever elites want. The two agendas came together in Benn's speech -- in a single stroke, Benn achieved both the elite’s war aims: undermining Corbyn and helping to win the vote for bombing Syria.

I've been monitoring the mainstream media for 30 years and cannot remember a time like this: literally everything is being thrown at Corbyn. The BBC has simply become an attack dog, its reporting so extreme and so full of vilification that it does not even have a pretence of providing the balance that is required of it as a 'public service broadcaster'. The people who pay for the 'news' service the BBC provides (us, of course) are its precise enemy, the target of its disinformation.

Reading the text of Benn's speech, it is mainly notable for being so predictable. Whenever elites are set on military intervention, they tend to make fancy speeches that will make their actions seem noble (Blair's Chicago speech in 1999 to justify bombing Yugoslavia is an obvious example; George Bush Senior prattled on about a 'new world order' as he gave the order to bomb Iraq back to the stone age in 1990). Hilary Benn's key point was that Britain has a 'moral and practical duty' to bomb Syria and that the UN 'is asking us to do something'. Thus he was seriously suggesting that Britain would be acting immorally it we didn't bomb, a position even more extreme than the usual recourse to moralism.
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