Hold the front page! The workers and activists need to vet it...

Corbyn’s Alternative MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh was probably the first example of the Labour Leader setting his own agenda after weeks dominated by the anti-semitism furore. While the row with the Jewish community shows no sign of abating – and new footage emerges of Corbyn making extremely dubious remarks at a London conference five years ago – his media proposals were indeed eye-catching enough to deserve some scrutiny.

He started with a direct attack on mainstream news.

‘While we produce some fantastic drama, entertainment, documentaries and films,’ Corbyn argued, ‘when it comes to news and current affairs, so vital for a democratic society, our media is failing.’

His evidence for this sweeping statement? That people, when questioned in surveys, say they don’t trust the media.

Of course, a fair degree of scepticism is entirely healthy when looking at journalistic output. The British tabloid press doesn’t have the greatest of reputations and proprietors clearly have strong financial and political interests.

But in the Corbynite world, this suspicion of ‘mainstream media’ or the ‘MSM’, extends to any organisation with a newsroom and professional journalists.

His supporters are just as likely to rail against the BBC as they are to condemn The Sun or The Daily Mail.  In fact, any outlet which doesn’t venerate Corbyn as some kind of living saint is treated with contempt.

The Labour Leader’s own fanbase fuels the very distrust which he describes.

And when politicians such as Corbyn and Trump question the role of professional journalism, they play a profoundly dangerous game. They are feeding a cycle of cynicism which becomes self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling.

As he moved on, he naturally started to focus on his obsessions with media ownership. He said that he aimed to ‘break the stranglehold of elite power and billionaire domination over large parts of our media’.

The press barons who help to highlight his shameful past are obviously in his sights, but Corbyn is also looking at multinational corporations such as Facebook and Google, who now wield huge power over the media landscape.

According to Corbyn, ‘political and social activists’ should ‘get involved’ in deciding the business model of media in the future. Quite why the views of these self-appointed people would be accepted by multinational businesses or actively promoted by government wasn’t explained. But if these activists are anything like the individuals who troll, snipe and vent online to promote Corbyn’s agenda, then we’d better prepare for the biggest culture war the UK has ever seen.

After this, Jez started to outline his more specific proposals, including the sponsorship of what he calls ‘public interest journalism’. The most charitable interpretation of this segment of the speech is that he sees the whole business of news reporting as revolving around worthy investigations.

Naturally, we all want to see journalism that exposes injustice and corruption. But one gets the sense that in Corbyn’s puritanical and self-important world, the reporting of entertainment or royalty or celebrity is unbearable trivia. It doesn’t count as ‘real’ news.

And do we really believe anyway that local or not-for-profit organisations are somehow going to expose wrongdoing or social ills more professionally and credibly than, say, The Washington Post, The Guardian or the BBC?

In a world where we are confronted with Breitbart and The Canary and Westmonster and Skwawkbox, what confidence do we have that Jez’s ‘news co-ops’ are going to be producing anything other than polemical rubbish and half-baked conspiracy theories?

Corbyn then moved on to the BBC, with his much-reported proposals to ‘democratise’ the public-service broadcaster. It would seemingly become a news co-op on a grand scale, with workers and licence-fee payers running the show.

My general impression is that a Momentum Labour government would promise the BBC new funding by taxing successful new media businesses, but this largesse would come with a big caveat: adherence to the editorial policies laid down by People’s Committees. It would be an environment in which no self-respecting professional journalist could possibly want to work, but that matters little to the ideologues behind the scheme.

Naturally, supporters of Corbyn online lapped it all up. Many saw it as Jez getting ‘his revenge’ on the biased journalists who have given the veteran socialist such a hard time.

And then, of course, their guru was on to the idea of journalists electing their editors.

This is Corbyn at his most hare-brained and is the kind of idea that you’d expect to see championed during an occupation at Berkeley or the LSE in the 1960s. Perhaps in Caracas, while the editor of the local paper pops out with rucksack of cash to buy an espresso, her staff plot to overthrow her. But it isn’t going to happen in the UK anytime soon.

What should be particularly worrying to supporters of Labour is that some quite good ideas – extension of Freedom of Information legislation, for instance – were hidden amid all of Jez’s ideological baggage.  

So if you didn’t get to hear about them, don’t blame the MSM.