The Jewish community’s alienation from Labour has been years in the making - but it is Johnson's Conservatives who have embraced hostility to minorities
Jonathan Cook
Part 10 - Wildly inflated figures
Jews are as susceptible as everyone else to media propaganda and manufactured “moral panics”. And given their justifiable fears of a revival of antisemitism, they are likely to be even more open to manipulation by a media determined to block Corbyn’s path to power.
How effective this campaign has been outside the Jewish community is highlighted in a new book, Bad News for Labour.
How effective this campaign has been outside the Jewish community is highlighted in a new book, Bad News for Labour.
Academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry have noted the astonishing power of the media’s wildly inflated claims against Labour to dupe the British public. This has been equally true of Labour Party members, even when the media’s claims conflict with their own direct experience.
One survey they undertook for the book shows that on average respondents estimated that 34 per cent of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism.
That was over 300 times larger than the true figure.
When asked how they arrived at such a huge figure, many cited the scale of media coverage. As Philo observed in one interview: “A recurring theme of their answers was the sense that it simply must be on a vast scale, given how much publicity there’s been around it – the sheer amount of fuss and coverage in the media, as they saw it, and the amount of money being put into investigating the issue.”
One survey they undertook for the book shows that on average respondents estimated that 34 per cent of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism.
That was over 300 times larger than the true figure.
When asked how they arrived at such a huge figure, many cited the scale of media coverage. As Philo observed in one interview: “A recurring theme of their answers was the sense that it simply must be on a vast scale, given how much publicity there’s been around it – the sheer amount of fuss and coverage in the media, as they saw it, and the amount of money being put into investigating the issue.”
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