Owen Jones v The Sun is the joke that keeps on giving
Guardian journalist and Jeremy Corbyn fan Owen Jones is so upset that he allowed the Sun to feature an extract from his book that he’s donated £500 to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign. The Sun lied when 96 innocent people were killed at a football match in 1989. You can read more about it here. A mere 23 years after the lies, the Sun apologised.
Jones won’t forgive the paper. “I’ve made the argument that the British media is directly responsible for legitimising and fuelling the rise of the far right. The hatred directed, on a daily basis, against Muslims, migrants, refugees, LGBTQ people, and other minorities, has had already horrifying real world consequences: worse is to come,” he writes in a story headlined: “Why writing for The Sun is bad (and my own making amends).”
But not all British media is to blame. The Guardian, for instance, which admitted that a cartoon”inevitably” echoed “past antisemitic usage of such imagery” is fine. As Julie Burchill put it as she left the Guardian for the Times, which like the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch, she’d “finally been convinced that my evil populist philistinism has no place in a publication read by so many all-round, top-drawer plaster saints”. That’s the Guardian, in which one columnist opined: “I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.” Jones has also written for the New Statesman, the organ that produced this fair and reasoned cover:
Jones adds: “It is the proprietors and editors who bear the greatest responsibility for this media campaign of hatred. But the journalists who write such stories have to be held to account, too. The idea that building their own careers is more important than not helping to whip up bigotry and hatred against already vulnerable minorities is perverse. They may think it’s a price worth paying to “make it”, but the price is not paid by them — it’s paid by other people in the streets, in school yards, in workplaces and in communities.” Sun writers should look to themselves and consider their positions.
Jones says that his refusal to accept a fee from the Sun doesn’t make it right. He was “naive”. “Giving them any copy whatsoever just legitimises the paper.”
As Jones is invited to hand back any earnings from the Guardian and the New Statesman – if he keeps up his rate of a £500 donation per article, he might earn an OBE for charity work – Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman muses on twitter:
The “established MP” who earned money from the Iranian government-funded satellite channel Press TV, is Jeremy Corbyn. One writer says “Press TV is not just a home for those with exterminationist fantasies about wiping Israel off the map, but a platform for the full fascist conspiracy theory of supernatural Jewish power.” Iran backs Corbyn’s “friends” in Hamas, the group whose stated aim is to kill every Jew. Jones wants us to make Corbyn the country’s Prime Minister. Maybe Corbyn didn’t notice the racism. He might also have missed the fact that Iran hangs gay people, stones women to death and wants to annihilate the world’s only Jewish state.
But it’s the Sun that shames Jones. For pity!
Posted: 15th, January 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
