Introduction: Militarised News Discourse and the Labour Movement

The contribution of ‘militarised discourse’ to the systematic negative repre-sentation of UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in the UK news media is the subject of a study by Freedman and Schlosberg (2016). They review three pieces of substantial empirical research which they claim demonstrate ‘the comprehensive denigration of Jeremy Corbyn together with the disproportionate amount of attention paid to his critics’ (Freedman and Schlosberg 2016: n.p.). One of these studies (Schlosberg 2016), conducted on behalf of the Media Reform Coalition in association with Birkbeck, University of London, notes that ‘one of the most striking patterns that emerged was the repeated use of language that invoked militarism and violence’ with, for instance, BBC correspondents tending to ‘ascribe militancy and aggression exclusively to Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters’ and not to those Labour MPs who publicly opposed Corbyn's stance and position as leader (Schlosberg 2016: 13). It is likely to be no coincidence, therefore, that the morning after a suspected ISIS-supporting suicide bomber killed twenty-two people and injured many more at the end of a concert in the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, one edition of The Sun newspaper juxtaposed on its front page a report of the atrocity with another report claiming to link Jeremy Corbyn with support for terrorist activities by the IRA in the 1980s. With just over two weeks left before polling day in a parliamentary general election scheduled for 8 June 2017, Britain's highest-circulation print newspaper – openly promoting Conservative leader Theresa May as its preferred candidate for prime minister – reported on 23 May 2017 that ‘[a]n ex-IRA killer says Jeremy Corbyn has blood on his hands – because without his support, the terrorist murders would have ended much earlier’ (with the headline ‘IRA BRUTE RAPS CORB’; Newton Dunn 2017: 1).

The reliance on what Freedman and Schlosberg (2016) describe as ‘militarised discourse’ to systematically and habitually demonise individuals and groups who challenge dominant ideological norms and values accords with our research on the (mis)representation of trade union endorsed strike action in the UK news press. Our view is that a key technique in the habitual stigmatisation of strikes is to misleadingly associate them with violence and aggression by routinely employing lexis from a semantic domain that has variants of the word ‘militant’ at its heart.