Jeremy Corbyn according to the BBC: ideological representation and identity construction of the Labour Party leader

There have been many complaints that the BBC coverage of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn has been partial and biased. This paper is part of an interdisciplinary project on the television representation of Jeremy Corbyn that brings together scholars in the disciplines of linguistics (critical discourse analysis), journalism and politics. The paper is a small scale case study examining the coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech on the 28th September 2016 after he won the leadership by election for the second time in a year. In the first stage we compared the scripting of the reports for the main national UK TV news programmes and the representation of the Labour leader’s identity offered to viewers. In the second, we also evaluate Newsnight, a BBC programme coverage of a slightly different genre, which constructed Corbyn as a particular kind of leader. In addition to the verbal text of the reports, we considered the interplay between the presenter and political correspondent and their tone. This enabled us to broaden our critical discourse analysis to a multimodal investigation and tease out non-textual, nuanced ways of creating partiality. We concluded that some BBC coverage does demonstrate bias and partiality against Corbyn in subtle modes where tone alters the meaning of the script and visuals and the BBC fared badly compared to other mainstream TV news.