Abstract
Several relatively new digital platforms made a significant contribution to the election, helping generate numerous stories that went viral. The more influential were pro-Labour and included Novara Media, one of the most important of the emerging left websites. Members of the team responsible discuss how they helped promote Jeremy Corbyn and his party’s policies and also defended him and them against their prominent critics within the mainstream media. The piece demonstrates the success of this and other radical websites in reaching a wide audience and highlighting certain issues that otherwise might not have attracted so much attention.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Pasokification ’, a term which in the UK originated on Novara Media , refers to the process by which formerly dominant social democratic parties are outflanked from the left by particularly insurgent anti-austerity parliamentary parties. The term originally referred do the near electoral elimination of the Greek party Pasok by Syriza , but has also been used to speculate on Podemos’s once-anticipated ‘sorpasso’ (surpassing) of PSOE in Spain, and to describe the rise of an anti-austerity oriented SNP against Labour in Scotland . For further information see: Doran (2013, 2015) and Chakrabortty (2015).
- 2.
IMO meaning ‘in my opinion’, ‘OMFG’ meaning ‘oh my fucking god’.
- 3.
‘Sesh’ meaning session; a long time spent with friends, usually drinking.
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Gent, C., Walker, M. (2019). Alternative Media: A New Factor in Electoral Politics?. In: Wring, D., Mortimore, R., Atkinson, S. (eds) Political Communication in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_8
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