The decision by the BBC complaints unit to reject viewers’ concerns over the way Jeremy Corbyn was depicted in Newsnight’s coverage of the Salisbury poisoning of a former Russian agent and his daughter (Report, theguardian.com, 11 May) displays a startling ignorance of everything we know about the communicative power of images. Images are never innocent or neutral. They work by association, reminding us of similar images. Newsnight’s visual montage projected on the studio’s huge curved screen showed Corbyn in a Lenin-style hat with the Kremlin in saturated red in the background. The BBC’s argument that this was “intended to epitomise the story rather than to express or invite a particular attitude to it” is frankly risible. Whether intended or not, the image carried powerful reminders of Soviet leaders in similar poses reinforcing the Daily Mail’s persistent association of Corbyn’s policies with communism as state repression. For a news medium that relies so heavily on images to anchor stories, ignoring the weight of connotations they inevitably carry undermines the “sound news judgment” the BBC claims to uphold and which viewers have a right to expect.
Professor Graham Murdock
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University
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