Jeremy Corbyn launched his leadership election campaign in Salford with an attack on the mass media for failing to cover a Labour victory at a parish council by election.
The seat concerned was for Ramsgate Newington Parish Council where (with 485 votes cast) the seat was taken from UKIP by a Labour candidate.
The election win was considered so minor that it had not even been covered by local media.
Corbyn said: “I’m going to tell you something now you won’t have read in any of the papers because none of them had any space to carry it whatsoever, they are very busy with all the important news of the day.
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“I’ll let you know that on Thursday night, which is only 36 hours ago so the news should have got through by now, there was a by-election win in the district of Thanet in which the Labour candidate took the seat from UKIP and won it for Labour.”
Corbyn also asked supporters in the packed hall to help get his message out in the absence of any support for his cause from the mass media.
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He said: “We’re all messengers for the ideas we want to put forward and the kind of society we want to achieve.
“The media, the mass media – the Murdoch-owned media and others aren’t going to do it for us – it’s up to us to reach out and do it.”
And he also attacked “the owners of some of our media, who are forced to live in tax havens elsewhere because of the onerous nature of the taxation system in this country, and their companies are forced to be registered in tax havens elsewhere because they are not particularly willing to pay taxes in this country yet quite prepared to criticise us for not having the resources available because they don’t pay their taxes in the first place”.
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