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I have no issue with people disliking the Canary—it's never been my cup of tea, either. But I've never seen any coherent argument to explain why left figures should no-platform it while still engaging with Britain's commercial newspapers, whose record is incomparably worse.
Corbyn published this post-election piece in the Observer, for example, which not only supported the Iraq war, but ran a batch of fake stories about WMDs to sell it in advance (Nick Davies has a great account of how that happened in Flat Earth News). https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/14/we-won-the-argument-but-i-regret-we-didnt-convert-that-into-a-majority-for-change
If you put together all the sins of the Canary since it first appeared, it wouldn't come close to matching the harmful impact of those Observer stories on Iraq. Should Corbyn have boycotted them, too?
(They stitched him up with the headline, but that's another story)
(They stitched him up with the headline, but that's another story)
I don't even have a problem with Keir Starmer going on Nick Ferrari's show as such—it's the political thrust behind it, as part of a broader downplaying (to put it mildly) of anti-racism, that's objectionable. But in general, what counts is what you say, not where you say it.
I'm talking here about a conversation *within* the left, of course: mainstream pundits who denounce the Canary while happily indulging the Times, Guido, Alastair Campbell and many more are just risible. But even within the left, I can't see any objective criteria at work.
