Friday, January 28, 2011

Support EDM 1334 - Support the Morning Star

Please find below a letter sent to a local MP urging her to sign EDM 1334 calling on the Director General of the BBC to ensure that the Morning Star is covered by the BBC. You can find your MP using Write to Them, which you can easily do yourself here: http://www.writetothem.com/

Please feel free to adapt the letter. Let's make sure every MP, especially Labour MPs, gets one of these.

Dear ____

I am writing to ask you to add your name to EDM 1334, The Morning Star, put down by Ian Lavery MP and supported by a range of Labour MPs.

The Morning Star is the only socialist daily paper in the English language. Uniquely, for a national daily paper it is a cooperative, owned by its readers, and covers issues concerning working people that are ignored by the mainstream media. As you are probably aware, it has strong links with the trade union movement. These features give it a different character from the mainstream print media. Yet it is almost never referred to by the BBC. I believe that the BBC as a public service broadcaster, has a duty to reflect the full spectrum of opinion in the print media. By ignoring the Morning Star, seemingly because it is not a large circulation paper owned by a large media corporation, the BBC is failing in that task. Consequently, the BBC is betraying, unwittingly perhaps, a political bias against the stories and angles expressed in the Morning Star.
EDM 1334 calls on the Director General to ensure that the Morning Star is featured regularly on an equal footing with other papers.

I think at a time when working people, and indeed public service broadcasting are under sustained attack, the trade union and progressive movements need as many public avenues for our views as possible. Ending the tacit censorship of the daily voice of the left and the trade union movement would be a big contribution to that fight.
I hope you will sign EDM 1334 and I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,

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