Politics

Media's lack of interest in Jeremy Corbyn's Sean MacBride Peace Prize win `not biased'

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was awarded of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize. Picture by David Cheskin/PA Wire
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was awarded of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize. Picture by David Cheskin/PA Wire Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was awarded of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize. Picture by David Cheskin/PA Wire

CLAIMS British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's award of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize was "deliberately ignored" by the media has been dismissed by a fact-checking team.

The Sean MacBride Peace Prize is awarded by the International Peace Bureau (IPB) and is named after its former chairman, who also held the post of chief of staff of the IRA in the 1930s.

MacBride later served as Ireland's foreign minister and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 in recognition of decades of human rights work.

Mr Corbyn, who has close links to Sinn Féin, including attending a 1987 commemoration for IRA fighters killed during an attempted terror attack in Loughgall, received the prize in Geneva last Friday.

It was not widely reported, with supporters of the Labour leader suggesting `mainstream media' were deliberately ignoring the accolade which was previously won by Chelsea Manning, the former US soldier jailed for espionage after giving classified documents to Wikileaks, Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and Irish president Michael D Higgins.

However, Channel 4 News's fact-checking arm pointed out that critics have noted that the IPB "effectively awarded the prize to itself last year (naming) their own secretary-general, Colin Archer, as the winner.

"We used Factiva, a paid-for media archive, and searched for mentions of the prize in the UK media since it was established in 1992", it reported.

"Leaving the search options as wide as possible ("all dates" and "all sources"), we can only find two mentions of the prize in UK newspapers - (a 1994 article about Mordechai Vanunu and a 2013 story about President Higgins which referenced his win)."

News that Mr Corbyn had won it was first announced in a press release in September and he was due to receive the award at a ceremony in Barcelona last month, but the IPB said they changed the handover to a time and place more convenient for the Labour leader to attend.