A lot of our time is wasted, on the Left, complaining about the media. Not because it isn’t true that most newspapers and broadcasters are intrinsically hostile to the Left. They are, and they will remain so. The problem is more a failure of imagination, where we use privately owned platforms to lament, say, the Guardian. It is of course a liberal paper, speaking for liberals, and it has always been — the emphasis on its failure to report on us in the way that we might like is an after-effect of the absence of a media of our own.

Of course, over the last few years, many have tried to occupy the gap left by that absence — in the UK, Novara, Red Pepper, New Socialist, Double Down News, and, of course, Tribune itself; but our resources are meager by comparison, limiting what we can realistically do to counter the daily blizzard of bullshit. What might happen if we did have those resources?

There is one great historic example of when a left-wing organization had those resources and really went to town with them — that is, the German left-wing press of the Weimar Republic, under the supervision of the man one historian called “a Marxist Rupert Murdoch” — the German Communist Willi Münzenberg. Today, this figure, who ran one of the biggest and most successful media organizations in the world, is mostly forgotten; once remembered in the words of Walter Laqueur as “a cultural impresario of genius,” he now features only in exposé-style books about the “useful idiots” who were “duped” by commie propaganda, with titles such as Red Millionaire (Münzenberg lived modestly, and died penniless).