If you work in corporate media, then the pressure is always going to be towards producing content that is on some level power friendly. It's a tendency which leads to Owen Jones refusing to share platforms with an 'Assad apologist', while appearing with apologists for UK crimes.

Jones doesn't even acknowledge things like this are a problem that have the real world effect of normalising British war crimes and war criminals, and characterises the people pointing it out as shrill online lefties who aren't representative of the wider left.

Ditto with his tacit endorsement of murdering Muammar Gadaffi and Bashar al-Assad. He simply would never dream of writing or tweeting anything which suggested it might be legitimate to murder a British politician, no matter the crimes they have committed or are implicated in.

I see his criticism of the relatively powerless Canary, while he writes for and remains silent about the faults of the incomparably worse Guardian, as being rooted in the same tendency towards producing narratives shaped by power.

Lots of Jones' writing is adversarial and he gets flak for it. But there are still certain parameters that he works within, and it doesn't matter if he's even aware of them or not. Once again, the effect is to legitimise power (powerful Guardian good, powerless Canary bad).