It’s worth remembering that in the press, public opinion is often used interchangeably with media opinion, as if the public was somehow much the same as a group of radically rightwing billionaire sociopaths.
This is specific to one candidate, but the basic dynamic is the same.
To be fair, much of the negative commentary on Corbyn explicitly focuses on how badly he will play in the media, without asking why that should be when he is the only candidate with any obvious personality or charm. In lieu of any charisma from the preferred candidates, Tony Blair appeared like a prize-winning Iraqi Halloween costume and was cheered for spewing out some meaningless rhetorical algorithm by a political class that somehow still uses the phrase “big beast” in the middle of a paedophile scandal.
I suspect that what all the Corbyn-bashing really means is that our media thinks the only people who are fit for anything in this society are those who have internalised the assumptions of its propaganda. That banks are too big to fail but countries aren’t. That unbelievable foreign villains have made movies ridiculous, but not history or the news. I honestly don’t think that Corbyn would make a good leader but only because he would quickly take his own life in a highly unconvincing manner on a long country walk, an inquiry taking 15 years to report that he had kicked himself to death.