If Labour is serious about defeating right wing populism, it needs to reform large parts of the media

 

The new Labour government aims to counter the “snake oil charm of populism”. Right wing populism suggests that minorities or outsiders represent a threat to the national majority, and it thereby encourages and excuses the racism we have seen expressed by gangs of thugs terrorising parts of UK cities over the last week.

For too many in the media, as was evident on election night, right wing populism means the likes of Nigel Farage. But as I emphasised here, right wing populism in the UK is far more widespread. The rhetoric used about immigration and asylum by nearly all Conservative MPs is populist. Brexit happened because of right wing populism. Much of this country’s press could reasonably be described as promoting right wing populism. The kind of violence we have seen over the last week has been for many years formented by the language of mainstream political parties and mainstream media.

Good, competent government that does not deliberately set out to inflame divisions within society is important in reducing the appeal of right wing populism. Governing to ensure economic divisions within society are reduced rather than increased is another. Ensuring that prosperity and public service provision in the country as a whole does not stagnate compared to other countries also helps. Unfortunately, even achieving all of these things does not ensure that right wing populism will not prosper.

This is because right wing populism is increasingly seen by particular monied elites as a means of obtaining political power and financial benefits. This is most transparent in the US, where billionaires seem quite happy to openly support a candidate for President that tried to overturn an election he lost and a political party that appears beholden to that candidate and indifferent to democratic norms. In the US, who has the most money to spend is one determinant of who wins elections. There is some evidence that the same is true in the UK, and funding for UK parties increasingly comes from very wealthy individual donors.

While the very wealthy providing financial backing to right wing populists during elections is clearly a problem, in my view a problem that is just, if not more, serious is the very wealthy trying to influence what information the public receives by their funding of media outlets that support right wing populism. Some wealthy individuals have always done this, of course, but the problem is growing, not shrinking, with Musk's takeover of twittter, the advent of GB news and the descent of the Telegraph from a once reasonably serious right wing paper into something almost unhinged (and which may soon be bought by the owner of GB News). This trend is evident in many advanced democracies.

An essential part of democracy is that voters should be able to receive information (news) that is not slanted to fit a particular political viewpoint. When this doesn’t happen then voters receive propaganda, and all the evidence suggests that propaganda can be very effective at influencing how people think and how they vote. When the propaganda involves right wing populism, it isn’t manufacturing consent but rather manufacturing discontent. Misinformation about immigration and asylum seekers is pervasive among right wing politicians and the media. Islamophobia has become endemic on the political right and its press, and feeds the racism so evident among the gangs creating havoc in our cities.

Media outlets can produce propaganda whether they are owned by the state or by individuals. When those from the political right talk about a ‘free press’, they usually mean freedom from the state, not freedom from the views of an individual media owner. In a democracy the media should provide information free from the direct or indirect control of either the state or individual owners. As we saw with the last government and the BBC, state ownership is no guarantee that a media organisation will not advance right wing populist themes, or pander to the populists.

The UK has already suffered serious harm as a result of media outlets that promote right wing populist ideas. The economic costs of Brexit were well known before the 2016 referendum, but a combination of propaganda from most of the press and a broadcast media that balanced that propaganda against the truth meant that many voters didn’t believe those costs would occur. They now have. This shows us that impartiality is a very weak defence against propaganda. If right wing populists claim that Turkey is about to join the EU, and this is balanced against knowledgeable views that they are not, the populist view is promoted without being negated.

Balancing propaganda with the truth may be better than propaganda alone, but it is a totally insufficient way of dealing with propaganda. As Hanna Arendt may have said:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the devout communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist”

The moment a truth is presented as merely a claim one side in an argument makes, it delegitimises the concept of truth.

Introducing more media competition in these circumstances doesn’t help, because media outlets rarely just include news. Instead news is often combined with opinion pieces, gossip about celebrities and a whole host of other features that help determine what media outlet any individual consumes. Just as we should not want the information people receive to be determined by the political views of an individual billionaire, we also shouldn’t want them to be determined by which outlet has the best celebrity contacts. Particular social media outlets remain dominant because of network effects.

The only way I can see to stop media outlets producing propaganda is through an effective regulator ensuring that they do not. Unfortunately UK regulators, particularly under the last government, have often proved anything but effective. In some areas direct public sector control is an alternative, but in the case of the media it obviously is not. Effective regulation requires ensuring the independence of the regulators from both those they are regulating (preventing revolving doors) and from politicians.

The reason a media regulator like Ofcom needs to be independent of politicians is obvious. As we saw with Boris Johnson, a right wing populist leader will quickly replace the leaders of a media regulator with those who will follow the populist’s wishes. But this is a generic problem across all regulators. Those who are being regulated can influence the regulator directly, but they can do so indirectly by getting politicians to do that work. I would be interested in ideas about the best way to solve this problem, or for those who say it cannot be solved what the alternative is.

Obviously the kind of media regulator I have in mind goes well beyond what Ofcom currently does. Ofcom’s treatment of GB News has been pathetic. GB News produces propaganda, and should not be allowed a broadcast licence. In my view any print or broadcast media outlet that provides news should be regulated to prevent it producing propaganda. What counts as propaganda and what does not is an important topic with no clear or neat dividing lines, but we are currently so far from where that dividing line is with GB News or some of the right wing press that this discussion at the moment is academic.

For obvious reasons a Conservative government is almost certain not to make media regulation more independent and effective, so the only way this will happen is under a Labour government. Yet Labour politicians, particularly when in opposition or when politically weak, can easily be persuaded by media owners not to pursue measures that might threaten those owners. It seems that this has happened with the second stage of Leveson inquiry. (If you think that inquiry should go ahead, see here.)

Yet if Labour is serious about defeating right wing populism, it cannot let the media landscape become increasingly the plaything of very rich individuals wanting to push a right wing populist agenda. The time to tackle this problem is now, when Labour’s majority is secure and it remains popular in electoral terms. There is no reason to delay, and any delay makes action less likely to happen.