The persuasive power of the UK right wing press

“It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio” - Joseph Goebbels

The first line of defence for the UK’s partisan right wing press (Mail, Sun, Telegraph) is that they do not matter. The opinions they express and the news stories they follow just reflect the views and interests of their readers. We now have clear evidence that this is simply not true for Fox News in the United States. As I describe here, the output of Fox News, which bears very little relationship to the truth, is designed to maximise its persuasive power. I think Obama summed it up quite clearly when he said even he would not vote for himself if he watched Fox News.

The presumption must be that the same is true in the UK in terms of the potential power of the right wing press. Most voters are not interested in politics, and so depend on limited sources of information to form their views about politicians and political parties. But I thought we had no comparable econometric or statistical studies to show this for the UK. I had noted that Scottish newspapers were much less pro-Brexit than their English counterparts, but maybe that just reflected different attitudes to Brexit north of the border. I did wonder whether Liverpool and the Sun (more specifically its absence because of Hillsborough) might be what economists call a natural experiment. The Leave vote in Liverpool’s districts does seem exceptionally low (my thanks to Ian Gordon here), but of course there are always other stories you can tell.

But then someone (alas I cannot remember who) pointed me to a paper by Jonathan Ladd and Gabriel Lenz in the American Journal of Political Science in 2009. They looked at another natural experiment: the endorsement of Labour by certain newspapers before 1997. To quote

“By comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical approach, the point estimates vary from about 10% to as high as 25% of readers. These findings provide rare evidence that the news media exert a powerful influence on mass political behavior.”

So we do have evidence, comparable to that for Fox news, of how powerful an influence these papers can have. I suspect the endorsement per se is not doing the work here, but the more favourable editorial line and coverage that went with it. Blair never got the Kinnock or Miliband treatment. 

It is ironic how much we are currently obsessing about the influence of the new social media, when the problems with old media are likely to be quantitatively larger. Once you acknowledge this, explaining important political developments like public attitudes to austerity becomes much easier (see this paper by Timothy Hicks and Lucy Barnes for example). For so many things that political scientists and others spend a great deal of time analysing, like Brexit, the right wing print media is the elephant in the room.

It is in this context that we should view the latest attempt to smear Jeremy Corbyn in the print media, and the shameful attempts by Tory ministers to jump on the bandwagon. (I will leave it to Andrew Neil to explain what nonsense the smear is and who those ministers are, but watch Steve Baker use all the usual tricks (e.g. “questions to answer”) to try and make something out of nothing.) The 2017 election showed us the influence of the Tory press is not total, but May still won: its influence on older voters in particular is still strong. Despite its falling readership, this press still also has considerable influence over the broadcast media's agenda.

So when certain journalists call Corbyn’s response to these smears creepy and disturbing, this is the context in which to view such comments. To say it suggests an attack on our free press is nonsense, because the predominantly right wing press in the UK is not in any meaningful sense free. That these papers are owned by extremely wealthy people who can dictate these paper's political agenda seriously distorts democracy. It also means this press has considerable power over the government. The UK press will not be reformed under a Tory government: Leveson 2 has been shelved.

Those who want to go back to a world without Brexit and Trump have to ask why Brexit and Trump happened. There is no point treating the symptoms and not the disease. A key part of the reason we have Trump and today's Republican party in the US is Fox News, and a key reason we have Brexit in the UK and ministers calling the leader of the opposition a traitor is the right wing press.   

Mediamacro is alive and well, unfortunately

I didn’t see Andrew Neil’s interview with John McDonnell which seems to have started the media’s obsession with interest on government debt, and how it would increase under Labour. But I did see the Peston interview where he was asked a similar question (see here). McDonnell’s answer was good, but the fact that Peston felt obliged to ask it told me that mediamacro was still alive and well.

But before I come to that, I need to link to the piece I wrote in the New Statesman that tries to explain why the question is a silly one (and what a much better question would be). It wasn’t the first time I had come across the power of this debt interest idea to fool people. I remember I did a debate with Oliver Kamm in Prospect, and the then editor said she thought I was getting the better of the argument but that Kamm’s point about debt interest finally swayed her. I remember thinking what!? How can you be so foolish. That was in my younger days (look at the photo) when I was still learning about mediamacro.

So why did Peston feel he had to follow up on Neil’s question? I think it is pretty simple. When McDonnell did not answer Neil’s question, the reaction of journalists was not to think maybe that was a silly question, but instead here was some weakness that the journalist had found. Journalists love catching politicians out: it means that the interview when it happens gets repeated and repeated and the journalist gets congratulated by their peers. It is just a numerical version of political gaffs. And most of the time it is just as childish.

There may be some point in doing this when there is a real issue involved. If you managed to show, for example, that a politician really didn’t know the difference or relationship between debt and the deficit, that would tell us something meaningful. (I can remember one Chancellor who did need helping through such things.) But that normally requires a knowledge most interviewers, who might talk about paying off the deficit, do not have. (Even fact checking sites can confuse rather than enlighten: in this case here. The BBC's site in the past has made similar errors.) Not being able to remember numbers is a memory test more than testing whether someone is numerically minded. I’m pretty numerically minded, but ask me what the size of UK GDP is on a bad day and I’d get it wrong.

But asking a prospective Chancellor about what the debt interest will be on any borrowing they will do for investment possibly four years ahead is a silly question, as my New Statesman article makes clear. I’m sure Peston knows this, but he nevertheless felt obliged to follow a mediamacro theme. Which is how a lot of journalism works. Attack lines dreamt up by right wing newspapers or journalists become questions of public interest that every journalist feels obliged to ask. Even when they know better, they are not going to upset their colleagues by saying I’m not going to ask that question because it is a nonsense question and instead ask something more intelligent. As a result, the mediocrity that is mediamacro persists.

The Media and Brexit redux

In this post I complained about how little attention the visual media gave to the fact that the overwhelming majority of economists thought that Brexit would involve significant long term costs. All I have now is more evidence to back up the argument in that post.

First, I was not alone in these thoughts. Here is Andrew Scott talking about his foreboding concerning the Brexit debate: “I just really wasn’t looking forward to the debate because I knew that it would stifle what are the really important issues, it would become partisan rather than insightful and that the economic voice and argument was vulnerable to being politically sidelined.” [1]

Second, the argument that there will be long term costs with Brexit has not, as yet, convinced most voters. In this poll, which is not unique, only 22% of voters thought they would be worse off as a result of Brexit. It seems unlikely that voters are unaware that David Cameron and George Osborne have claimed they will be worse off, but quite rightly they may be very distrustful of what politicians say. Virtually no voters will have examined the economic arguments on both sides and made up their own minds. Crucially, unless they read one of the broadsheets, they will have no idea that there is such an overwhelming consensus among economists. 

Third, we now have more evidence besides letters that there is indeed an overwhelming consensus among economists, thanks to the Observer. True, not quite as overwhelming as I had imagined, but 9/10 counts as a consensus for economists.

Fourth, there is polling evidence that the public do have a high level of trust in what academics say. Here is the relevant data (source):

So to sum up, most people do not think they will be worse off after Brexit, economists (including academics) overwhelmingly do think people will be worse off, and people have a high level of trust in what academics say. I can only think of one plausible explanation that is consistent with these three facts, and that is that people do not know what the overwhelming majority of academic economists think. [2]

In a vote that could well be close, you cannot argue that this failure to transmit information is unimportant.

One of the structural issues that help produce this problem is what you could describe as the politicisation of truth which comes from the overriding need to be unbiased. The visual media rely on either side to bring the relevant information to the table, because to do otherwise might seem biased. If a statement is made by one ‘side’ and disputed by the other it is contested, whether it is true or false. [3] 'Contested' is the word I heard a BBC reporter yesterday describe the £350 million a week claim, even though the UK Statistics Authority and one of their own fact check websites say it is false. So if one side does not headline that the overwhelming majority of economists think Brexit will involve significant long term costs, this fact - if it is reported at all - can get lost in the endless and tedious sequence of political claim and counterclaim.

This politicisation of truth did not begin with this referendum. The Leave campaign chose to headline a figure which they knew to be wrong. They did so because they also knew it would do them no harm. They knew it would do them no harm because no one in the media other than the broadsheets would have the nerve to describe it as a lie. They knew that from observing how the media has worked in the past. 

[1] Here is an example of how the media tries to fit this consensus among economists into their standard confrontational model. Now I have no objection to economists being challenged, but it is a shame that all this interview seemed to be about was Tony Yates trying to get across the concept of a counterfactual. Just one question along the lines of why do you think that on this issue economists are so united might have been interesting for viewers

But I do object strongly to the preamble. All the statements made were either wrong or beside the point. (1) that the 364 economists were wrong is the opinion of some but not others - it is not a fact. (2) the ‘establishment’ may well have thought we should stay in the ERM in 1992 but did the majority of economists think we would be worse off coming out? I certainly did not, and published a paper saying so. (3) it was the evidence from economists in the 5 tests analysis that convinced Brown to say no, not the other way around!

So rather than examining why there is such a consensus view among economists we get a rather poor interview about the value of counterfactual analysis, and certain opinions passed off as facts without any opportunity to challenge them. If anyone in the media asks me why academics appear reluctant to appear on TV, I shall show them this.

[2] Some people have a kneejerk reaction against complaints involving the media. In reading Andrew Scott’s piece an analogy occurred to me which I think might help here. Until the financial crisis, most macroeconomists (not all) tended to view the financial sector as a simple ‘transmission system’ rather than thinking about it as a system with its own incentives and dynamic. That was a huge mistake. Equally criticisms of the visual media which amount to ‘they are all biased’ are about as informative as saying the problem with the financial sector is that everyone in it is too greedy. More sensible critiques in both cases look at the way the sector works, and the incentives actors with each system face.

[3] Equally if something is stated often enough by one side and is not contested, it becomes a fact.