Power without accountability in our tabloid press

Even though I have been doing this for four and a half years, I still found it unnerving when, after typing ‘UK media bias EU’ into Google, one of my own pieces comes up on the first page. The gist of that (mid-April) post was if the broadcast media stuck to their ‘shape of the earth: views differ’ policy, our EU membership might disappear as a result.

What I took as given in making that comment is the partisan behaviour of the non-broadsheet press. In a more recent post I argued we should not take this as given. Martin Kettle subsequently spelled it out very well here. He wrote “Remain or leave? Politics or the press? The question on Thursday, just as Humpty Dumpty said, is which is to be master.” But is this kind of sentiment just a form of Guardian writer/reader transference: blaming the messenger of working or lower middle class views because they abhor those views? Is this, as comments on my own post suggested, just the tabloids reflecting the views of their readers?

Forget the straw man of newspapers telling readers what to do. The concern is not with which side newspapers formally endorse. It is about how stories are selected and portrayed. [1] Like the recent front page story from the Mail about migrants in a lorry saying “we’re from Europe - let us in”. Except they didn’t say that. Incredibly the Mail is not the worst offender for putting stories like that on its front page, as the montage below shows (source @kwr66 HT @mehdirhasan).

But maybe readers of The Express want to see countless stories of the migrant ‘threat’. But if this is so, you would expect the press as a whole to be balanced in publishing either pro or anti Brexit stories, reflecting the balance of the polls. But research finds that, when you weight by circulation, pro Brexit articles outnumber pro remain articles more than 4 to 1. (You can see a pictorial version of the same point from a different source here. Or for another source here.)

But even though the ‘only reflecting their readers’ canard is untrue [2], there is I think a more important point. I don’t just want false or misleading stories about the migrant ‘threat’ to be balanced by an equal number of misleading stories about how wonderful migration is. I want stories that contain some real facts, so that people who read these stories can be informed. I want a situation where we no longer have nearly 60% of the population believing Turkey will be an EU member within 10 years. (In 2013 the British appeared to be the worst informed about Europe among Europeans.)

It is sometimes said that telling facts is the job of the broadcast media, and newspapers are about opinion. Right now I would turn that around. The broadcast media are so frightened of appearing biased that they describe clear falsehoods as simply ‘contested’. In the soundbite world they inhabit, that is as far as they go. They set up debates rather than explore issues. They broadcast opinions rather than facts: the opinions of politicians. In print you can go further: you have the space to present the facts and back them up. That is what the broadsheets at their best do.

Why does the Mail or the Sun not do that? Because their owners have a clear line to push, and all too often the truth gets in the way of that. They will not tell their readers that restricting immigration will make it less easy for them to see their GP or wait longer in A&E. They will not tell their readers this because they would rather their readers believed otherwise. [3]

Facts like these get in the way of the Leave campaign. They would prefer an emotional rather than rational debate. Shamefully, they play on the emotions of nationalism and the threat of others. They will not tell their readers that there is no chance Turkey will join the EU in the near future because they want to use that false threat to generate fear - indeed vote Leave leaflets headline with this threat.

And I have to say, as others have done, that those who distort facts to whip up such emotions for political gain have to take some responsibility for the tragic side effects of their actions. When politicians do this we can, in time, hold them to account. When the owners of newspapers do this it appears we have no recourse, and they can go on doing the same again and again. If there is an issue with ‘control’ in our country, it is not with Brussels bureaucrats but with a small number of press barons that wield such power without a trace of accountability. [4] We need to find a way to ‘take back control’ of the means of communicating information.

[1] Declan Gaffney gives a nice account, in the context of stories about benefits, of how this can be done.

[2] In this mythical story of reader reflection, the owner of the paper only dictates the newspaper’s line because only he can truly sense the wishes of his readers. So when Murdoch instructs his journalists to write more anti-Miliband stories, it is because he just knows this will sell more papers.

[3] Another line apologists for these tabloids use is that readers are well aware of their paper’s political bias, and it does indeed seem to be true to some extent. But when these readers see no alternative source of facts (and most readers of these papers will not seek out alternative sources), the misinformation pushed by these papers sticks.

[4] Before anyone says ‘freedom of the press’, note that in the UK the broadcast media have to conform with a code that requires both impartiality and accuracy when reporting news. Does that mean our broadcast media is not free? That code is enforced by Ofcom. Why not apply something similar to news content in the press?

Postscript (26/06/16): one more piece of evidence for the distortionary impact of the tabloids is how biased the public's view is of key facts, and the bias all goes in one direction.