The right wing partisan media is the elephant in the room in discussions of mainstream politics and far right extremism

Treason used to be a word associated with spies or assassins. Crimes against the state of the utmost severity. Yet, to take just two recent examples, here is an article in the Sun describing how “Treacherous Theresa” has surrendered our freedom. “May's name will rank alongside those of the worst eels in Western history - and she deserves it”. Cross the Atlantic, and here is a presenter at Fox News calling for the "the traitorous treasonous group that accused Donald Trump" to be locked up. “True justice” she calls it.

It seems that the word treason is now being used to describe the actions of a Prime Minister the writer disagrees with, or to describe a legal inquiry that successfully prosecuted a number of individuals who were once close to the President of the United States. How does this escalation of language happen, and does it matter? To understand both questions we need to start with what links these two examples. The are both from media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch.

As a detailed analysis of the Murdoch dynasty by Mahler and Rutenberg of the New York Times shows, Rupert Murdoch created, and runs with the help of his sons, a supremely successful media empire. Media businesses in particular are subject to regulations, and part of Murdoch’s success has been to get round those regulations. As Mahler and Rutenberg write: “Murdoch’s news empire is a monument to decades’ worth of transactional relationships with elected officials.” These are not always right wing politicians, as his support for Tony Blair showed, but they tend to be, reflecting Murdoch’s own situation and views.

Murdoch is not part of a long-standing establishment but rather the opposite. In that sense he is a particularly influential example of what we could call the neoliberal elite that Aeron Davis describes so well in his book ‘Reckless opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment’. But why would someone like Murdoch, and the UK’s other press barons, be happy with people employed by their media organisations using inflammatory language like ‘treasonous’ in their papers?

The standard response of many people in the media to a question like this is that it sells newspapers. Newspapers or radio stations or TV channels like Fox are just expressing the views of their readers. There is no doubt that is partly true, but the reality is that this is a two-way relationship. The media reflects the views of those that read or see it, but it also shapes those views. The excuse that media just reflects their audience’s opinions cannot be used to absolve those media outlets of responsibility for what is said or written there.

There is now overwhelming academic evidence that the media can have a potentially powerful influence on what those who consume it think and do. A particularly interesting and powerful recent study by two economists looked at US cable channels, which remain the main source of news on political campaigns even in the digital age. They isolate viewers who view these channels just because of their place in the channel ordering, rather than because their political preferences seek out particular channels, in order to look at how influential the channel was.

They find that the existence of Fox News boosted the Republican vote share in 2000 by about 0.5%, which fits with another study that used a different method to isolate the influence of Fox. However the growing viewership and increasingly right wing stance of Fox increased its impact on the Republican vote share in 2008 to a huge 6%, which was far bigger than the influence of any other channel. An equally interesting finding is that the political stance of Fox is far to the right of where it should be to maximise viewers. In other words Fox is broadcasting material that maximises its ability to shift its audience to the right, rather than to maximise its profits.

Unfortunately there are no studies yet of Trump’s election, but it seems very likely that the influence of Fox was crucial in his victory over Clinton. In the primaries Fox had a more critical view of Trump, perhaps because Murdoch did not think he was up to the job. Mahler and Rutenberg found three sources who reported Murdoch saying “He’s a [expletive] idiot” about Trump, although Murdoch’s spokesman denies this. It was ironically other broadcasters that gave Trump much more coverage than his opponents, because he was “good TV”. Reporters then talked favourably about Trump, simply because he was gaining vote share. After it was clear he would win, Murdoch saw his chance to form a close relationship to a US President. That influence is now so strong that one recent article in the New Yorker was entitled “The Making of the Fox News White House” (HT @rupertww).

Would this level of influence also apply to the UK press? There is every reason to think so. For example this study found that when Murdoch’s Sun switched support to Labour, it increased Labour’s vote in 1997 by 2%. That was not enough to influence the result, but when the Sun switched back to the Conservatives in 2010 that had a similar impact in the opposite direction, which was enough to influence that result. Newspapers influence attitudes towards austerity, and the best predictor of attitudes on immigration is newspaper readership. I note other studies with a similar message here.

There is no doubt that both Trump and Brexit reflect deep underlying causes. What the media is able to do is help direct those causes in particular ways. To again quote Mahler and Rutenberg: “The Murdoch empire did not cause this [populist] wave. But more than any single media company, it enabled it, promoted it and profited from it.” Given the narrowness of Trump’s victory and the Brexit majority, it is extremely likely that Fox News and the Brexit press were respectively the difference between defeat and victory.

Once we accept that the media can have an influence on mainstream politics, it would be very surprising if it did not also influence the political fringe. We should be shocked at soldiers using a photograph of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition for target practice, but we cannot just put this down to soldiers expressing their personal views about Corbyn’s attitude to Nato and his past associations. What legitimises in soldiers’ eyes doing this is the constant demonisation of him in the press. The press both reflects and influences.

More serious than target practice, Corbyn was the intended target of the man responsible for the terrorist attack at Finsbury Park mosque. A Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered during the Brexit campaign, and a member of a far right organisation plotted to kill another, and many MPs have received credible death threats. According to Britain’s counter-terrorism chief, the man responsible for the Finsbury Park attack was “driven to an act of terror by far-right messaging he found mostly on mainstream media”. As Gary Younge writes, the threat from far right terrorism is growing alarmingly and while “the violence may come from the fringes, the encouragement comes from the centre.”

If you think the idea of terrorists being inspired by the mainstream media is fanciful, just listen to the extract from Fox I linked to in the first paragraph above. Of course this is an unintended effect of the extreme language the partisan media uses. Whether the rise of far right parties and groups is an unintended consequence is less clear, particularly when the BBC chooses to broadcast an interview with a far right leader straight after 49 people had been murdered in New Zealand. There is academic evidence that media coverage of far right groups like UKIP does increase support for these groups, and as I have already noted this is partly why Trump became the Republican candidate for President.

But the main reason for the language the partisan media is now using is to ‘fire up the base’, who in turn will influence politicians to do what the owners of this media want. This route of influence is well established in the US, which is why David Frum, former George W Bush speechwriter, says “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. And now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” We are now seeing it happen over Brexit, as candidates who oppose No Deal are deselected and would-be leaders play to a base which is heavily influenced by the partisan press it reads.

There is one important difference between the UK and US, however. The US retains a widely read independent press that can discuss the influence of the media. In the UK, independent broadcasters would find that more difficult and in any case they mostly do not try. UK journalists tend not to talk about the partisan press as a key political player that can influence a party, perhaps in part because they would be talking about colleagues who work for that press. The myth that the media just reflects and does not influence is too convenient for many, so the media remains the elephant in the room in discussions about politics and political extremism in the UK.

Leave and the Left Behind

I argued at the end of last year that immigration was an attractive issue for the right, because it offered the possibility of capturing votes from those who would vote left on economic grounds, but who were also socially conservative. It was particularly attractive if you could convince leftish social conservatives that voting to reduce immigration would improve their economic situation. The EU referendum vote exemplified how successful that strategy could be. The socially conservative vote went to Leave, irrespective of where those voters were on a left right spectrum (see here).

In this situation, it is understandable that a lot of focus goes to the left/social conservative voters. As voting left clearly correlates with income and areas of social deprivation more generally, we get stories about the economically left behind Leavers. At the same time, some social scientists object, saying that voting Leave clearly correlates with socially conservative views, like hanging for example. There seems to be a contradiction here, but there is not. As I argued here, it is the fight over whether left social conservatives vote on economics or on their social views that swings these votes. The same point could be made for the US as the UK, particularly if we add in race as an issue.

Those controlling right wing media understand all this. Another post from last year looked at how economists had shown clear evidence that Fox news was not in the business of reflecting their viewers beliefs and voting patterns, but in moulding them. They did this by looking at what economists call natural experiments: events that in this case influenced whether people watched Fox that had nothing to do with their politics. Over Wren-Lewis Christmas we were talking about whether there were any natural experiments for assessing the influence of the Mail or Sun in the UK. One possibility we discussed was whether the Liverpool boycott of the Sun over Hillsborough might be a useful natural experiment.

I then read this twitter thread from @marwood_lennox. They first note the clear correlation between measures of deprivation by constituencies and votes in the 2017 general election. They then show the imputed EU referendum vote against measure of deprivation: apart from the least deprived areas voting to Remain, there is no clear correlation. So far much as we would expect from the analysis above. But it was these two tweets that really caught my attention:

“Deprivation doesn't clearly correlate with strength for Remain either. There are eight >60% Remain seats in most deprived decile …. Two of those eight are in very white working class Liverpool. What happened there?”

Is this the ‘natural experiment’ of Sun readership at work?

If only social science was this easy. There are, unfortunately, plenty of other explanations. First, cities tended to vote Remain, it was the towns that did not. Liverpool’s Remain vote was not that different from Manchester. True Manchester has less acute deprivation, but if deprivation and voting Leave are uncorrelated, so what? One reason that cities voted remain is that they have large universities.

Furthermore, as a result of twitter (thanks everyone), I learnt that the local papers had made much of EU funding for the docks and elsewhere. There is also a legacy of Irish immigration. Liverpool has a strong international tradition based on its port and football club, recently reinforced by being a European city of culture. Thus plenty of other reasons why Liverpool might be unusually Remain, if that is what they were.

Despite all this, I have learnt from experience not to let such difficulties get in the way of a potentially interesting result. So I would be very interested if by chance anyone who did proper multivariate analysis of the Leave vote is reading this, and noticed that Liverpool constituencies were, or were not, unusually Remain (given age, education etc). Or if anyone else has any ideas about natural experiments that might affect recent newspaper readership.     

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.

UK election: it was mediamacro wot won it

After the UK general election in 1992, which the Conservatives won to the surprise of many, the Murdoch owned tabloid newspaper the Sun splashed the headline “It's The Sun Wot Won It’. The headline is infamous enough to have its own Wikipedia entry. A few days ago I wrote what I hope was a calm, considered and rather academic post on the concept of mediamacro, following my posts on specific mediamacro myths, and I talked in abstract about the dangers it posed. Here I want to be more concrete.

Since the 2010 elections, YouGov has asked the following question: “Here is a list of problems facing the country. Could you say for each of them which political party you think would handle the problem best?” This is a simple table comparing the Labour lead in this poll just after the 2010 elections and today.

Issue	Lab lead 6/7 June 2010	26/27 April 2015	Difference
NHS	-1	14	+15
Immigration	-26	-6	+20
Law and Order	-21	-12	+9
Education	-4	6	+10
Taxation	-10	-8	+2
Unemployment	-7	-4	+3
Economy in General	-11	-18	-7

Source YouGov

Ignoring the normal academic caveats, the message is clear: the only topic on which the Conservatives are doing better today than shortly after they won the last election is their handling of the economy in general.

Yet when you look at any standard criteria of economic performance, the economy has done terribly during the coalition’s term of office. There is no doubt about this: numbers from GDP per head to real wages all tell a similar story. Average living standards have not increased, which means that they have fallen for many, a result which is almost unprecedented over a five year period. How much of this is the result of government policy is debatable, but that is not a debate that you see in the media. What you see in the media is an obsession with the government’s budget deficit, and on that criterion the coalition has left the economy in a better state than when it came in. So the only way to explain these poll results is that people have internalised the media’s obsession with the deficit.

Now normally you would ask how on earth something like the budget deficit could trump standards of living when judging economic performance. This is where the mediamacro myth of Labour profligacy is so important. One of the lasting images of this election was the man in the recent Leaders Question Time who accused Miliband of lying when he said that the global financial crisis rather than Labour profligacy had caused the deficit. (Second clip here.) He just knew that the last government had bankrupted the economy, and it appears many in the audience did too. And who could blame them: coalition politicians go unchallenged when they say it, and lots of newspapers repeat the line endlessly as fact.

It is a myth, pure and simple, but an important myth, because it places the blame for stagnant or falling living standards during the coalition government on their opponents. They created the mess the coalition had to clear up, and that was bound to be painful for a time. I’ve watched people who comment on this blog try to twist and turn figures in a desperate attempt to keep the myth alive. I’ve experienced being rubbished in the partisan media for trying to expose this myth. But in mediamacro this Question Time confrontation is described as an awkward moment for Miliband, rather than just the ranting of a bloke who had never looked at the numbers. I cannot recall any major coalition politician being seriously challenged for promulgating this myth.   

It is strange watching all this happen. I know that having written one of only 2 or 3 academic papers on Labour’s fiscal record does not guarantee what I say is correct, but it certainly gives me confidence that I am not talking rubbish. I write what I can, talk to any journalists who ask, trying to get the facts across. Facts like the deficit before the global financial crisis was only within a typical forecast error of its sustainable level. Facts like the debt to GDP ratio before the Great Recession was below the level Labour inherited.

Yet I know that this message will never be received, however indirectly, by the angry man in that debate, or by most of that audience. Perhaps some do not want to know the facts, but if they did, they are very unlikely to hear them. Instead they will get propaganda from most newspapers, and ‘views on the shape of the earth differ’ type comments from the TV, whose journalists are desperate not to appear to take sides. For that reason, if the coalition government remains in power after this election (or if the Conservatives win outright), then the title of this post will have rather more justification than the Sun’s original headline. [1]

[1] Although perhaps I should not be too rude about the Sun’s claim. Recent research suggests that readers of the Sun are considerably more trusting of the media than those who prefer other papers.