Between Two Realms

The claim that "the next UK election could be the first at which the Murdoch papers do not back the winning party" is a useful jumping-off point to consider how the relationship of the press and politicial parties has changed since Tony Blair flew half way around the world to pay homage to the Dirty Digger in 1995. According to William Turvill in the New Statesman, "Earlier this week, the Sun’s editorial section shrieked that Starmer’s party was “fully in bed with the eco doom cults” ... Barring some significant changes by Starmer, or a dramatic U-turn by the Sun, it seems unlikely that the red top will call for a Labour government next year." Given that Labour has this week started to row back on its £28 billion anual green commitment, and given Starmer's rejection of activism, I wouldn't be surprised if the distance between the two dramatically narrowed over the next few months, but the underlying question remains. Can Labour win without Murdoch's backing?

The short answer is yes. The track record of Murdoch's papers in picking the winner is largely down to them simply picking the party most likely to win, hence the flip from the Conservatives to Labour in 1997. The crowing of 1992, "It's the Sun wot won it", was relief for having backed the right horse in what looked like a narrow contest, not evidence of the paper's magical powers of persuasion. The role of newspapers in political narrative is largely about salience: determining what is important and what needs to be discussed in the frame of political action ("Something must be done"). In this they act as the agenda-setter for other media, most obviously TV. The technicalities of the media should logically reverse that relationship, with the immediacy of live TV news setting the agenda for the press, as it largely does in the US and other countries. The UK anomaly reflects the continuing dominance of the BBC in television and radio news and its preference for treating newspaper journalists as a shortcut to the appearance of balance, an approach willingly echoed by ITV and Channel 4. 

Attempts to break up this cartel with even more opinionated journalists, such as GB News, have failed because they're offering more of the same rather than something different. Fox News succeeded in the US because it offered a radically different product to NBC and CBS. In the UK, where the main TV channels already privilege journalists and columnists, a new entrant must offer something wildly different, hence GB News has been drawn towards conspiracy theories. The inclusion by the BBC and ITV of voices from new media on the left, such as Ash Sarkar, does not detract from this cosy relationship and if anything helps give the misleading impression that marginal interests are being represented, albeit in their appropriate marginal place. In fact, these new media outlets are increasingly being aborbed into the "club" and are adopting the same modes as traditional media, such as the prominence of "name" columnists and the trenchancy of opinion. I suspect that many are more than happy with this development, viewing a job with one of the established players as the career goal.

The longstanding relationship between the press and political parties was based on the premise that both sides would respect certain limits: that there was a mutual interest in preserving their symbiosis. An individual politician could not expect to be shielded if there was a juicy scandal to report, and the political class as whole understood that it would take periodic kickings as part of the pantomime of faux-populism, but there was a belief that the press would turn a blind eye to the "old Spanish practices" of Westminster. This was upset by the expenses scandal in 2009. The timing of that and the financial crash of 2007-8 was not coincidental. With the shared worldview of neoliberalism suddenly in question, there was an instinctive turn to find scapegoats. Bankers, such as Fred Goodwin, bore the odium initially, but once it became clear that the political system would bail out the banks then attention turned to the politicians. The problem was that the political parties were united in consensus, so the only avenues available to the press were either a populist anti-politics, such as the Tea Party in the US, or the questioning of the virtue of politicians en bloc, as in the UK.

Britain would obviously go on to have its own populist moment in 2016, but the relationship of the press and the political caste was already damaged by the time of the 2010 general election. David Cameron's decision to launch the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 was not simply a response to the phone-hacking scandal but an attempt by politicians as a whole to reassert authority over the fourth estate. The subsequent revival of the expenses scandal around Maria Miller, the then Culture Secretary with responsibility for enacting Leveson's recommendations on press regulation, made the link explicit. Since then we have seen politicians retreat across the board. Leveson II, which would have turned the spotlight on the press-politics relationship, was unceremoniously buried, while tighter regulation of the press has proved illusory. In the years since the post-Leveson truce politicians and media have become so indistinguishable that we ended up with an amoral journalist in Number 10, and the press then proved its continuing power by bringing him down over nothing more substantial than cake.

This has all happened against the background of an economic decline in newspapers since the millennium as advertising has moved online. Paradoxically, this hasn't reduced the role of the press in setting the political weather, rather it has led it to increasingly colonise TV and social media. The borders have become more porous between the press and other media, but they have also become more porous between the media and politics, with the former increasingly commissioning serving politicians to act as opinion-formers rather than simply people whose opinions should be interrogated. There has always been crossover between the two realms, but that tended to be unidirectional: a politician would retire and present cosy documentaries on trains or a journalist might become an MP and never look back. Nowadays, it is not unusual for someone to move repeatedly back and forth between the two. The idea of an independent press that holds politicians to account is being eroded before our eyes. 

The BBC in particular has actively cultivated this through an expansion in its news coverage. While it has conceded that this increase in quantity hasn't resulted in greater quality, at least in the specific area of its coverage of economics, there seems little desire to substitute more domain experts for shallow blowhards, and that in turn has meant promoting the sort of people who see their interests as lying at the intersection between the two realms, from Matthew Goodwin to Alastair Campbell. After the defenestration of Richard Sharp, it might be thought that the BBC is in a weakened state, but this is to ignore its continuing centrality to the politics-media nexus, which was after all the reason why Sharp's apointment as Chairman was both predictable and controversial. Far from being further evidence of the moral delinquency of Boris Johnson, his elevation to the role reflected that ever-growing merging of interests that has occured since 2012.

To return to the jumping off point. Does it matter any longer who Rupert Murdoch (or his editors) supports in the next general election? The answer is still yes. While the Sun's circulation may have fallen from 3.5 million at the millennium to less than a million today, its influence remains significant. But Turvill is looking in the wrong place: "Editors and proprietors might argue that their influence is greater than ever because, owing to the internet, total audiences have grown. But realistically, when the next election falls, it is difficult to imagine millions of readers scrolling through newspaper websites to read editorial endorsements." Even at its commerical height, most people never bothered to read the editorials in the paper either. The vector by which the press influences public opinion has always been through salience: the topics it deems worthy of coverage and the shouty opinions this gives rise to. And the salience of the press itself has grown due to the expansion of TV's political coverage and its appetite for adversarial balance. The problem of the British press is increasingly the problem of the BBC.