But with so many regarding politics as cheap entertainment, so it retains influence.įourthly, party membership has fallen. If we think of politics as being about policy, such attitudes would render the media irrelevant. Back in 2018 John Humphrys said of Brexit – on one of the BBC’s “flagship” programmes - that this is “all getting a wee bit technical and I’m sure people are fed up to the back teeth of all this talk of stuff most of us don’t clearly understand.” This revealed journalists’ disdain for policy analysis if favour of the “drama” of Westminster shenanigans. This gives influence to the dumbed-down media. Instead, we watch politics in the way our nans used to watch the wrestling, cheering the good guys whilst trying to hit the baddies with their handbags.
In fact, many politicians don’t even realize what the purpose of politics is – the solution or amelioration of collective action problems. Thirdly, people don’t see politics as a discrete and separate activity with its own distinct criteria of excellence and failure. Which means they need quicker routes to prominence, and the media offer these. With parliamentary careers truncated, politicians can no longer build reputations through campaigning within the party (the old “rubber chicken” circuit) or through diligent backbench work. And several New Labour MPs who would now have accumulated to the experience to be “big beasts” have long left national politics, such as David Miliband, Ruth Kelly, Ed Balls or James Purnell.
David Cameron, for example, spent only 15 years in parliament: Thatcher and Wilson were MPs for longer than that before becoming PM. Secondly, political careers have become shorter. If a politician believes he can be made or broken by Murdoch or the Mail, he’ll stay in their good books and so they will indeed have power. The media are like the Wizard of Oz, possessing power because people believe in that power. maintain influence because they shape elite opinion - among ministers and the BBC - not because they speak for the people, who no longer buy them. One possibility is that a belief in the power of the press is self-fulfilling. This fact alone gives it some influence over party politics. But it is better than other sources at breaking Westminster bubble stories, such as those about the Downing Street parties. Granted, it is mostly useless at describing longer-term social changes and emergent processes or at scrutinizing legislation: think of the comparative lack of coverage of the police bill. One explanation is that the legacy media still has a big comparative advantage. As Mic Wright says:ĭespite declining revenues and readership, the British press (and the broadcast media that hews closely to the agenda it sets) does not simply report the news, it creates it. The other is that In Liverpool, where the Sun is not sold, the Labour (and Remain) vote has been bigger than in otherwise comparable areas. In the 2019 election over-65s split 62%-18% Tories to Labour, whilst 25-34 year-olds went 23% Tory-55% Labour. Older people consume much more legacy media (including the BBC) than others, and they vote right. Nobody says the media is only one-third as powerful as it was in the 90s, although it would be if its influence had matched its sales.Īlthough it is easy to overstate this power – people can be right-wing idiots without the help of the Sun or Mail – it still exists. Such collapses in circulation, however, have not been matched by a decline in their influence. Of course, digital readership has risen, but it’s not clear that this sustains their political influence: you can read the Mail’s sidebar of shame without succumbing to the paper’s politics. And although the Sun, Telegraph and Times no longer publicise their circulation, data from 2019-20 show falls of over 50%. I’ve no interest in that claim, but it raises an overlooked issue: why does the media still have so much influence despite collapsing newspaper circulation?įor example, since 1997 the Daily Mail’s circulation has fallen from 2.3m to under one million, and the Guardian’s from 428,000 to 109,000. It’s sometimes said that Johnson is in trouble because his erstwhile supporters in the media have turned against him.
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