Abstract
It has never felt it gets a fair hearing from the right-wing press, so can the Labour Party get its message across using digital?
Immediately following this year's Labour Party conference, The Canary, the far-left website, called for a boycott of The Guardian in protest at the newspaper's coverage of Jeremy Corbyn and antisemitism. It was, to say the least, an unusual development in the history of Labour's relations with the press when the target of the party's ire has more often been the Daily Mail and The Sun. But Labour's relations with the press have never been easy and never more so than when the party has swung to the left. The last time was in the 1980s, when newly-elected left-wing Labour councils – mainly in London – were dubbed the “loony left” for advocating such outrageous “far left” policies as race and gender equality, outlawing discrimination against gay people, and equal treatment for those with disabilities (although they never went as far as suggesting equal marriage rights for gay people).
Labour's initial media response to the attacks in the 1980s was ineffective and the party took a media pounding until, after the election of Neil Kinnock to the party leadership, Peter Mandelson and then – following the advent of Tony Blair – Alastair Campbell took charge of Labour's media operation. So, as Labour swings left again, what lessons can be learnt from the “loony left” experience?
Back in the 80s the media's reporting of politics was dominated by Westminster lobby journalists. They were the big (indeed almost only) beasts in the political reporting jungle. Made up of the “gentlemen of the press” (they were overwhelmingly men, though some women did take important roles), the lobby operated under an almost masonic code of conduct and, hardly surprisingly, found it difficult to see these new left activists as part of “legitimate politics”. This is not dissimilar to the way that Jeremy Corbyn was initially viewed during and after his election to the Labour leadership.
Back in the day, lobby members spent their working lives cocooned within the narrow confines of Westminster, briefed by the prime minister's press secretary twice a day and, in between, lunching and dining with “contacts” in Westminster's plusher watering holes. They worked closely together so that although they were always searching for those fabled scoops, none wished to stray too far from the consensus in, for example, trying to understand, and represent to the public, the political changes that were sweeping through the Labour Party.
Unlike today, the lobby had a virtual monopoly on the flow of political information. The 1989 launch of Sky News, the arrival of non-stop broadcast news and the digital revolution led to the 24-hour news cycle and the posting, podcasting, tweeting political journalist of today. In the 80s, political journalists needed only to look for one or two stories a day; in a world of 24hour news, this no longer suffices. Constant updates, blogs, tweets, posts etc are required, leaving precious little time for original research or reflection.
So have all these developments in the political media landscape changed how the Labour Party, particularly its left, is being reported? Arguably not, for despite the plethora of new media outlets, the agenda-setting power of the national press remains, to a large extent, intact. This power was attacked by Robert Peston when he was economics editor at the BBC. He decried his colleagues for being “completely obsessed” by the agenda set by the Mail and the Daily Telegraph. This continuing obsession with the press is reflected in the fact that most TV and radio news outlets still feature a daily press review (news websites were added in 2017), giving a prominence to the mainly right-wing news agenda of the press that is out of all proportion to the declining sales of papers in the UK.
But in addition to the overwhelming right-wing bias of much of the national press, political journalists are also biased – not specifically to the right (or the left) – but towards the political consensus as seen within the so-called Westminster village. This was highlighted by the lobby's failure to anticipate Corbyn's victory in the 2015 Labour leadership contest. Reflecting on the BBC's particular failure, Katy Searle, editor of the corporation's political news, told a BBC radio audience: “You can find yourself in a programme environment where the majority of the view in that room is leaning against Corbyn and that's something that shouldn't happen …Traditionally, our focus here at BBC Westminster has been across the road. Jeremy's leadership has made us look beyond that.”
Yet despite the impact of the digital revolution on the way politics is reported, for the majority of the British population, mainstream media (including websites) are still the most used and trusted sources of news – with the BBC way ahead on both criteria (although it is less the case for younger people). But things are changing. In the 2017 election, according to social media commentator Alec Connock, the Conservatives found themselves “overwhelmed by the sheer passion and virality of an online movement on the left”.
Labour's skilful exploitation of social media is now perhaps best symbolised by the tactic that Corbyn has adopted during the weekly prime minister's questions. Traditionally, leaders of the opposition have sought to use their allotted questions to discomfort the prime minister and thereby achieve a clip on the nightly TV news bulletins. Corbyn still aspires to this, but one or two of his questions are designed to be used as social media clips with a message that his followers will like and share – reaching audiences that rarely, if ever, watch the main television news bulletins.
Biased and proud of it
Labour's message is amplified by the hyper-partisan left-wing news blogs – The Canary, Evolve Politics, Skwawkbox and Novara Media – collectively known as the alt-left. These sites carry news stories from an unashamedly left perspective. Kerry-Anne Mendoza, who edits The Canary, says: “We are absolutely biased …. We're biased in favour of social justice, equal rights – those are non-negotiable things…. Every press organisation has an editorial stance and we're certainly no different.”
All of which raises the question of whether the digital media – news websites, alt-left blogs and social media – have significantly undermined the power and influence of the right-wing press. If the answer is yes, or even “possibly”, then the new digital news environment is only half the story; the other half is the remorseless decline in newspaper sales that we have witnessed over the past two decades, as the economics of the media industries have been radically disrupted by the economic power of the major online players – primarily Google and Facebook.
This is not to suggest that the right-wing newspaper editors and proprietors have become toothless, penniless bulldogs. They still exercise great power through both their print and online publications, if not via direct contact with their readers then through their influence on the news agendas of the BBC and other broadcasters, as researchers at Cardiff University have demonstrated. A poll after the 2017 election indicated that 32 per cent of respondents said it was the newspapers that helped them choose who to vote for, compared to 16 per cent who relied on social media sites. Though the poll also showed that 51 per cent of 18–24-year-olds thought social media was more influential, compared to just 28 per cent who opted for newspapers.
The influence of newspapers is also, paradoxically, being amplified by the very online media that is causing them such problems. This amplification takes two forms: first, because those news brands that have maintained free access online are still major media players – not just in the UK, but internationally. MailOnline and The Guardian are in the world's top 10 news sites and both have substantial followings on Twitter and Facebook. The second form of amplification is via social media, now accessed by approximately two-thirds of the over-16 population in the UK daily Although direct posts from the mainstream media might not be that ubiquitous on social media, much of the general discussion there derives from items that first saw the light of day in the national press.
So, to answer the question posed earlier about the influence of the largely right-wing press… Most of the indications are that it is still probably the most important factor in making the weather in which politics is conducted (on and offline). However, Labour in general, and its left in particular, which have found themselves deluged by Tory-supporting newspapers, now gain some protection from inclement political weather by sheltering under their digital umbrellas. Whether this will provide them with sufficient protection over the long term remains to be seen.
