Transcription
Today, I want to talk about newspapers. It's the Guardian, reading tofu, eating W, karate. We have a situation in this country where 81% of the mainstream media is owned by six corporations. They've enjoyed a kind of immunity from the law. I don't know what the remarks are, cuz I don't buy the Sun newspaper. Love them or hate them, newspapers are still big players in British politics. And if you want to understand how the news and politics in this country works, well, you've got to understand those newspapers.
But often the way this topic is discussed is quite bon and a bit vague, actually. If you really want to understand this, you need to understand each specific paper, its politics, its controversies, and its agenda. So that's what we're doing today. And to help me, I'm talking to Mick Wri. He's worked with the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, and now writes a Substack he describes as honest media criticism from a complete [ __ ]. Others have described it as the most feared newsletter in journalism. As unlike most in this industry, he's happy to call out the worst bits of journalism. So although Mick is on the left of the political spectrum, his views are definitely unfiltered. So join us as we explore the bizarre and twisted politics of British newspapers. Okay, let's start with the Sun newspaper, which is one of the UK's tabloids, or red-top newspapers, different to the more high-information broadsheets.
The way the Sun presents itself is a kind of, uh, voice of the working class, um, very conservative, very right-wing, very geared toward W.S. Southern England, very M-driven and orientated. There was a Page Three girl from the very beginning, but from the following year, they start printing topless Page Three girls. It's very pur, it's vulgar, it loves puns, dad's D, kind of dad humor, dad joke type things. So when Paddy Ashdown was found to have had an affair with his secretary, the headline was "It's Paddy Pants Down." It has got very clever subs who create its headlines, but it also speaks in a really interesting, odd Argo that only the Sun speaks in. If someone has a sexual encounter, it's a romp. Um, if someone um cheats on their partner, they're a love rat. Uh, scientists are bins.
The paper is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who at the time of recording is still alive at 92 years old and owner of many conservative news outlets. He bought and relaunched the Sun in 1969. From the start, it was his vision of what a tabloid should be. I have a copy of it on my—the headline is "Horse Dope Sensation." So the structure of the Sun, including the Page Three girl, although not topless from day one, that's all there, that's all present in the in the very first edition. Similar to other Murdoch outlets, the Sun newspaper is conservative, pro-Brexit, hardline on criminal justice, and generally pro-military action, even jingoistic. It's often been anti-union, supporting Margaret Thatcher's fight against striking miners in the 80s. And Murdoch himself is famous for his own battle with the workers who printed his papers. In fact, in 1984, the Sun prepared a front page that depicted a union leader as Hitler, but the print workers refused to print it, leaving a gap on the page.
Another key thing about the Sun is that it's seen as influential, with one of the highest readerships in the UK. A famous example of its influence was in the 1992 election when the Sun campaigned strongly against Labour and its leader. Many expected Labour to win the election, and when it lost, the Sun ran this now famous headline: "It's the Sun What Won It." Whether this was actually true is debated, but in 1995, Labour's new leader, Tony Blair, flew thousands of miles to see Murdoch and to try and win him over. And when the Sun endorsed Blair in 1997, it was seen as a key moment in the election, which gave Blair a huge majority. In elections since, the party backed by the paper has always won the election, and politicians on both the left and right have often tried to get support from the Sun, welcoming Murdoch to visit Downing Street or giving jobs to former editors.
But this story about the Sun's influence might be overblown, and that's now sort of created this mythology that then when they backed Tony Blair's New Labour, it was the Sun's backing and the News Corp's backing that hugely swung it. But I think it's actually the reverse, and I think there's plenty of evidence that it's a reverse. What tends to happen is Rupert Murdoch backs winners. He sees that the way the wind is blowing, and his papers, you know, back the the likely winner anyway. And actually, at the time of recording, its readers are more likely to vote Labour than Conservative. Another reason to believe its influence is declining was the general election in 2017 when, despite the Sun strongly campaigning against Labour, the ruling Conservative Party unexpectedly lost a lot of seats.
The other thing that is worth saying is a lot of people read the Sun do not read it for its politics. They read it for the football. They read it 'cause it's an easy read, a quick read, a cheap read, a funny read. The last thing you need to know about the Sun is that it's hated by many people, very unpopular in the North, obviously, particularly in in Liverpool. The Sun is hated in Liverpool because of its reporting on the Hillsborough disaster. The Sun published a front-page story headlined "The Truth," alleged all kinds of false things about uh Liverpool fans, you know, that they had stolen from the dead, urinated on police, all this kind of stuff. It knew very early on that it was not telling the truth. It was getting its facts from Tory MPs, from the police, um, from unreliable news agencies, and it doubled down on that completely false accusations. It took years for the Sun to apologize. Critics also bring up the paper's history of homophobia and scare stories about HIV/AIDS. The Sun paper, along with others we'll look at today, also have a history of celebrity revelations. Sometimes these stories were completely fabricated, such as the time a comedian was accused of eating a hamster, or when Elton John supposedly had the voice boxes of his rock-vier guard dogs surgically removed because their barking was annoying. But the paper also got stories in more controversial ways. For example, one journalist, later jailed, was known as the "Fake Sheikh" and would pose as a Middle Eastern businessman asking celebrities to buy drugs before exposing them. Another method for gaining stories was phone hacking. The most notorious example was when journalists listened to the voicemails of Millie Dowler, a missing schoolgirl who was later found murdered. When the hacking was revealed in 2009, the result was a huge scandal. "The News of the World was shut," "this is the most humble day of my life." There were criminal charges for some of those involved, a big inquiry, and lawsuits and payments that are still ongoing.
Next, let's talk about the Daily Express. It used to have the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world when it was owned by Lord Beaverbrook in the 1940s. And in the year 2000, it's bought by uh Richard "Dicky" Desmond, an owner of many softcore pornographic magazines—Asian Babes, Posh Housewives. Politically, it's on the right, pro-Brexit, with frequent headlines about immigration and asylum seekers, and it's often accused of Islamophobia. However, another thing you need to know about the paper is, well, it's not always taken seriously. The joke with the Express during the Desmond era, particularly, was that it pretty much splashed front pages about uh Princess Diana, Maddie McCann, benefit claimants—that was sort of it. Its run obsessions also include miracle cures—"Purple tomato can beat cancer" is a personal favorite of mine—house prices, and the weather, which it covers in a crazy way. For example, here's an article about Easter being the hottest ever, followed a few days later with a prediction of 10 inches of snow, with both articles written by the same writer. The final point on the Express is that in 2018, it was taken over by new owners. Partly this is interesting because the new editor said the paper had been Islamophobic in the past and promised to change its coverage. But it's also interesting because it's another angle on the debate about who owns newspapers. Rather than being a powerful individual, the Express's new owner is Reach, a shareholder-owned company, which, as we'll see, has its own issues as well. As well as the Express, Reach owned the Mirror papers and many others, including hundreds of local papers. But despite its size and being profitable, its shareholders care most about profit growth. And the way the owners have tried to do this is by cutting costs. They've moved different papers into the same office space, started publishing the same stories in different titles, flooded their websites with ads and popups, and cut reporting on many things that, at least from a democracy perspective, are pretty important. Shareholder ownership might give less power to random rich people, but it's not necessarily good news for democracy.
Next, we have the Daily Mirror. Well, Daily Mirror um is a really old paper. It was actually another paper founded by Lord Northcliffe, who founded uh the Daily Mail in the 60s. Under its legendary editor, Hugh Cudlip, it becomes the bestselling paper in the country, very powerful, big supporter of Labour. The Mirror is still a supporter of Labour, but it's no longer the bestselling paper. By the 80s, it's really suffering. It comes under the management and proprietorship of Robert Maxwell, really fascinating character. And then when he dies his mysterious death—he falls off his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine—Maxwell, his his daughter, now in prison for her her involvement with and enabling of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein—"A body has been found in the sea of the Canaries. It would appear very much as if it is that of our father"—and it subsequently uh becomes uh clear that he has been basically using uh the Mirror Group pension fund to prop up his businesses. It's a financial blow that still affects the paper today. And like the Express, its owners, Reach PLC, are continuing to make cuts to try and improve its profits. All of which has meant that, despite still breaking some important stories, the Mirror seems to be declining in influence. It's lost its identity, doesn't really make the weather in terms of making stories happen anymore. Occasionally it has campaigns that cut through. If the decline continues, the Labour Party and Trade Union movement may lose the only newspaper aimed at working-class readers that reliably supports it. The final thing that's kind of fun to know about is that Piers Morgan used to be the Mirror's editor. In 1996, he apologized for this headline—"He was punched three times by Jeremy Clarkson at some press awards"—and in 2004, he was fired after publishing photos of British army soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners that turned out to be fake. The Mirror also, like the Sun and other tabloids, used phone hacking to get stories, although Piers Morgan has always denied involvement. There's lots of reasons why that's questioned, including articles and interviews by him describing being played voicemail messages—"Journalist found out that if the celebrity hadn't changed their PIN code, yeah, you can access their voil—you can access their voicemail"—and the fact that recently a judge ruled that there could be no doubt that Piers Morgan and other executives knew about hacking uh, but as we say, he he denies, but he does deny knowing about phone hacking or being involved with it.
The Guardian is a pretty old paper, like many of the others. It's founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian. It was a progressive, a radical paper, um, reporting on things like the Peterloo Massacre. It's still seen by most people as a left-wing paper. I uh don't happen to believe that. I think it's a cautious paper. It's progressive. It doesn't have a traditional proprietor, nor is it owned like uh the Mirror is by a public company. Instead, it's owned by the Scott Trust, established in 1936 to ensure editorial independence. It can be easily mocked, and often is, for for a couple of things. One, um, the the old mockery was that it uh used to make a lot of spelling errors and and gram—and and sort of typos. It's called the "Gronad." But a more serious criticism is the representation of a kind of fairly comfortable middle-class um existence and upper-middle-class existence, really. I get a lot of whiplash from the Guardian because you can go from like a very hardcore and excellent piece of reporting reportage on on on on the fundamental issues of poverty in the UK, and then three pages later, the kind of soft lifestyle stuff is very London and pretty pricey, with no sort of sense that there is a kind of harsh dichotomy at work. There also sometimes it just does very cringy things. Like during the um the election where George W. Bush was up for uh reelection, it had this campaign where it was um encouraging its readers to send letters to a section of America to encourage them not to vote for George Bush, and it was just honestly embarrassing. By the way, you can still read the replies to the Guardian from this campaign. Lots of talk of "weeny-spined limes" and "stupid yellow-toothed pansies," plus reminders that Americans aren't interested in your "pansy-ass tea-sipping opinions." One signed off their letter with "Brush your goddamn teeth, you filthy animals." The other problem that I would say is that the Guardian has never been very good at getting its politics in line with how it actually behaves within its newsroom. So it talks a lot about social mobility and the problems of of a media that is heavily Oxbridge-dominated, right, and yet its newsroom, when you see lists of who works in its newsroom and its columnists, is vastly dominated by Oxford and Cambridge and also has quite a lot of nepotism in it. To the extent that when Alan Rusbridger was uh the editor, his daughter was working for the paper, but you know, using her mother's uh maiden name as a as a means of sort of smudging that up a bit.
The Times and the Sunday Times are sort of these grand old papers. One of the most interesting periods is under Harold Evans. Uh, he creates this team, the the Insight team, this investigative team in the 60s and 70s, who uh break stories like the thalidomide story, revealed that Israel had a nuclear arsenal in 1986, and he—there are still reporters who break fascinating stories, good stories. Murdoch bought the paper in 1981, and he bought it having been basically allowed to buy it against competition rules, pretty much in return for support of the that government. The Times's politics have shifted back and forth in the Murdoch era, although I think it's slightly deceptive to say that in some respects because it's always been and remains a centre-right, sometimes more than centre-right paper. It's just that in 2001 and 2005, it supported the Blair government, but the Blair Blair government was enacting pretty centre-right policies. The paper also often hires former Conservative politicians as columnists or broadcasters. However, it is worth noting that public perception is that the Times is not as right-wing as some of the other papers. And unlike the other Murdoch paper, the Sun, the Times supported the Remain side in the Brexit referendum of 2016. In recent years, the the Times has become more right-wing. It is obsessed uh with with trans stories; it publishes them every day. It's really leaned heavily into culture war stuff, but it's also doing things where you can see that it's attempting to be prepared for having to cover a Starmer government. And I would not be surprised if the Times came out uh supporting Starmer uh ahead of the next election, but only because uh Rupert Murdoch and uh the editors of the Times will have seen the way the wind is blowing.
Next up, the Financial Times. It's probably the British newspaper that most accurately represents reality at any given time. The reason it's able to present the um stories pretty straight is because it's read by people who want to make money, and they want to have a good sense of what is happening. That's not to say it's without ideology. It's a great defender of capitalism, red in tooth and claw in that respect—pink in tooth and claw maybe—but it does reflect the world relatively well in its news coverage. I mean, it has some pretty um grotesque elements. Its "How to Spend" magazine, I think, is one of the most disgusting products in in the British media. It's a magazine full of super expensive stuff and is essentially designed to target uh bankers and people in the financial industry who have huge bonuses to spend. The FT is owned by a Japanese media company, but unlike the owners of the Express and Mirror, there is no cost-cutting drive and no apparent interference. Politically, the FT has swung between endorsing Labour and the Conservatives, usually in line, like the Murdoch papers, with how the electorate ended up voting. However, in 2019, it refused refused to endorse either party, repelled by a Labour leader they saw as too left-wing, but also by a Conservative Party the FT saw as pushing an economically damaging Brexit deal.
So the Independent was originally a genuinely independent paper, founded in the 80s. It was innovative in in lots of ways, including literally not covering royalty. It was and still is seen as a centre-left paper, supporting electoral reform, opposing the Iraq War and Brexit, usually supporting Labour or Lib Dems at election time. It was also known for its opinionated front pages. Okay, so the Independent is a centre-left newspaper, but actually it went digital-only in 2016, and I wouldn't even include it in this video, as despite a decent online audience and now being profitable, it has lost a lot of its former influence. However, the Independent is worth talking about because its owners are the Russian millionaires Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny Lebedev. And the story of their ownership reveals something about political power in the UK. The father bought the Independent for £1 in 2010, shortly after buying the Evening Standard, a London paper, the year before. He then went on to put both papers under Evgeny's control. The Independent is sort of a mushy centrist paper, but the Evening Standard is, you know, hugely Tory. Interesting that it's so Tory, given that the Standard is a paper for a city—London—that is a pretty Labour city. It seems that the Lebedevs are comfortable with the papers having different views because their interest isn't political influence, but but prestige. A Lebedev puts himself in his papers a lot, particularly the Standard, but also the Independent. In 2020, Lebedev was even made a member of the House of Lords, nominated by Boris Johnson after receiving years of favourable coverage. The father, Alexander Lebedev, is a former KGB agent, is famous for once punching a man on Russian [Music] TV, and was sanctioned by Canada in 2022 for "quote, directly enabling the Russian war in Ukraine." Despite all this, he was able to take control of influential British newspapers and have Boris Johnson over to party in his Italian castle when he was Foreign Secretary—"Did you meet Alexander Lebedev? I I I think I probably did, but I but uh without officials, yes." In 2017, a Saudi businessman was sold a 30% stake in the Independent, and as we'll see with the next paper, others looked like they're learning from the Lebedevs' approach to gaining influence.
The Telegraph is a conservative, right-wing newspaper, known for promoting Leave during the Brexit campaign and generally supporting the Conservative Party—effectively the the house journal of the Tory Party, you know, nicknamed the "Torygraph." It's become more and more right-wing over time, less of that sort of tweedy, sort of stolid Tory thing and more obsessed with talking about being anti-elite, very pro-Nigel Farage, very pro-Leave, hugely obsessed with culture war issues, very very anti-trans, and very heavy on "Stop the Boats" rhetoric. If the alt-right went shooting in Tweet, that's that's what the Telegraph of of the um of the 2020s and uh onwards is is like. The Telegraph always endorses the Conservatives at general elections, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson once paid £275,000 a year for his column at the paper, described the paper as his "real boss" when he was in power. Another thing to know about the Telegraph is its ownership. It's had some terrible proprietors. Conrad Black went to prison; he was such a terrible proprietor. And then there's its current owner, the Barclay twins. They essentially tried to almost make themselves into real-life Bond villains. They lived on an island and a castle, trying to avoid as much tax as possible. In 2023, the brothers lost control of the paper after failing to pay bank debts, but in December of that year, with help from Middle Eastern money, they were able to regain that control. However, many worried that the final deal would put the United Arab Emirates, a dictatorship with a poor civil rights record, in control of the paper. The deal would also include The Spectator magazine, which is influential amongst Conservatives. This deal is being resisted by many, including the Telegraph's own journalists, and at the time of this video, the final outcome isn't certain.
Finally, let's look at the Daily Mail. The paper is often described as the paper of Middle England—roughly that's the rural and suburban lower-middle classes of Southern England and the Midlands. It has a curtain-twitching kind of mentality. The Mail on Sunday is obsessed with house prices. If you are murdered, The Daily Mail will say how much your house costs. It loves this thing of of um, you know, both having a lot of female readers, but also constantly having um stories and features that are sort of designed to make women feel they're not doing the right thing, or then they're not quite, you know, they're kind of failing. But today, it is one particular headline from one particular paper that is getting all of the attention. You might think it's odd that women would seemingly want to read sexist articles, but the Mail has a kind of genius for knowing what readers find interesting. Lord Northcliffe, who created The Daily Mail, he was an editor genius in the sense that he understood the importance of women, getting women to read newspapers, the importance of creating news, not just reporting news, and and the importance of entertainment. You can see the heritage of the Mail in things like the Mail Online's sidebar of shame—so trashy celebrity stories. It's also famous for its weirdly long but intriguing headlines. And the truth is, with the Mail, is that is that people hate it, but also people voraciously read it. And there are so many people who who um both hate the Mail and are addicted to reading Mail Online. Second, and maybe this is obvious, but it's a right-wing, conservative paper. In public perception, the most right-wing. You go back in the past, and the politics of the Daily Mail were so right-wing that the paper supported the Blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists. Like the Sun, the Daily Mail is regularly accused of racism and xenophobia—of calling British athletes born abroad "plastic Brits," depicting immigrants as rats, mirroring imagery from Nazi propaganda—and in 2001, it apologized for a racist cartoon that depicted foreign doctors as African witch doctors. Other targets of the Mail's discourse include the BBC, multiculturalism, Harry and Meghan (though of course Harry is currently suing them for phone hacking), the EU, climate campaigners, human rights, trans people, civil servants (or "pampered mandarins," as it calls them), judges who uphold the rule of law, gay pop stars who die of natural causes, anything woke, and wind farms. In fact, there's a website called "Daily Mail Headline Generator" that gives you a good idea—"Muslim SoCal global warming is murdering n of Farage and enraged scum of had sex with the mortgage" were my personal favorites. Basically, what Northcliffe understood, right, is he understood that fear and anxiety are uh means of driving people to read newspapers uh and also envy. In modern times, a lot of this agenda was driven by its former famous editor, Paul Dacre, who used to use the C-word so much when shouting at staff, he was known as "The Vagina Monologues." The paper's interest in stoking anxiety is also revealed in its interest in cancer caused by anything from peanut butter to shaving to having your nails done. In fact, one Facebook user found 135 things that the Daily Mail has reported as causing cancer. A more serious charge against its accuracy was in 2014 when an article in the New Statesman argued its accuracy was much worse than other papers, giving a long list of false reports from just that year and another list of all the cases in the previous 10 years where the Mail had had to pay damages. A more recent example of nonsense was this front page alleging that a shadowy figure called "Dr No" runs UK politics and he once murdered his ex-girlfriend's brother's rabbit. Partly as a result of all this, in 2017, Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a source, something The Daily Mail obviously loved—"The making of WikiLie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors to promote their own warped agenda on a website that's a byword for inaccuracy." All of this is enough to make the Daily Mail hated by many people. There are viral videos of it in a big cage, "Buc red tape Facebook."
Gang, a song by Radiohead, and lots of anger, especially on the left. And what you've got to understand about the Daily Mail: it is the worst of British values posing as the best. The last thing to know about the Mail is that, despite all this, it's an influential paper.
The Daily Mail is a powerful paper; it's the biggest-selling newspaper. It does have clout. Policy makers believe, and are right to an extent, that it's read by middle England, that it probably is read by a significant number of swing voters. In fact, its target audience of middle England is quite similar to demographic personas of floating voters often used by pollsters. And it's very well funded and it sells a lot of copies. But I think we over-index for that. It's very good at understanding what people are angry about and then acting as a megaphone for that anger.
It's worth saying that while the Mail has, unlike the Sun, always opposed Labour at every election, there are occasional taxings on Conservatives. It attacked Boris Johnson over expensive wallpaper in Number 10 and when he refused to fire his aide for breaking lockdown rules. It attacked Conservative governments for failing to support Afghan interpreters, that threat from the Taliban, and on its plans to extradite a British hacker to the United States. Another possibly surprising part of the Mail's history is when, after the courts failed to prosecute the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence in the '90s, they printed this front page: he named the killers as murderers, saying, "If we're wrong, let them sue us." And in 2012, the men finally went to prison. The Mail also says it opposed military campaigns in Iraq, Libya, and Syria and is on record as denouncing Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, and torture. It has also even sometimes campaigned on environmental issues, urging a levy on plastic bags, for example. Okay, there you go, all the main British newspapers.
But looking at all this raises a question: are the newspapers still as influential as they were? After all, their circulations are in rapid decline. However, I think there are two ways in which newspapers are still influential. First, they set the agenda for other media like TV news; their influence is magnified and amplified by broadcast news outlets. What happens is, in the morning the papers come out, and the agenda that is set in those papers is then reflected in the running orders of programs like the Today Programme, and Good Morning Britain, and BBC Breakfast. And by the way, there's someone who's worked on BBC programs; this is something I can vouch for personally.
Second, even if declining sales mean newspapers speak to fewer readers, the readers they are talking to are still important, especially when it comes to electing the leaders of political parties. For example, in 2022, The Daily Mail did much to destroy one Tory candidate's campaign for leadership, mainly for her more liberal approach to trans rights. On the other hand, sometimes this scrutiny of newspaper bias can slip into what I call bad information fallacy. It's genuinely, I think, a very important idea, and if you enjoyed this little survey of the British papers, then I recommend you check it out next, which you can do by clicking here. Here, I think, maybe, yeah.