by James Curran
In the early 1980s, at the height of the ‘loony left’ offensive by the Conservatives and the right-wing press, Labour’s attitude to the using the media was, at best, ambivalent. Media experts who were advising and training the Party’s back and frontbenchers reported having to sit through debates with those on the left arguing that they should have nothing to do with the ‘capitalist media’ and should rely instead on traditional methods of getting their message across, whilst those on the right saw no major problem with the media’s characterisations of Labour; indeed, as discussed earlier, some saw the media as allies in their intra-party battles.14
The visceral nature of such divisions was symbolised for one informant when, in a triumph of hope over experience, the party decided to produce a party political broadcast devoted to ‘puncturing the myth’ that there was a division between the party’s leadership and its left wing. The idea was to feature Roy Hattersley, then a leading figure on the right of the Party, and Eric Heffer, from the left, chatting amiably in a TV studio how ‘that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us’. The broadcast, if not a disaster, was far from a triumph. The fact that prior to transmission, neither would meet with the other to discuss the script played no small role in the distinct lack of on-air chemistry between the two politicians and hence the programme’s lack of credibility. Another broadcast, featuring a politician seen as on the right, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Peter Shore, had to be re-edited at the last moment at the insistence of left-wing members of the National Executive, in order to include a voiceover at the end of the broadcast saying: ‘That was Labour’s Shadow Chancellor outlining the Party’s economic policies as devised by the National Executive and approved by the annual conference’ – hardly the sort of catchy end to a broadcast likely to provoke a positive response from the uncommitted.15
In other words, the Labour Party’s problems with the media in this early period were partially of its own making. Its media operation was under-funded, amateurish and constrained by the very real political divisions apparent throughout the Labour Party. The political divisions might have remained but the Party’s response to the battering it was receiving, spearheaded by the right-wing press, was shortly to change when, in 1985, Neil Kinnock appointed a little-known television producer, Peter Mandelson, as the Party’s Director of Communications. In short order, Mandelson set about transforming the Labour’s media operation into a more robust and proactive machine. Mandelson, at the urgings of advertising executive Phillip Gould, created the Shadow Communications Agency, out of which, as Chapter 6 has outlined, the New Labour spin machine emerged – a machine, that many came to see as both facilitating and symbolising the New Labour project. But what the machine did not do, indeed was never meant to do, was to challenge the press’s version of the ‘loony left’ and the supposed damage they were doing to Labour’s prospects of coming to power.
The other side of the transaction that needs to be considered are the journalists at Westminster, known as the lobby. Back in 1975 the lobby ruled supreme. It was made up of the ‘gentlemen of the press’ and men they overwhelmingly were. Jeremy Tunstall’s landmark study of the lobby16 paints a vivid picture of this powerful group who played a key role in setting the national political news agenda. Tunstall’s work, and the more recent study by Sparrow (2003)17 reveals the essentially (small ‘c’) conservative nature of the lobby – with its almost masonic code of conduct. It does not require a great leap of imagination to consider just and how far from what they regarded as ‘legitimate politics’ the activists of the new municipal left must have appeared. Members of the lobby spent their working lives cocooned within the narrow confines of Westminster, being briefed by the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary twice a day and, in between, lunching and dining with ‘contacts’ in Westminster’s plush watering holes. They worked closely together so that although they were always searching for the journalists’ fabled ‘scoops’, none wished to stray too far from the consensus in, for example, in 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 political information. There were hardly any accessible alternative sources of news and hence the lobby journalists’ interpretation of political events went virtually unchallenged. After Prime Minister’s Questions, for example, correspondents would gather around the Prime Minister’s and Leader of the Opposition’s spin doctors seeking their interpretation of the day’s encounter.18 After being briefed, they would then form another pack, made up of the more senior members, who would then agree among themselves the ‘top line’ for the day. They did this partly because it was useful to exchange views as to the precise meaning of the spin’ they had just heard, particularly when the spinner was someone as skilful at the game as Tony Blair’s spokesman, Alastair Campbell, but also because it saved them from having to deal with their respective news desks later that evening demanding to know why a rival paper had a different lead. The pack nature of the lobby was memorably described by one of their most distinguished members, Anthony Bevins, whose journalistic experience included stints on the Independent, The Times, the Mail, Express and Sun. He wrote:
it is daft to suggest that individuals can buck the system, ignore the pre-set ’taste’ of their newspapers, use their own news-sense in reporting the truth of any event, and survive. Dissident reporters who do not deliver the goods suffer professional death. They are ridden by news desks and backbench executives, they have their stories spiked on a systematic basis, they face the worst form of newspaper punishment – by-line deprivation. Such a fate is not always a reflection on professional ability. Over the last 20 years, I have known fine journalists broken on that wheel; they lose faith in themselves, and are tempted to give up the unequal struggle. It is much easier to pander to what the editors want, and all too often that is a pulverised version of the truth – the lowest common denominator of news.19
But this monopoly of parliamentary and political news by the lobby has, in recent years, been somewhat reduced.20 First, because the amount of parliamentary, as opposed to political, news carried by newspapers – and to a lesser extent by television and radio – has dramatically declined. In 1988, all five national broadsheet newspapers – The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Financial Times – carried at least one page of parliamentary reports. Within ten years, none did.21 Perhaps more importantly, since 1989 the lobby’s monopoly of the chamber has been broken as a result of the televising of the House of Commons’ proceedings. This has meant that when it came to the big parliamentary occasions such as the annual budget, major debates and the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions – depending on what the main TV bulletins chose to show – viewers were now able to form their own judgements as to how the politicians had performed.
On the other hand, the decline in parliamentary reporting over the past three decades has changed the overall tenor of political coverage and not necessarily in a way that has ameliorated the essentially anti-left bias of the majority of the press. If anything, it has been accentuated. This is because, with roughly the same number of journalists in membership of the lobby, its members’ focus has increasingly shifted from reporting parliament to reporting politics. This entails using their parliamentary base as a means of gaining inside knowledge about Westminster politics – much of which is based on solid information, but some of which is little more than rumour, scandal and gossip. Given the predominant bias of the lobby members towards the Westminster centre of political gravity, this has meant that politics and politicians outside this consensus, either geographically or ideologically, are poorly reported – either as a matter of editorial policy or journalistic oversight. In particular, there has been an expansion in the prominence given to the parliamentary sketch writers – political journalists whose prime function is to amuse – hence, given the domination of right-wing newspapers, this has inevitably entailed an increase in the mocking and deridi
ng of left Labour politicians with greater frequency and venom than that devoted to their opposite numbers on the right of the Conservative side.
A related development in 1989 was the launch of Sky News, the UK’s first 24-hour television news channel, marking the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle that has so impacted on the working day of politicians and political journalists alike. Prior to this, political journalists needed only to look for the main story of the day, either for their newspaper or radio or television bulletins; but in the world of 24-hour news that no longer sufficed. A constant stream of updates, blogs, tweets, posts etc. was now required, leaving precious little time for original research or reflection.22
So, have all these changes in the political media landscape changed how the Labour left has been reported? We would argue not, because despite the plethora of new media outlets, the agenda-setting power of the national press has, in essence, remained, despite the best efforts of the broadcasters to keep to the impartiality rules that their regulator requires. This ongoing agenda-setting power was encapsulated by Robert Peston, a senior broadcast journalist at the BBC and ITV, who – as quoted in Chapter 9 – said that his colleagues at BBC News were ‘completely obsessed’ by the agenda set by newspapers and that they followed the news leads of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph too frequently.23 This obsession is reflected by the fact that most TV and radio news outlets still persist in featuring a daily press review (news websites were added in 2017) – which gives a prominence to the mainly right-wing news agenda of the press, out of all proportion to the declining sales of newspapers in the UK.
There is another factor at work that needs to be considered and that is that, in addition to the right-wing bias of much of the national press, political journalists are also biased, not specifically to the right but towards the consensus as defined within the so-called Westminster village they inhabit. This was highlighted by the lobby’s later failings to anticipate, and report fairly, Corbyn’s victory in the first Labour leadership contest he faced in 2015. As noted in Chapter 9, Katy Searle, Editor BBC Political News, told a BBC radio audience:
I would say on that occasion we could have done more to find a Corbyn supporter. There is a large number of MPs that are against Corbyn and 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 and that Jeremy’s leadership has made us look beyond that.24
But perhaps the major reason why political reporting has changed so dramatically over the period under consideration is, quite simply, because of the impact of the digital revolution. Its initial impact on how politics was reported appeared to be minimal. For despite the fact that more and more people were receiving their news online, their primary sources are still the mainstream media, with the websites of the BBC and the newspapers far and away the largest sources of news – still largely the case, although less so for younger people. The broadcasters’ regulator Ofcom, in their 2016 survey, found that, in terms of news consumption, television was used by 69% of respondents whilst print newspapers were used by 29%, radio by 33% and online sources by 48%. However, when it came to the sixteen- to twenty-four-year-old group, the figures change dramatically with 49% quoting television as their main news source and just 14% quoting newspapers, 20% quoted radio but 63% said they used online sources to access news.25 The annual Reuters Digital News Reports finds a similar trend, reporting that more than four in ten adults over sixteen accessed news via their social media feeds. The Report also notes a continuing fall in trust in the media down from 50% to 43% between 2016 and 2017.26 However, the two Labour leadership elections that Jeremy Corbyn faced in 2015 and 2016, and the General Election in 2017, may have set in motion a change in both the production and consumption of political news that could be transformative.
Commentators have described the 2015 election as the first real social media campaign27 . The success of the Conservatives in that election that took the pollsters and commentators by surprise, has, in part, put down to their superior social media campaign in which they spent more than £ 1 million with Facebook on highly targeted advertising, reaching specific voters in specific constituencies.28 But in 2017, it was Labour’s turn to dominate the social media campaign, very much based on Jeremy Corbyn’s two successful leadership campaigns in the previous two years, when his supporters used Facebook Groups such as Red Labour, to garner support for him and, in particular, to mobilise people to turn up to the nationwide rallies that were a central part of his campaign.29 These rallies, which were replicated during Labour’s General Election campaign two years later, might have seemed like throwbacks to the rallies that characterised many of the ‘loony left’ campaigns of the 1980s (with even with the same cast of politicians) but there was something else going on as well. In a digital age, the rallies had the sort of visual impact that was particularly effective on television and social media platforms. Supporters shared the still and moving images of the huge rallies that created a sense of excitement and momentum (also, not coincidentally, the name adopted by Corbyn’s support network).
In 2017, according to the social media commentator Alec Cannock, the Conservatives, and to an extent their supporters in the press, were ‘overwhelmed by the sheer passion and virality of an online movement on the Left’.30 That passion stemmed from the successful experience of the Corbyn campaigners in the two leadership elections he had faced and the success of Momentum in organising and mobilising his supporters and would-be supporters. By the time of the 2017 election, Momentum consisted of 150 local groups, 23,000 members and 200,000 supporters; this formed the backbone of Labour’s successful online campaign of persuasion and mobilisation.31 Newswhip is a social media consultancy that analysed the parties’ social media activities in the 2017 General Election. They found that there were 4,360,000 engagements with Jeremy Corbyn’s Facebook page in the four weeks of the campaign, compared with just 554,000 interactions with Theresa May’s. And the Corbyn campaign posted 217 messages and videos compared with 57 by the Theresa May team. There was the same disparity found on the parties’ official Facebook pages, with Labour’s 450 posts attracting 2.56 million engagements, while the Conservative’s 116 posts attracted less than half as many at 1.07 million.32
In terms of content, the Corbyn and Labour pages featured a much greater ratio of videos, which achieved far higher levels of shares compared with the Conservatives. As the Newswhip site observed: ‘In this election, native video on Facebook was the message of choice for the political social media managers, and their reach far outstripped that of most other formats’.33 Corbyn and Labour didn’t just get the message across, they got out the vote, using social media to persuade young people to register, campaign and then vote. Connock observes: ‘During the campaign, a record 1.05m 18 to 24-year-olds registered, including a quarter of a million – that’s almost three per second – on deadline day alone’.34 In the last three days of the campaign, Labour spent £ 100,000 on the social media platform Snapchat, much preferred to Facebook or Twitter by many of the younger demographic that Labour was keen to reach. An unnamed senior Labour official said: ‘We targeted every single young person in the country irrespective of seat. We got 7.8 million young people to see our advert. A million people clicked the link to see where to vote in the final forty-eight hours. Nobody has ever spent £ 100,000 on Snapchat before in British politics’.35 Labour’s use of Snapchat was in marked contrast to its relative lack of interest in Twitter, the social media of choice of most journalists and politicians.36 This lack of interest meant that much of the ferment taking place within public opinion, particularly among younger voters, went largely unobserved by Westminster-based journalists. This might well have been a factor in their failure to pick up the mood of voters which led to Labour’s unpredicted net gain of seats in the 2017 election.
Labour’s skilful exploitation of soc
ial media is perhaps best symbolised by the tactic that Jeremy Corbyn is reported to have adopted during the weekly Prime Ministers Questions confrontation with the Prime Minister. Traditionally, leaders of the opposition have sought to use their allotted six questions to discomfort the Prime Minister and thereby achieve a clip on the nightly news. Corbyn still aspires to this with most of his questioning, but one, and sometimes two, of his questions are designed to be used as Facebook clips with a message that his followers will like and share – reaching an audience that probably never watches the main television news bulletins.37
There was another factor at work that has increased the impact of a left Labour message – and that was that the mainstream media has now been joined by a growing number of hyper partisan left-wing news blogs – the Canary, Evolve Politics, Skwawkbox and Novara Media being the most prominent. Collectively known as the alt-left, as opposed to the alt-right which played such a key role in Trump’s election in 2016, 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’.38 During, and since, the 2017 election, the alt-left sites ran an almost unceasing critical commentary of the political coverage of the right-wing press and of the BBC (the other broadcasters seemed to have been more or less ignored). In particular, they shone a harsh spotlight on the reporting of the Daily Mail and the Sun and the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg. The Political Editor of the Buzzfeed news website, Jim Waterson, noted that this aspect of their coverage – in terms of hits and shares – was the most popular. Overall, using web-based data, Waterson demonstrated that the ability of these sites to get their stories initially clicked through, and then shared, was more than three times greater than that achieved by the mainstream media. The sites claimed readerships to rival that of some of the main news websites – Canary claim its articles regularly achieve 500,000 views and Another Angry Voice has claimed that one of its articles reached 1.5 million views.39 These figures were largely substantiated by the independent Enders Analysis media consultancy, which noted that the alt-left sites were reaching larger Facebook audiences than most of the mainstream media brands.40