Prof Steven Barnett
Professor of Communications at the University of Westminster and an established writer, author and commentator, who specialises in media policy, regulation, political communication, and the theory and practice of journalism. Over the last 30 years, he has advised ministers and shadow ministers across the political spectrum, and has acted several times as specialist adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and Digital.
Email: s.barnett@westminster.ac.uk
Twitter: @stevenjbarnett.
UK Election 2024
Section 7: News and journalism
73. Why the press still matters (Prof Steven Barnett)
74. When the Star aligned: how the press ‘voted’ (Prof Dominic Wring, Prof David Deacon)
75. Visual depictions of leaders and losers in the (still influential) print press (Prof Erik Bucy)
76. Towards more assertive impartiality? Fact-checking on BBC television news (Prof Stephen Cushion)
77. The outsize influence of the conservative press in election campaigns (Prof Dan Stevens, Prof Susan Banducci, Prof Ekaterina Kolpinskaya and Dr Laszlo Horvath)
78. GB News – not breaking any rules… (Prof Ivor Gaber)
79. Vogue’s stylish relationship to politics (Dr Chrysi Dagoula)
80. Tiptoeing around immigration has tangible consequences (Dr Maria Kyriakidou, Dr Iñaki Garcia-Blanco)
81. A Taxing Campaign (Prof David Deacon et al)
82. Not the Sun wot won it: what Murdoch’s half-hearted, last-minute endorsements mean for Labour (Dr John Jewell)
83. Is this the first podcast election? (Carl Hartley, Prof Stephen Coleman)
84. A numbers game (Prof Paul Bradshaw)
85. Election 2024 and the remarkable absence of media in a mediated spectacle (Prof Lee Edwards)
86. 2024: the great election turn-off (Prof Des Freedman)
Anyone reading the British national press in the runup to this election could have been forgiven for predicting a crushing defeat for Starmer’s Labour Party. While the Telegraph was warning us that “Starmer’s sinister plan for Britain will end the country as we know it” and the Express stated unequivocally that “we are doomed if Labour wins a massive majority”, the Mail’s election day front page listed all the diabolical evils that would be visited upon the nation with a Starmer/Rayner victory: “Soaring taxes, uncontrolled immigration with Rwanda scrapped, rampant wokery, betrayal of women’s rights, Net Zero mania, weaker defence, surrender of our Brexit freedoms – and votes at 16 to ‘rig’ future elections”.
Even The Sun’s lukewarm endorsement was accompanied by an editorial which was much closer to the Conservative Party than Labour: backing the Rwanda plan, the abolition of National Insurance, and “[t]he ban on teaching harmful gender ideology in schools”, while praising Sunak’s promise to curb “the headlong rush towards Net Zero” and his “long-held and principled commitment to our Brexit freedoms”.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats were dismissed as a joke with “a leader who has spent this most depressing of campaigns pulling ridiculous stunts”.
And yet. Not only did Labour win its predicted landslide with an overall majority of 172, but the Lib Dems’ 72 MPs was its best performance since its 1988 merger between the Liberals and Social Democrats. Whatever the chorus of disapproval and dismay from our dominant right-wing press, they were comprehensively ignored. And so, the narrative goes, we can now safely assume that the influence historically ascribed to the national press can now be consigned to history.
There are three reasons why this theory is both wrong and dangerously complacent. First, Labour’s majority may be extensive, but it could still be precarious. The party’s vote share (on a historically low turnout) was the fifth lowest of any election since 1931. It has been variously described as wide but shallow and a “sandcastle” majority, with many voters – like the Sun – giving half-hearted rather than full-throated support. There is no sense of Tony Blair’s triumphant and optimistic coronation in 1997. In a volatile political environment, partisan and opinionated media will have greater influence.
Second, these legacy media are not diminished by social and online media, but in some cases could actually be enhanced. We will need to wait for post-election studies to determine the key sources of voters’ election news and information, but YouGov gave us a foretaste a few days before the election: 58% said they used TV to access news, followed by 43% for social media, and 42% for a newspaper’s website or app. Even amongst 18-24’s – notoriously press averse and supposedly social media obsessed – nearly half gave a newspaper website/app as a news source.
Once we take into account the news stories originating with mainstream media news outlets but being distributed on social media – the Mail, for example, has a significant presence on Facebook – newspaper reach will be even higher.
Third, there is still widespread agreement that national newspapers in the UK play a significant role in setting the broadcast news agenda. Whether it’s the BBC’s nightly obsession with the next day’s headlines both on its website and on Newsnight; Sky’s twice nightly press reviews; the newspaper columnists, pundits and commentators that frequent all the broadcast studios; or the newspapers routinely scattered around Radio 4’s Today studio, broadcast journalism still owes much to its press counterpart. Katie Perrior, Theresa May’s communications director in Downing Street, said recently that broadcasters planning the day’s headlines are “still taking some of those from our national newspapers that drop at 10pm the night before”.
That agenda setting role was illustrated graphically during the election campaign when the Conservative minister Grant Schapps raised the frightening spectre of a Labour “supermajority” – a non-existent construct in UK politics. As a subsequent analysis demonstrated, this partisan hype was first reported as a news story by most national newspapers, followed by strident opinion pieces in the Times, Telegraph, Express and Mail repeating the same dire warning – including, on 29th June, an eight-page Daily Mail guide to “avoid a Starmer supermajority”.
Such blatant client journalism has increasingly disfigured the UK’s newspaper journalism culture. On his own podcast Media Confidential, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger recently spoke about a huge failure of print journalism “where a generation of journalists has grown up for whom ideology is the thing and the secondary aspects of simply and fairly informing readers about the facts has become almost a sideshow”.
This is the problem that Keir Starmer is going to face as a Labour Prime Minister attempting even a vaguely progressive policy agenda: a press that is less concerned about truth, accuracy and an informed electorate than pursuing its own anti-woke, anti-immigration, anti-EU priorities. We saw during the Brexit referendum the damage that such propaganda can inflict on the body politic. Labour has been warned: the press still wields power.
