Prof Des Freedman
Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. He researches media policy, politics and power, was a founding member of the Media Reform Coalition and writes on media for Declassified UK.
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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)
Just after 4pm on 22nd May, everyone taking part in Radio 4’s The Media Show was fired up because of talk that Rishi Sunak was going to call an election any minute. Former Newsnight presenter Kirstie Wark was desperate: “For us [journalists], it’s meat and drink and it kind of energises everyone”. Presenter Katie Razzall then asked the specialist election broadcaster Peter Snow whether his body was “tingling”: “Are you as excited as you were back in the day?” to which the veteran journalist replied “Katie, there is nothing more exciting than an election. Roll on an election.”
Not everyone shared this excitement. Elections may be “meat and drink” for the media and political establishments but this is far from true for the rest of the population. Indeed the 2024 general election saw near-record levels of abstention (rarely discussed in the media) following an insipid and uninspiring six-week campaign.
This disinterest was partly because of the very limited differences between the two main parties on key policy matters – from fiscal to foreign affairs – and partly because the prospect of a Labour landslide removed an incentive to rush to the polls.
Yet mainstream journalism, obsessed with the performative routines of electoral contests, largely reproduced the charade that this was a dramatic and transformative moment. They achieved this by, as usual, focusing their coverage on the mechanics of the campaign itself – for example, opinion polls, candidates betting on the outcome of the election and intra-party rivalries – such that 42% of all coverage, according to researchers at Loughborough University, was dominated by stories concerning either the electoral process or sleaze.
Meanwhile, issues central to the population as a whole were marginalised. Even if the main parties didn’t want to talk too much about how to meet net zero commitments, there is no justification for the fact that climate stories occupied just 2% of all coverage. While UK complicity in Israel’s war against Gaza remains a major concern for millions of voters – leading to the election of five independent MPs standing on pro-Gaza platforms – it barely featured in the campaign with most discussion of defence and security issues focused on which party was more pro-NATO. Similarly, the ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the likely public spending cuts that might follow the election was rarely challenged.
Instead, further ‘drama’ was injected into a languid campaign by giving Nigel Farage, leader of far-right Reform UK, a wholly disproportionate amount of coverage. Farage accounted for nearly 10% of all press and TV coverage in the penultimate week of the campaign while the co-leaders of the Greens didn’t even make the top twenty. According to a search of the Nexis database, while most major outlets mentioned Keir Starmer approximately twice as much as Farage across the whole campaign (itself a significant overrepresentation of a party which, at the time, had a single MP), BBC 5 Live and Radio 4 mentioned the Reform UK leader significantly more than the future prime minister.
All this served to drag the campaign further to the right and to demoralise, not galvanise, an already disillusioned electorate. The first TV debate on 4th June between the main candidates was watched by an average of 4.8m viewers, more than 2m down on 2019 when Johnson and Corbyn repeatedly clashed over key issues. The BBC’s Question Time Leaders’ Special on 20th June was watched by 3.3m at its peak, down by nearly 25% on its 2019 equivalent, with around half of the audience watching Spain v Italy in the Euros at the same time.
Indeed, according to Techne polling, the percentage of people most likely not to vote increased during the course of the campaign from 21% to 26%. For 18-34 year olds, the campaign actively turned them off with likely abstainers increasing from 38% at the start to 44% just ahead of polling day. The more these younger voters saw – whether on TikTok or on the BBC – the more they were put off from voting.
Of course it shouldn’t be this way. Elections ought to be spaces in which genuine differences are thrashed out and where campaign promises are linked to actions that follow. Yet modern elections are often – although with some significant exceptions – spectacles that run parallel to the real exercise of power located in boardrooms and opaque offices of the state.
The journalist Paul Foot wrote a wonderful book, The Vote, about the importance of the struggle to achieve the universal franchise while also acknowledging the “thin gruel of democracy it offers us”. He called for “economic and industrial democracy as well as parliamentary democracy. We want to see not just those who make the laws elected, but those who enforce them elected too – the judges, the police, the armed forces. We want to see those in authority in the factories and workplaces subject to election too, and those who control the media.”
This campaign – although not the spectacular implosion of the Tories – will soon be forgotten because one dominated by ‘more of the same’ politics and covered by an insular and unaccountable media represents a fake, not vibrant, democracy.
