Another election loser

It’s widely agreed that, in this election, all three main parties were losers, as were other scum. But isn’t there another loser - the media?
I mean that 6 of our 10 national newspapers backed the Tories, whilst only one and a half each backed Labour. But voters behaved very differently.
Weighted by circulation, 74.8% of the press backed the Tories, but only 36.1% of voters did. Only 13.3% of the press backed Labour, whilst 29% of voters did so. And 4% of the press backed the Lib Dems, but they got 23% of the vote.
Millions of voters, then, largely ignored the papers.
Nor did TV fare better. The Economist greeted the “Cleggstacy” triggered by the first TV debate as “a triumph for old media.” But of course, in the end the Lib Dems share of the vote was only a percentage point higher than in 2005. So much for the power of television.
Now, I’m not saying that the failure of the old media to sway voters represents a triumph for the new media - there’s not much evidence for this. Nor am I going to go misty-eyed about the wisdom of the people. I’m just posing a question I’ve asked before and which hasn’t been satisfactorily decided: just how much real influence upon people does the media have?

Comments

[Paul Sagar]

The plausible answer I've heard from Pol Science types is that the media can't tell people what to think, but it can tell them what to think ABOUT.

Hence, immigration is a huge issue, but contra-Murdoch people still voted Labour.

[Alex]

What Paul said. All the papers have their world views, that day after day slowly chip away at people's perspective of reality. How else do you explain the fear of crime is rising nonsense? Or "political correctness"/"'uman rites" garbage beliefs?

[Andrew Neilson]

Yep. And yet politicians will still see their success from day to day as framed by the media, and will still come up with policy initiatives to get a good headline. Meanwhile, the media continue to tank their paying readership and viewing figures. It's a funny old world.

[Luis Enrique]

although if their objective was "predict the winner" we'd see 100% back the Tories, so doesn't this just reveal newspapers have some incentive to back the winner?

Or will the Tories simply be better for business if you are a media mogul (less regulation etc.?)

people have suggested commercial motives for the FT and Economist backing the Tories, but I can't really see what's in it for them.

[Big Fez]

The irony of the papers 'coming out' for their preferred party is that this is probably their least effective way of swaying opinion. It wouldn't matter if the Sun hadn't explicitly backed Cameron, they had been effectively (and more effectively)doing so for the last year anyway.

People don't like being told what to think, but if you tell them the 'objective facts' of the news and let them make their own mind up you can surely influence their opinions.

It's true that this is hard to establish satisfactorily with a sample across different media, as it is possible that people read the daily mail because they are idiots to start with. It should be possible to survey, for example, the sun readership over time though. Don't the sun do this themselves in fact?

[Rav Casley Gera]

Incidentally, with regard to the scum, apparently the BNP vote actually more than doubled - it was just too evenly distributed for them to do well electorally.

Which I'm sure will come up in any discussions of STV...

[Fred Kapoor]

I believe the media has a lot of influece on certain target audiences. And that influence is only on some subjects. Not for everything. However, sometimes the media is not well managed. If it was well managed it'd be a lot more influential and powerful.