Not everything that stinks causes disease. Yes, there is plenty wrong with the press and BBC, but how much influence does it actually have?
I ask because of Simon’s recent post blaming the media for the sheer incompetence of this government. I’m not so sure about this. The press has always had a right-wing bias, but we haven’t always had a government as lousy as this one. This alone tells us that other factors are at work: mechanisms that select for fanatics and against competence have strengthened in recent years.
Equally, it would be stretching things to blame the media for the rise of coarse right-wing populism. The press has been fomenting this for decades: the Sun ran the headline “Up Yours, Delors” way back in 1990. But it is only in recent years that it has become so widespread. This tells us to look elsewhere for explanations – for example in increased (perceived) threats to old white male supremacy or to the psychological impact of economic stagnation. As Martin Wolf says, “sharing out losses generated by a financial crisis, followed by the inevitably weak recovery, always creates public rage.”
What’s more, the cognitive biases research inspired by Kahneman and Tversky shows us that people are perfectly able to be idiots without reading the papers. Pro-capitalist ideology can emerge without their help.
And personally, I find blaming the press to be aesthetically displeasing: I fear it can sometimes come close to conspiracy theory, and under-rates the importance of emergence.
We also have empirical evidence from the US that the press doesn’t much matter. Matthew Gentzkow and colleagues used the opening and closing of daily newspapers to estimate effects on voting behaviour and found (pdf) “no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares.” One reason for this is that papers respond to readers’ ideologies (pdf), not vice versa.
But, but, but. There’s also evidence on the other side. Jonathan McDonald Ladd and Gabriel Lenz show that Sun readers were more likely (pdf) to vote Labour in 1997 than otherwise similar people who didn’t read the rag, implying that the Sun’s shift to supporting Labour in the 1997 election did shift votes. US evidence shows that the roll-out of Fox News boosted the Republican vote. One study has found (pdf) "quantitative and qualitative evidence that media coverage may have played a unique causal role in increasing support for UKIP," And the fact that young people are far more left-wing than oldsters – something which was not the case in the 80s – might be due in part to the fact that they don’t read the papers.
What’s more important for me, though, is perhaps the role of the press in shaping the agenda, in deciding what gets talked about: in this context is the constant drip, drip of stories that matters more than any individual one. Simon is right to say that media stories of Labour’s over-spending created a climate receptive to Tory claims that government borrowing was a big problem. The MPs’ expenses “scandal” helped to foster a distrust of parliamentarians*. And anti-immigrant stories in the papers might well help explain the otherwise curious fact that anti-migrant sentiment tends to be strongest in areas which have low immigration. When people can compare the evidence of their own eyes to newspaper stories, they disbelieve the latter, but when they can’t…
Of course, if the press puts some things onto the agenda it follows that others things are kept off it. Not least of these is the truth. The fact that people were ignorant of basic facts about the EU in 2016 and that Tory MPs needed a training session this year on what a customs union is both tell us that the media does a lousy job of informing people.
The facts, though, aren’t the only things avoided. In talking about Brexit, immigration, identity politics and so on, important questions get ignored – such as the causes of stagnant real wages or of inequality. Even well-meaning journalists, in their search for heroes and villains, tend to under-rate the importance of emergent social phenomena. One of the BBC’s greatest failings is perhaps a tendency to take its agenda from the press, thereby exacerbating the bias against understanding.
Net, then, I suspect our media is indeed a problem, though not the only one. Which means that one task of the left - a task it has for years failed at - is to change what we talk about.
* The fact that some of the most imaginative writing in English literature has sometimes been in journalists’ own expenses claims was curiously overlooked in that affair.
I think you're being a little unfair here “that the press doesn't matter much” is becoming widely appreciated precisely because the conversation has changed. Restricted by brexit mania for sure, but considerable work has gone into highlighting our Forth Estate's dependence on corporate finances, and the degree to which, unquestioned, this obscures an understanding of how stuff works.
Posted by: e | May 09, 2019 at 06:41 PM
so, lets just say that the Wren-Lewis argument is correct and the press massively influences elections to the point of making it impossible for left wing governments to get elected, so the press needs to be sufficiently controlled in order that the populations, suitably now informed, will elect a left-wing government.
Under that scenario, what is the point of having elections? If the electorate are simply a mirror for the opinion that is blasted at them and have no agency of their own, then their vote means nothing. So surely the logical end of this argument is for the left to seize power and abolish elections. Have I got that right?
Posted by: Dipper | May 09, 2019 at 07:29 PM
"So surely the logical end of this argument is for the left to seize power and abolish elections. Have I got that right?"
Probably not given the current autonomist trend (ineptly demonised as populism) across the advanced world.
There's clearly a movement amongst bourgeois liberals intent on neutering democracy and/or outflanking it through administrative capture - largely backed by the press., Gratifyingly however both they and their cheerleaders appear to have quite exhausted their reserves of trustworthiness hence the (hopefully futile) turn to increasingly crude and obvious forms of repression.
Posted by: Scratch | May 09, 2019 at 07:47 PM
Leaving aside his reductio ad absurdum, Dipper frames the question of what the left can do in terms of imposing control, but this gets the issue the wrong way round. The problem with the "free press" is that it is already controlled.
It is no coincidence that the press itself has displayed an antipathy towards social media and unconventional online journalism. It is also no coincidence that it is supposedly progressive elements of the press, like the Guardian, who have been most vocal in their criticism of new media.
Posted by: Dave Timoney | May 10, 2019 at 11:05 AM
@ FromArsetToElbow how is that reductio ad absurdum? It is just taking an argument to its logical conclusion. If people are simply vehicles for passing through received opinions without any independent ability to process them then what value do they add?
Posted by: Dipper | May 11, 2019 at 08:47 AM
“…anti-migrant sentiment tends to be strongest in areas which have low immigration”.
Or to put it the other way round, pro-migrant sentiment tends to be strongest in areas where migrants and their descendants have come to make up a very high percentage of voters. It’s almost as if migrants are voting for more migration.
The 2011 Census revealed a London that was 55% non-White, with 35% of its population born outside the UK. It also found that 600,000 Whites had left the capital since the 2001 Census.
This BBC report is interesting:
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-33409111
It reveals that, even though just 26% of school pupils in London are White, they go disproportionately to schools where Whites form a majority. This ethnic distribution of pupils cannot be explained by the ethnic distribution of individual boroughs. It seems that White parents are gaming the system to avoid sending their children to schools where they’ll be a minority.
Is this a “revealed preference”?
Posted by: georgesdelatour | May 11, 2019 at 08:50 PM
«important questions get ignored – such as the causes of stagnant real wages or of inequality.»
Many voters reckon those are rather less important questions than how to get rents and house prices to increase faster, and only secondarily worry how to ensure that the help's wages fall and inequality increases.
Politics matter, and it is a common leftoid delusion that everybody thinks or should think that "stagnant real wages and inequality" are top issues.
As I haven't tired of repeating yet the political challenge is how to cope with the new large class of pension and property rentiers that the socialdemocratic policies of the 1960s and 1970s have created, rather than wringing hands and tut-tutting about "stagnant real wages and inequality" which is a minor consequence of that.
Posted by: Blissex | May 12, 2019 at 02:25 PM
«If the electorate are simply a mirror for the opinion that is blasted at them and have no agency of their own, then their vote means nothing.»
"Dipper" here shows his assumption that "hoi polloi" are genetically inferior and thus are fundamentally unable to make decisions. The logical consequence of that is Spencerism, and to make the vast majority of the population into slaves, ruled over by superior being like B Johnson.
But there is a rather better "left-wing" answer to the people (usually lesser types of elitists) who complain that "hoi polloi" are too easily swayed by wall-to-wall far-right propaganda: help "hoi polloi" educate themselves with a wider range of opinions, provide alternative narratives to the wall-to-wall far-right propaganda that defines the "Overton window", and trust better prepared "hoi polloi" to make their own decisions.
That's the tradition of Labour, the socialist/methodist tradition of night schools, reading clubs, debating meetings, pamphlets, magazines, it is about empowering those people that right-wingers like you seem to regard as animal-like "commoners".
Consider for example the "Another Angry Voice" blog: it reaches more people than some newspapers, despite it having been "algorithmically" penalized by Google and Facebook.
Posted by: Blissex | May 12, 2019 at 03:16 PM
On your point about some anti-immigration feeling being curious because it was in areas with low levels of immigration - the LSE chaps you referenced looked at this and proposed that it was the *rate of change* in these low immigrant population areas that was significant, rather than overall numbers. So when you look at it that way the sentiment can then make sense independent of newspaper reporting (much as both the sentiment and the newspaper articles sadden me).
Here's their paper (found within the blog link you posted):
http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Changing_places_-_web.pdf?1411989188
Posted by: J | May 12, 2019 at 11:41 PM
«proposed that it was the *rate of change* in these low immigrant population areas that was significant, rather than overall numbers.»
* Some of those areas are rich, and most residents are english supremacists, and they are outraged that some insolent foreigners claim the right to immigrate without having to beg for permission, and cannot be just thrown out at whim, and behave as if they were english expats.
* Some of those areas are poor, and tend to have very few jobs, so any increase in the competition is resented, plus those are also areas from which there is emigration to the south, and competition for jobs and housing there is also resented.
Posted by: Blissex | May 15, 2019 at 08:34 PM