The media establishment poses a serious obstacle for moderate social-democratic, let alone socialist, politics. This is a longstanding problem, brought sharply into focus by recent events, and one to which the left has yet to develop a satisfactory response, in terms of either policy or strategy. The rapid change to our communicative systems, and the extraordinary power of the digital platforms, however, demand an urgent response.
Though often overlooked by political economists, the shifts in the ownership and organisation of media institutions in the latter decades of the twentieth century were an important aspect of the neoliberal turn that fundamentally weakened the left. The decades immediately following the Second World War had been characterised not only by a strong labour movement, which shaped the structures and culture of state and quasi-state institutions, but also by a more politically balanced media system.
As one would expect in a capitalist press, Tory-supporting newspapers were always ahead of Labour-supporting papers; from 1945 to 1970 just over half of the newspaper market by circulation backed the Conservative Party, while the remainder favoured either Labour, the Liberals, or remained neutral. However, from the 1970s onwards, a series of closures, takeovers and mergers, and associated editorial changes, saw a marked shift to the right in the industry which helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power.
In 1969, Rupert Murdoch had taken control of the Sun – formerly the Daily Herald, which was once a hugely popular paper and an organ of the labour movement – and transformed it into a populist right-wing outlet. Thatcher’s coterie developed a close alliance with Murdoch and his editors, as well as with the traditional organs of popular conservatism: the Mail and the Express. Together these titles formed a potent machinery of reactionary propaganda. The proportion of the newspaper market supporting the Conservative Party shot up from around half to between 70 per cent and 80 per cent. The alliances forged, and the backroom deals made, between media owners and politicians in those years have since been revealed by the Leveson Inquiry and official documents disclosed under the thirty-year rule. As was suspected but always denied, Thatcher supported Murdoch’s bid for The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981, and his right-wing stranglehold on the industry was later secured with a victory over the print unions in the Wapping dispute of 1986.
Recent research examining the Sun’s endorsement of the Conservatives in 2010 and of Labour in 1997 estimated that each delivered over half a million votes, without any underlying change in readers’ political attitudes.* The latter endorsement had been secured by Tony Blair’s assiduous courting of Rupert Murdoch and for a period New Labour reversed the usual political balance of the British press, at least in terms of partisan electoral support. In 2001, the Blairites were even able to secure the support of the Express. Labour’s rightward shift, accelerated and consolidated by Blair, was in part a strategic response to media power (insofar as capitulation can be considered strategic): the fear of being monstered by Britain’s unscrupulous reactionary press served as an opportunity and alibi for Blairite policy and the centralisation of power within the Party.
While the press shifted sharply to the right from the 1970s, broadcasting lagged behind as a legacy of the social-democratic era, but it would follow. The UK’s broadcasting system had become progressively more commercialised since the 1950s when advertising-funded commercial television first emerged as a rival to the state broadcaster, and commercial radio followed in the 1970s. But the broadcasting system that operated up to the 1980s was a mixed economy underpinned by a strong public service ethos and regulatory structure, and it contained pockets of genuine political independence and creativity. That was all swept away by late Thatcherism, with both the passing of the Broadcasting Act 1990 – leading to the death of the innovative and independent regional ITV companies – and the introduction of external commissioning at the BBC, along with an internal market and the centralisation of editorial and managerial control.
Socialists have too often neglected media and communications as a second-order issue compared with material concerns, or placed too much faith in the natural capacity of people to resist smears and misinformation. Of course, we all question what we read or watch, drawing on our own knowledge, experiences and networks. But our capacity to do so is always limited by the power of states, corporations and political elites to dominate the communicative environment, and to set the political agenda and the terms of debate. The media, rather like the state, represents a terrain weighted against us, which we cannot afford to ignore if we are serious in our ambitions.
The rise of digital platforms, and the crisis in conventional news media business models, are in the process of profoundly reshaping our system of media and communications – but not necessarily for the better. In March 2016, Jeremy Corbyn remarked in an interview with Jacobin magazine that the declining influence of the Sun and the BBC, and the opportunities presented by social media, meant that it was much easier to reach people with left ideas than it had been in 1983. The extraordinary 2017 general election result, which reversed years of electoral decline for the Labour Party, seemed to vindicate this; being all the more remarkable for having seemingly circumvented an overwhelmingly hostile media apparatus. But if 2017 seemed to break a spell, 2019 was a rude awakening. The negative treatment of the Labour Party by the media was even more extreme in the 2019 election than in 2017.*
As ever, the power of the media is difficult to disentangle from other factors, but it is very clear that politically motivated smears and misinformation played an important role in the defeat of Corbynism. Take the Labour antisemitism scandal, which despite having no sound evidential basis dominated headlines for years, and featured prominently in the 2019 election campaign. Even respected broadsheet and broadcast media departed from basic professional standards in their reporting, and as a result of relentless exposure to the issue, British Jews came overwhelmingly to believe that the Party in general was institutionally antisemitic, and even that Corbyn himself was an antisemite. Meanwhile, the broader public thought that on average a third of Labour members had been suspended over the issue.*
With Corbynism roundly defeated, where does this leave the left on the question of the media? The legacy is fairly modest. There were some notable achievements in building up left outlets: Novara, the Canary, Tribune and New Socialist, for example. But not nearly enough was done by the Labour Party under Corbyn to foster socialist media; the focus instead was on classic strategic communications and disseminating left content through digital platforms.
Neither was much headway made on policy. The 2017 Manifesto laid out the same position, basically, as the 2015 Manifesto, and was in fact much more muted in its political rhetoric. The commitments in relation to the press that came out of the Leveson Inquiry were maintained, but unlike in 2015 there was no reference to the ‘unaccountable power’ and ‘undue influence’ of media owners, and there was much more concern about the future of the industry. The 2019 Manifesto was similar, but included a reference to addressing the tech giants’ advertising monopoly and establishing an inquiry on ‘fake news’.
The most significant development came in August 2018 with Corbyn’s Alternative MacTaggart lecture, in which he argued for the democratisation of the BBC and the establishment of a British Digital Corporation. A number of the candidates to replace him as leader also addressed the question of media reform, which became much more prominent an issue in the aftermath of the general election. Both Clive Lewis and Rebecca Long-Bailey pledged to reform the BBC radically, devolving and democratising programme making. Long-Bailey promised what The Sunday Times referred to as ‘the biggest change to the BBC’s relationship with the state since it was founded in 1922’. Even Lisa Nandy broke with centrist tradition by floating plans for reform.
Notably, however, Sir Keir Starmer made no statement on the issue. This does not bode well, especially given that, insofar as Starmer’s supporters have offered anything approaching a political strategy, it seems to rest on offering a ‘credible’ candidate in the hope of attracting more favourable media coverage. It is worth noting how close this is to the ‘soft left’ strategy of the Party under Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband. In any case the basic challenges remain, and in my view the task of the left in the coming years is twofold: first, to build up its own media infrastructure; and second, to set out a positive policy agenda for twenty-first-century public media.
On the first, it is pure fantasy that the existing media structures will ever treat the left fairly, and it is simply not possible for an effective and mature left-wing movement to exist in any sustainable fashion without its own media and communications. At present there are far too few outlets, and those that do exist have far too few resources. We cannot afford to rely on voluntarism. All socialists should provide financial support to left media. In addition, it will be necessary for socialists to start to think seriously about developing their own platforms, as well as making use of commercial platforms as best they can. Competition with either the mainstream news media or the platform giants is not a realistic prospect, but it is imperative that alternatives are developed while state power remains out of reach.
The second priority is developing and effectively disseminating an agenda for media reform that can respond to the profound failings of our media system – including public broadcasting – as well as the serious threat that platform capitalism poses to human freedom. A radically reformed BBC should be a central component of a new public digital ecosystem in the UK.
Though developments were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, in the course of the 2019 general election the Johnson government sought repeatedly to intimidate public media, and afterwards moved quickly against the BBC, in particular with a consultation on the decriminalisation of licence fee non-payment and a war of words waged principally via the stenographers at The Times. The response of liberals and sections of the left was to panic and to leap to the defence of the BBC with sentimental pronouncements about public service and portentous references to Fox News.
Whatever Dominic Cummings’s intentions, the government is not in a position to abolish the licence fee system. It is protected under the BBC’s Royal Charter that runs to 2027, and it cannot be touched in its mid-term review. The Conservative government’s immediate intention, therefore, is to reduce the BBC’s income further, and to appoint a politically compliant BBC chair to serve alongside the new director general Tim Davie, who before joining the BBC was a PepsiCo marketing executive and active Conservative Party member. The BBC’s independence may be under threat but its existence is not, at least for now. The task of the left in the years ahead, therefore, is to win the arguments around the BBC before 2027. This means addressing the longstanding problems with its governance, but more importantly setting out a positive agenda for digital public media.
Ultimately, the goal should be the establishment of an ecosystem of non-commercial producers that are independent from both the state and commercial oligarchies, and which can harness the expertise and creativity of workers to produce technology, information and culture which will be freely available to the public. This will require a devolved, democratic, public framework for journalism and cultural production, fostered by the existing public service broadcasters and administered by a new public media funding body and regulator. Meanwhile, a new British Digital Corporation (or Cooperative, as Dan Hind prefers) would produce public digital technology and infrastructure for the public good.* The market-first media system – a legacy of neoliberalism – is undermining universal access and hindering creativity and innovation. It will need to be overhauled.
The global media and communications system is currently undergoing a profound process of change and it is imperative that the left effectively intervenes. Capital seeks to monetise education, culture and creativity, either by building paywalls around ‘content’ or via complex systems of user surveillance for targeted advertising and commercial data analytics. The left’s vision should be to open up information and culture to everyone in a form that allows us, individually and collectively, to control the structure of our digital commons.
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* Aaron Reeves, Martin McKeeb and David Stuckler, ‘“It’s the Sun Wot Won It”: Evidence of Media Influence on Political Attitudes and Voting from a UK Quasi-Natural Experiment’, Social Science Research 56, March 2016.
* David Deacon, Jackie Goode, David Smith, Dominic Wring, John Downey and Christian Vaccari, ‘General Election 2019 Report 5’, Loughborough University Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, 7 November – 11 December 2019.
* Jamie Stern-Weiner and Alan Maddison, ‘The Myth of a “Labour Antisemitism Crisis”’, in Jamie Stern-Weiner, ed., Antisemitism and the Labour Party, London, 2019; Justin Schlosberg and Laura Laker, ‘Labour, Antisemitism and the News: A Disinformation Paradigm’, Media Reform Coalition, mediareform.org. uk, September 2018; Greg Philo, Mike Berry, Justin Schlosberg, Antony Lerman and David Miller, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief, London, 2019.
* Dan Hind, ‘The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution’, common-wealth.co.uk, 20 September 2019.