The relationship between the media and the behaviour of both voters and politicians is complex. One area of debate – dominated by the contrasting views of Marxists and pluralists – is over the extent to which the media's political output is controlled and manipulated by those with economic power.

In brief, Marxists assert that those who own the means of physical production in a society also control the supply of information and, by extension, the way that we think: the media have hegemony. The

neo-Marxist sociologist, Stuart Hall, has refined this view:

Whilst accepting that the providers of news are not necessarily those with most economic power in society, Stuart Hall argues that the ruling class is nevertheless the 'primary definer' of news because journalists are conditioned to accept its news agenda rather than one which reflects the interests of weaker groups or individuals.

Definers Providers Receivers

Ruling class à Journalists à Readers/viewers etc.

In contrast, pluralists claim that competitive markets ensure that the public gets the information it wants. There are plenty of papers and news programmes to choose from and, if a sufficient number of people aren't getting the news and views they want, commercial interest will ensure that the niche is filled. But two features of popular news presentation undermine the pluralist case:

However, once the Internet becomes widely available, the picture might change. Dick Morris, US political commentator and former Clinton aide, is certain of this:

Neither the Marxian, nor the pluralist, assertion can be satisfactorily tested. Items B, C and D (below) clearly establish the relationship between both voting intentions and behaviour and newspaper readership; but we don't

Perhaps both things are happening at once: owners / editors influence readers – which would mean that they have real political power – and people look around for papers with ‘appropriate’ politics.

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Paul Whitely, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, suggests a third possibility: owners / editors might adjust their political lines to match the current outlooks of both existing and potential readers. This is, perhaps, the best explanation for the extraordinary attacks mounted by several UK news-

Lord Rothermere (Mail) 20%

Richard Desmond (Express, Star) 11%

Conrad Black (Telegraph) 4%

Tony O’Reilly (Independent) 1%

Mirror Group (Mirror) 23%

Guardian Group (Guardian) 3%

papers on asylum-seekers: as politicians court voters by tailoring their policies to fit the mood of the electorate, so do owners / editors of newspapers. (Whiteley is, however, convinced that the balance of evidence indicates that owners / editors do exert an influence on the voting behaviour of their readers.)

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Daily Newspapers (clear Tory bias) Party preference of readers

Tory Lab.

Mail 45% 40%

Telegraph 57% 25%

Express 47% 37%

Daily newspapers (clear Labour bias) Party preference of readers

Tory Lab.

Guardian 5% 71%

Mirror 12% 77%

*

Papers Readership’s Distribution of votes

Guardian middle 69% 0% 25% 6%

Star working 58% 11% 9% 22%

Independent middle 39% 12% 35% 15%

Sun working 38% 23% 9% 31%

Times middle 29% 37% 22% 12%

Daily Mail middle 29% 45% 15% 11%

Financial Times middle 24% 24% 13% 39%

Daily Express middle 22% 53% 11% 14%

Daily Telegraph middle 20% 61% 10% 9%

No daily national – 41% 18% 17% 23%

*

Paper read Tory Labour Lib.Dems Abstained

The LibDems seem to be very unpopular with Mirror, Sun and Star readers, which probably reflects the largely middle class/highly educated nature of that party's support, rather than any 'anti-Lib.Dem.' influence of papers which have a largely working class/basically educated readership. It's also interesting that Mirror, Sun and Star readers are much less likely to vote than readers of other dailies, apart from the Financial Times. This again is probably a product of the class-based nature of newspapers' readerships. The exception is the Financial Times' readership – perhaps many FT readers are too busy making money to find time to vote, or perhaps they calculate that an individual vote rarely (if ever) makes a difference in a parliamentary election and so, somewhat cynically, leave the job of voting to the rest of us.

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Labour's defeat in 1992 led to its courting of the Sun's owner, Rupert Murdoch, in the hope of getting his support. They succeeded: the Sun recommended a New Labour vote in both 1997 and 2001 General Elections. However, this sequence of events does not establish that the popular press plays a decisive role in elections. Perhaps Murdoch changed the Sun's editorial stance because he was expecting a Labour victory in 1997 and wanted to get New Labour sweet so that they didn't thwart his monopolistic ambitions when they came to power. Or maybe he shifted the paper's pitch so that it was more in tune with the views of its readers.

Paper Approval rating /5

Independent No endorsement but anti-Tory

Mail No endorsement but anti-Labour

Independent on Sunday No endorsement

*

Support for the view that the UK press has, at most, a limited impact on voting behaviour comes from the European Parliament elections in 1999. The Tories ran a single-issue campaign against European federalism in general (‘In Europe, not run by Europe’), and Britain's adoption of the Euro in particular. They were joined in their Europhobic stance by the Greens and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). For weeks before election day, the Telegraph, Sun, Times and Mail gave this campaign vehement support. Other papers ran quieter, more balanced articles. At the end of the day, only 9.9% of the electorate cast their votes for the campaign. Rather more voted for pro-European parties, even though opinion polls were showing a significant majority (60+%) against the Euro at the time.

Pro-European parties Anti-European parties

Labour 6.5% Conservative 8.3%

Lib.Dems 2.9% UKIP 1.6%

SNP 0.5% Total 9.9%

Plaid Cymru 0.4%

Total 10.3%

BBC ITV Channel 4

16% (16% in 1997) 2% 1%

But there is no doubt that bias exists throughout the news media: all newspapers, for example, have a political stance and most urge their readers to support a particular party on election days. And in report after report, the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) has catalogued 'issue bias' in both print and television.

In recent years, no domestic issue has received more media coverage than 'the troubles' in the six counties of Ulster which remained in union with the rest of Britain after the partition of Ireland in 1921. However, media coverage has not been balanced. Many aspects, such as the symbiotic relationship between the IRA and Sinn Fein, have been thoroughly investigated, whilst others have received scant coverage. To give some examples:

partition.

Roman Catholics who were being attacked by Protestant thugs whipped up

by ultra-unionists (loyalists) like Ian Paisley.

committed by loyalist paramilitarists. (Horrific murders – such as that of

Bernadette Martin, an 18 year-old Roman Catholic girl killed by the Ulster

Volunteer Force (UVF) for the 'offence' of dating a Protestant – have been

barely covered by the British media.)

government level throughout the troubles.

and loyalist terrorist groups – for example, David Trimble has had meetings

with UVF members, including several with the murderer Billy Wright.

Even when Wright was himself killed in the Maze, the blaze of publicity in

the British news media failed to mention his close associations with

‘democratic’ unionists. (In contrast, the close links between Sinn Fein

leaders, such as Gerry Adams, and the IRA have been extensively

documented.)

News values (editors' and journalists' views on what is worth reporting) determine that the news media are far more likely to report out of the ordinary events (man bites dog) than routine ones: they select from, rather than simply reflect, reality. When 450 TV production personnel were interviewed, 52% said they had been pressured into distorting the truth and/or misrepresenting views in the interests of excitement, controversy or entertainment.

So the media like extreme cases. There should be no surprise at this revelation. What is worrying is that the public generalises from these extremes. For example, the media over-reports apparently lenient sentences (such as that given to the pop star and paedophile Gary Glitter) and that leads people to think that the normality of sentencing is towards laxity. Thus the media 'sets the agenda' for the public's views on sentencing (it should be harsher), as it does on all political issues. This leads politicians to 'play to the gallery' by implementing policies which fit the public's media-induced agenda (e.g. declaring a 'war on drugs') rather than those which they believe will be effective.

In Law and Order News (1977), Chibnell used the phrase 'binary oppositions' in his description of the media's treatment of news. According to Chibnell, a much-used technique in reporting an issue (an industrial dispute, a war, a law and order matter . . .) is the presentation of two sets of

Legitimate Illegitimate

Management action Union action

Capitalism Socialism

Christianity Islam

War Terrorism

Hierarchy Egalitarianism

Puritanism Permissiveness

Heterosexuality Homosexuality

Patriarchy Feminism

Authoritarianism Libertarianism

Conformism Opposition

values, the one deemed 'legitimate' and the other 'illegitimate'. By simplifying complex arguments into 'binary oppositions', the news media is able to put a strong, unequivocal, ideological slant on whatever matter is under review.

Ever since the Tories employed Saatchi & Saatchi with such success in 1979, all the major parties have used the services of advertising agencies and image consultants. Music, symbols (Labour's red rose) and dress have become as important as policies. Greg Philo, a neo-Marxist member of the GMG, has pointed out how in the 1980s the Conservatives used the media to 'place' key phrases in the public's consciousness:

New Labour has been equally successful:

Some extraordinary memos written by Tony Blair, and leaked to the press in

July 2000, tell a lot about the new

sound-bite politics:

(New Labour, New Language, 2000, by Norman Fairclough, provides a perceptive and entertaining critique of Blairspeak.)

A panel of eight public relations experts, brought together by PR Week magazine, has voted the Labour party’s re-creation of itself as ‘New Labour’ the most effective ‘consumer facing’ public relations campaign of all time. "Even now, people criticise it as spin and no substance – that's the best measure of its success," said Trevor Beattie, chair of TBWA and one of the panelists. Slogans such as ‘A Better Britain’ and ‘Britain Deserves Better’, pushed Richard Branson’s promotion of Virgin into second place. The Conservatives’ ‘Labour isn't working’ campaign in the run-up to the 1979 general election took 16^th place. The panel said that in the 1990s New Labour created a brand which "sought to shed the image of a spendthrift, inflationary and union-dominated party, and create one that suggested it was in touch with the people".

The pervasive influence of the mass media has transformed the political scene in Britain:

Many traditional means of political persuasion have been abandoned and replaced by new, media-friendly, techniques:

Out In

meetings sound-bites

principle focus groups

policy makers spin doctors

debate image manipulation

information advertising

issues images

case stating negative campaigning

Whilst we don't know is the precise effect of media manipulation, Greg Philo probably gets it about right:

Following the 1997 general election, there were 120 women MPs. Although this is easily the highest total since female enfranchisement, women still comprise only 18% of the House. There is a much higher proportion of women in both the Scottish Parliament (37% in 2000) and the Welsh Assembly (42% in 2000).

Despite there being far fewer females than males in politics, the news media still contrives to under-represent the (few) women politicians there are:

And they treat women MPs differently from their male colleagues:

Interview based research in the mid-1990s found that women MPs thought that:

colleagues – age age, looks and fashion sense were frequently commented

on in articles.

children, childcare etc), something usually ignored in reports on male MPs.

The researchers concluded that, for a women MP, "her gender is always the primary descriptor."

After the general election of 1997, there were rather more women MPs than in previous parliaments, most of them on the Labour benches. The media immediately christened them 'Blair's Babes', which put them in their place (didn't it, chaps?) and confirmed the judgement of Streberny-Mohammadi and Ross (Item N).

(Jane Pilcher's Blair's Babes: Formal politics and femininity in Britain, which appeared in the February, 2000, edition of Sociology Review, is an interesting article on women politicians.)