Despite plummeting circulations, newspapers still held considerable sway during the election campaign. Photograph: Daniel Sorabji/AFP via Getty Images
Was it the media wot lost it? This general election has seen an unparalleled level of criticism of British journalism, a prime minister who showed it was possible to skip tough interviews without suffering at the ballot box, and an online campaign that pushed the limits of what was previously considered acceptable in UK politics.
The aftermath has seen Jeremy Corbyn partly blame the still-powerful Sun and Daily Mail for his defeat, despite the plummeting print circulations of national newspapers. At the same time the Conservatives have turned their fire on the media and are threatening to decriminalise the licence fee – potentially severely undermining the BBC – and look at other ways of changing the way the UK media operates.
John McDonnell: 'If anyone’s to blame it’s me, full stop' – video
Here’s what we learned this election campaign.
Age defines what media voters consume
While audiences of 20-somethings have largely abandoned television news altogether, BBC bulletins remain important for reaching older viewers who are more likely to back the Tories. And while print newspaper sales are collapsing and online news audiences growing, right-wing tabloids which relentlessly backed the Conservatives still sell millions of copies a day – and often indirectly help to set the agenda on television, radio, and online. Although it will be months before academic studies drill down in to the results, there remains a simple demographic divide on how people across the political spectrum get their news.
“One of the clearest differences is that most of those on the left prefer to get news online, and most of those on the right prefer to get it offline,” said Dr Richard Fletcher of the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute. “There will undoubtedly be questions about the influence of online media on the election result in the coming weeks, and we should take these questions seriously. But to correctly understand the impact of online media on the election result, we must constantly remind ourselves that the people most likely to have voted Conservative in 2019 are the least likely to have accessed news about the election online.”
The British public were more than capable of creating their own disinformation
Ahead of the election there were concerns about foreign manipulation of the electoral process. Although there were some issues – the prime minister refused to let a report into Russian money be released pre-election, and Reddit suggested a Russian-linked account may have helped distribute leaked US-UK trade papers – ordinary, politicised Britons proved more than capable of creating their own fake posts.
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When the Tory campaign was briefly derailed by a photograph of a child on the floor of Leeds General Infirmary, a viral message spread among Conservative backers that the image had been faked by Labour supporters. Aided by a toxic mix of falling trust in traditional media outlets and Facebook’s hands-off approach to content moderation, the hoax message was spread to millions of people aided by promotion from mainstream journalists and influencers such as former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen.
Some of the behaviour of those sharing the message – often older, less tech-savvy Facebook users – was so strange that they were mistaken for coordinated ‘bot farms’. In reality it appears they were just copying and pasting the same message out of enthusiasm and a desire to believe the photo was faked for political reasons.
We are becoming passive consumers of news on our phones
There’s nothing new about the idea of a political leader winning an election by repeating a slogan until they are blue in the face. But the experience of consuming news on a smartphone – where headlines drift into view via push alert notifications from news apps, on Facebook, and through links sent by friends – means that it’s often the only way to cut through the noise. There is limited space for nuanced policy platforms and complicated offers to the electorate if people are not concentrating; it’s easier to adopt a policy of ‘endless screaming’ and bombard them with the same message – such as “Get Brexit Done” – through as many different channels as possible.
While it might be a case of borrowed nostalgia to pretend that people every really engaged with every news story they saw on television or in a print newspaper, online data makes it easier to show how widespread this behaviour has become. When the Guardian ran an experiment to record the smartphone screens of volunteers we found that some people consumed their news almost entirely through headlines, few clicked through to the full article, and those that read to the end of a piece were a rarity.
Attacking the media is the new normal – but mistakes can be quickly called out
The BBC is facing a difficult post-election comedown as it reckons with widespread criticism from both the Conservative government – who accuse it of anti-Brexit bias – and from some Labour supporters who feel it made a series of errors in favour of the Conservatives.
Journalists at the corporation fear the damage done by some incidents, such as quoting Conservatives party sources claiming Labour supporters had assaulted a Tory aide at a hospital in Leeds when no such incident took place. Social media helped set the record straight: within an hour a full video of the alleged altercation was online, making clear that the incident was not as Tory sources had described it, killing the story in its tracks.
We don’t know what people were reading online and what had an impact
In the past – when political news was focussed on a few broadcaster bulletins and print newspapers – it was possible to have a good idea of what people were reading, watching, and consuming. If a politician made a mistake on television programme watched by 10 million people then it clearly mattered. If a print newspaper sold 4m copies a day – as the Sun did in the 1990s – then it clearly mattered. But online audiences are so fragmented that information can reach millions of people without ever being seen by journalists or political campaigns.
One Labour MP who nearly lost their Brexit-backing seat told the Guardian that on doorstep after doorstep, people brought up Corbyn’s connections with the IRA after seeing memes and images on Facebook: “It was never used by the Tories in the campaign but there was a separate election going on, which was a Facebook-orientated campaign.”
The MP suggested constituents are increasingly overwhelmed by information and unsure what is real and what is not, assuming there is some sort of editing of what goes on Facebook. “People have a sense that some of this stuff is probably wrong but they have no compass. They would say: ‘But it’s on Facebook – how can there be something that isn’t true?’ They think there are gatekeepers but there aren’t.”
Online advertising changed
The 2016 EU referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election focussed minds on the idea of under-the-radar, paid-for ‘dark ads’ which manipulate small groups of people to vote a certain way. But transparency tools introduced by Facebook and Google, although flawed, made this easier to track.
They suggested political advertising in the UK is drifting towards the US model, with blanket ad buys on sites such as YouTube resembling television advertising designed to carpet-bomb voters with simple messages, rather than the more laborious task of manipulating small groups below the radar.
The Conservatives took advantage of Facebook’s refusal to factcheck paid-for political adverts, with one study by First Draft News finding 88% of Tory ads featured questionable claims. And there was a substantial rise in the number of newly-formed third party campaign groups with opaque funding structures spending large five-figure sums on pushing pro-Tory adverts reaching millions of people.
Mainstream media set the agenda but its power has been hit
It was the election where politicians realised they could attack the media with few downsides. Boris Johnson’s decision to skip a one-on-one primetime television interview with Andrew Neil provoked fury from Labour, especially after they had agreed to put Corbyn up for scrutiny. But Tory strategists decided – apparently correctly – that a tough interview with Neil could be substantially more damaging than a few stories about Johnson refusing to take part in a television programme. The real concern, according to Tory campaign insiders, was about clips from the interview going viral.
Television stations used to be able to set the terms of engagement because they were one of the only ways for politicians to reach a mass audience. The debacle over the Neil interview, combined with Labour and the Tories working together to keep the Lib Dems and the SNP out of the televised leaders’ debates, showed the power may now lie with the politicians, with potential implications for the next election. That’s if the broadcasters survive in their current form – with the new Tory government targeting both the BBC and Channel 4.
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