maandag 16 december 2019

The Loss of the Mainstream Media

What we learned about the media this election

The campaign saw an unprecedented level of criticism of British journalism 
British newspaper report the Tory's landslide election win
 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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Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...