The Battle For Campaign Agenda In Britain — страница 4

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meetings between Blair and Rupert Murdoch, especially Blair’s visit to Australia in 1995. hroughout the campaign the Sun, with ten million readers a day, provided largely unswerving support for Blair, although opposing Labour policy on Europe and the unions, and many commentators predicted that the switch, based on Murdoch’s commercial considerations rather than political affinities, would not last long11. Labour’s traditional tabloid, the Daily Mirror, with six million readers, continued its brand of centre-left journalism (”the paper for Labour’s TRUE supporters”). On the last Sunday of the campaign, influenced by Murdoch, The News of the World decided to follow the lead of its sister paper, the Sun, and backed Labour. Among the broadsheets The Guardian called for

tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats in seats where it made sense, but broadly endorsed Labour. The Independent was more restrained in its backing, casting its editorial vote for Labour “with a degree of optimism that is not entirely justified by the evidence”. The paper was clearly more anti-Tory than pro-anything. The Times advised their readers to back Eurosceptic candidates from whatever party, although, in practice, nearly all were Conservatives. Only leads in the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Mail (”LABOUR BULLY BOYS ARE BACK” “LABOUR’S BROKEN PROMISES”) remained strongly in the Tory camp. Even the Daily Express was more neutral than in the past: a double-page spread was divided between Lord Hollick, its chief executive, arguing for Labour and its

chairman, Lord Stevens, arguing for the Conservatives. The front-page of the election-eve Mail carried a colourful Union Jack border and the apocalyptic warning that a Labour victory could “undo 1,000 years of our nation’s history”. Yet any comparison of editorial policy probably under-estimates the balance of partisanship in news coverage during the overall campaign. For example, the Mail ostensibly endorsed the Conservatives during the campaign, but in practice it probably deeply damaged the government by headlining sexual scandals in the party, and reinforcing images of disunity with leading articles highlighting the number of Tory Eurosceptics. With friends like this, the Conservatives did not need opponents. To understand this we need to go beyond the leaders, which

are rarely read, and even less heeded, to examine the broader pattern of front-page stories. The most plausible evidence for dealignment is that certain papers like the Sun, traditionally pro-Conservative, switched camps, but also that front-page stories were often so similar across all the press, driven by news values irrespective of the paper’s ostensible partisanship. Since the early 1970s fierce competition for readers has encouraged far more sensational coverage in the popular press, fuelling an endless diet of stories about ’scandals’, (mostly sexual but also financial), infotainment, and the Royals, preferably all three. This process started when Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1968, and the Sun a year later. It accelerated in the cut-throat

competition produced by the launch of the Daily Star in 1978, which sought to out-do the Sun in its relentless search for sex, investigative ‘exclusives’ about celebrities, violent crime, and graphic coverage of the bizzare. Those who thought British newspapers had reached their nadir at this point had under-estimated the soft-porn Sunday Sport, launched in 198612. The tackiness of the popular press, such as their exhaustive gossip about the goings-on of the younger Royals, gradually infected and corroded the news culture of the broadsheets as well. By the mid-1990s, the journalism of scandal trumped party loyalties, hands down. This fuelled the series of sleaze stories about senior Conservative politicians hroughout John Major’s years in government, and there was no let-up

during the campaign. As documented in detail later, the first two weeks of the election were dominated by a succession of stories about corruption in public life and sexual ’scandals’, providing a steady diet of negative news for the government which swamped their message about the economy. The most plausible reason for this focus on sensationalism is the fierce competition for readers following plummeting circulation figures: between 1981-95 the proportion of the public reading a daily paper dropped substantially (from 76 to 62 percent of men and from 68 to 54 percent of women)13. In Britain the national press competes for attention headline-to-headline in newsagents shop-windows, unlike in countries where there is a strong regional press each with its own distinct market.