As Britain goes to the polls, what role has the media played in shaping the way that nation votes? Traditionally, the tabloid media, mainly Murdoch’s Sun, had a significant role in influencing the public, simply due to the huge swathes of the population that read the paper. But what about this year? Where have the tabloids and the broadsheets put their faith?
Alan and Lionel are joined by David Yelland. David was once editor of the Sun and now presents a podcast for the BBC called When It Hits The Fan. David believes the Sun has lost all of its influence. But then, at the last minute, the Sun decided to back Starmer—only not very passionately. Alan, Lionel and David react to the breaking news.
This transcript is unedited and may contain errors.
Alan Rusbridger: The polls are open. Today, Britain decides who will be prime minister for the next five years. Possibly by the time you listen to this podcast, the votes will have all been counted and we'll have a winner. What part has the mainstream media played in selecting the next prime minister?
Lionel Barber: Despite headlines such as, "Rishi warning: Starmer will wreck Britain in just 100 days," from The Mail on Sunday and, "Starmer to wreck Britain in 100 days," from The Sunday Express, Labour's 20-point lead in the polls has scarcely budged. We're joined today by former editor of The Sun and presenter of When it Hits the Fan, David Yelland, to ask if the power of the tabloids in politics has faded irredeemably.
Alan: First, we're together today in the flesh. Lionel, in front of you, there is a shiny object. Do you want to tell the listeners what this is?
Lionel: Oh, well, it's oh, an award. I see. Podcast of the Year: Media Confidential, Prospect Publishing. It's pink. Nothing to do with the FT, but yes, we did get a media industry award for our podcast. We can now talk about the award-winning podcast by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber.
Alan: I believe it was from what is known as the Oscars of the podcast world.
Lionel: Yes, that's lowercase o for anyone who's listening.
Alan: Excitement bubbles up. We're going to be talking about the election. What else have you been noticing this week?
Lionel: A story appeared in the New York Times today, which really did catch my eye. Alan, you'll appreciate this. It's got 14 bylines, just 14, from all places, Kiev, Washington. Anyway, the headline is, "Biden's lapses are said to be increasingly common and worrisome." This is the fallout from the disastrous presidential debate and Joe Biden's performance on that night. This is a very detailed report in the New York Times, written by the White House correspondent, the excellent Peter Baker in the lead. It says, "People who have spent time with President Biden over the last few months or so said the lapses appear to have grown much more frequent, pronounced, and after Thursday's debate, more worrisome."
Of course, we're seeing the fallout now with some moves in the Democratic Party to change the candidate. I think the interesting other point is that people are asking, "Well, why wasn't this report written a year ago?" It might have made a difference.
Alan: A very interesting comment in Semafor by Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times. She used to partner with The Guardian occasionally. She's written a scorching editorial for Semafor. She says, "It’s clear the best news reporters in Washington have failed in the first duty of journalism: to hold power accountable. It is our duty to poke through White House smoke screens and find out the truth. The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the President’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age. Shame on the White House press corps for not to have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President." Do you think that's a fair criticism?
Lionel: It's always difficult because those reporters who are covering the White House-- The first time you write about any such developments about the President's health, one, you will get blanket denial. You need to have first-hand evidence. Have you got access to the doctors? There's privacy issues there. It's not easy. The thing I would say is they should have been looking smartly outside Washington, checking with sources in Europe, people who'd met the President or been in his presence. I must say I've been twice to Washington in the last 12 months. Both times I heard reports from people in reasonable position to know, saying the President's health was deteriorating.
Alan: The New York Times podcaster and columnist Ezra Klein did an entire episode about Biden's health back in February. I'm sure you listened to it, Lionel. He got comprehensively dumped on for doing so. Jill Abramson says here, "It's laughable and immoral for the Democrats to blame the press now for overreacting to the reality." It's one of those things where the press is often the messenger and the lone outriders who were obsessing about Biden's condition, for them to have been attacked at the time was clearly wrong.
Lionel: Well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a long report about six weeks ago which did quote unnamed sources, at great length, looking at the President's health, raising lots and lots of questions. Similarly, they were dumped on both by politicians and indeed, again I had this firsthand, other reporters saying, "Oh, well, this wasn't quite right or this was off the record." The fact is the journal report, Ezra Klein, they were spot on.
Alan: The other thing that caught my eye today is Roger Mosey, a very distinguished former BBC executive, then went off to Cambridge. He's done a piece with New Statesman. Really quite critical of the BBC's coverage of the election. He's talking about, "A woeful lack of in-depth analysis of the issues." This is across the board. "Hardly anything about foreign affairs, Labour’s attitude to a Trump presidency and their view on Europe or their stance on Israel.” You can add to that list climate change, social care, the crisis in prisons and the justice system – all of which are of far more significance to the people of this country than a candidate placing a bet."
Then he goes on to say, "The BBC has a particular responsibility here. Its charter requires it not to provide merely an average news service," but it has to do better than that. That's quite strong words from a former BBC executive. I don't know whether you think that's fair, Lionel.
Lionel: I think he makes some points about substance, trying to look at policy, [crosstalk] of course--
Alan: Which are true more generally?
Lionel: Yes, but the fact is that the betting scandal, and it was a scandal, was a very good news story. It told you something, not just about the individuals, but the level of immorality and lack of judgment in the senior ranks of the Conservative Party.
Alan: You have to say that there are one or two who stand out. I think Mishal Husain, Nick Robinson, they've had good elections. They've got stories out. They've delved in-depth into some of the issues that Mosey describes there.
Lionel: In previous general election campaigns, the media has played an important role. Securing the support of the dailies was seen as a vital part of winning the election, but this time around, there have been headlines and commentary bordering on hysterical scaremongering. Has the Conservative press gone too far? Is Adrian Wooldridge, the distinguished commentator on Bloomberg, right when he says that the Conservative press has degenerate into burbling irrelevance?
Alan: We've had blood-curdling headlines in The Telegraph, warning that "Starmer's plan will bankrupt Britain." "Sunak is our only hope." Even The Murdoch Press has been quieter than usual, which leads to the speculation that Rupert's empire has lost its influence.
Lionel: What's happening? Has tabloid power been exaggerated? Do newspaper endorsements matter? According to YouGov, young Britons are far more likely to get their news from digital sources, especially social media, with 72% of 18 to 24-year-olds doing so, versus 19% for the over 65s. Overall, 90% of the youngest Britons get news online, compared to only 60% of the oldest Britons. It's clear that the printed press is no longer the go-to medium for news.
Alan: An Instagram post by Gary Neville on a walk with Starmer reached over 2 million followers. With figures like that, social media, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, has become the battleground for the election campaign. If the Conservative Party is seriously damaged tomorrow, will the papers that back them go down too? We're very pleased to be joined now by David Yelland. David Yelland was editor of The Sun. He now is the sole owner of Kitchen Table Partners which offers sound PR advice and he's the author of a podcast called When It Hits The Fan. I won't say it's our so-called rival because it's a very good podcast.
Lionel: We're going to begin by talking about The Sun because just as we are about to release this podcast, The Sun who... until now, have been strangely silent has come out and back to Keir Starmer and Labour. What's going on here?
Alan: In newspaper terms, this is what we used to call stop press. The Sun has, at four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon before the election, mysteriously posted its leader online. I don't know what you call it. It's a slightly grudging editorial saying that they are in favor of a Starmer government. David Yelland, you are here. Can you imagine what's going on with The Sun that they should do this extraordinary thing of suddenly posting a mid-afternoon editorial? Has that ever happened before? What's going on?
David Yelland: I think there's total chaos in Rupert Murdoch's London newspapers today. We can talk about The Times in a minute. At The Sun this has come as a complete shock to most of the staff. It's a non-endorsement endorsement, really. They're embarrassed about it. The front page which they say they're going to stick with through all the editions doesn't mention Keir Starmer or the Labour Party. It's built around football with a picture of Gareth Southgate and it says "Time for a new manager, and we don't mean Southgate." Well, that's funny but this is a serious thing.
The editorial, which is not, you can't get it on the main Sun website but you if you search for it, you can find it. A little bit like The Sunday Times at the weekend, it's like an essay for a PPE paper. It goes round and round, but they don't give anything-- They point out all the problems that they have with Rishi including immigration. They're going to hold him to account. What they're really saying here is he's going to win big and we don't want to be completely irrelevant. That's really what they're saying. Of course, they don't actually say that, but that's what this is about.
Also Alan, I think you'd be particularly interested, they mentioned press freedom, very high up. That is about Leveson 2. A lot of people, some people, very powerful people, in the Labour Party that think there should be a Leveson 2. I think that that is clearly aimed [unintelligible 00:12:55] missile across the bow.
Alan: We should just explain Leveson 2 is shorthand for the second part of the Leveson inquiry. The first part dealt with general press and ethics. The second part was going to look at criminal behavior within companies. That's not currently going ahead, but I know what you're saying is there are lots of newspaper executives who are worried that the Labour Party might go back to it. Lionel, what's your take?
Lionel: I want to pick up what David said about The Times because they've also done something very unusual. In their editorial, they've done an endorsement of Rishi Sunak's premiership saying he may have made some missteps but he's still striven to restore the party's reputation for competence and probity after the disasters of his predecessors, i.e. Truss and Boris Johnson. This is a two-thirds page editorial which goes through meticulously what Sunak has achieved during his premiership. It mentions staying strong on Ukraine, dealing with Nicholas Sturgeon in Scotland and a few others. Ban on smoking, which didn't happen but not by his own design.
I think this is a non-endorsement of the Conservative Party but nothing on Keir Starmer or Labour. I suspect that it'll be tomorrow they may have something to say on Labour, but it would be a very grudging endorsement and so late. This is what it tells you that they're all over the place regarding allegiances, David. It tells you something about, what will Rupert be making of this? Rupert Murdoch.
David: He must have told them to do it at The Sun. There's only one person on The Sun who could possibly be ....that's the editor Victoria Newton, and I don't think she-- She's not a particularly political person. She came from showbiz background. Everybody else, every other comment, from Jane Moore to Trevor Kavanagh, Clarkson, have all pinned their own clause to the mast. She's not carrying the paper. The paper is not endorsing. I would say also, let's watch she resignation honors list, assuming that Rishi Sunak will do this. Have a look at that because this is now the last chance.
Alan: If it was Rupert, David, the timing of these editorials is key. All the postal votes will already be in. If you write an editorial, in Times terms, tomorrow morning, that's incredibly late. I think The Guardian came out last Saturday. The Financial Times was on Monday. When would The Sun editorial, if Rupert had been at his prime, you'd have expected it a couple of days before the vote itself?
David: A week away. A newspaper has to campaign. It's not an endorsement, it's a campaign. There's no single policy reason why they've done this. It is cynical and quite laughable. I think it's embarrassing. It's very interesting. We've seen nothing from the Labour Party that I see. I don't know if either of you have seen anything. When The Sun backed Labour, Tony Blair was quoted in that paper in the day. It was greeted by the whole establishment, the Labour Party, as a turning point. It's almost like when you apologize, sorry, not sorry. It's an endorsement that's not an endorsement. It's really strange. I've never seen anything quite like it.
I know that there is chaos at The Times. I know Lionel ...to this. At The Times, which you would've thought would be much more likely to back the Labour Party, what are they going to do? You've got an editor there that really doesn't want to back the Labour Party. A lot of staff that do. This is the biggest thing, isn't it? We are going to see the Conservative Party almost completely wiped out on Thursday and the Labour Party getting the biggest majority in its history. It's inconceivable that The Sun can be on the wrong side of that. That's why they've had to do what they've had to do but it won't be "The Sun Wot Won It."
Alan: David, you talk about chaos just in terms of timing this idea of rushing out a front page at four o'clock in the afternoon. What's going on?
David: As I say, it is total chaos. What happens if something big happens now? A huge global news event. It won't be on the front page. It would just be on Twitter. It would have to be a big news event to take this off the front page. I can't believe they're going to go with that front page to all the editions. It's so weak.
Alan: On that bombshell, and to use the old press technology, we can replay it, start the presses again and get on with the episode.
Alan: We've had The Sunday Times with a lukewarm endorsement. The Times were speaking on Wednesday lunchtime has said nothing at all that I've noticed.
Lionel: Not the Thunderer.
Alan: It's far from Thunder. It's not even whispering. The news this morning was a limp lettuce of rumination on Rishi Sunak. Did that surprise you that The Times has not said anything?
David: No, it didn't surprise me. I have to say, I think some the reporting in The Times has been superb. The Times is a very strange beast because it's a very good newspaper where the staff almost defy their editor. They are good despite not because of their editor. There are some newspapers that are like that. The Times is not irrelevant. Post-election, we're going to see a battle for the hearts and minds of the Conservative Party between Reform and the Tories. What all these Tories forget including those in the media is that when you lose power, you are irrelevant.
It will not matter. Suella Braverman, from 10:00 PM on Thursday night, when she's banging on about whatever she's banging on about, no one's going to be listening. They've forgotten that. Labour, of course, never forget that because they spend most of their lives in opposition.
Alan: Well just explain how it used to work. You're the editor of The Sun. You've got the big man upstairs.
David: Yes.
Alan: Does he tell you what to write? Who to back?
David: No.
Alan: How does it work?
David: It's all decided way before you are told what to do. If you are ever being told what to do then you're probably about to be fired, because you should never be-- In my case, I was a left of the aisle, liberal, Deputy Editor of the New York Post, is what I was doing. Tony Blair was elected, and Rupert began to talk to me quite a lot about Tony Blair, who he adored at the time, as did I. This is a long time ago. Things can only get better on all that stuff. I still have a high regard for Tony Blair. Not many people do, but I do. He knew when he appointed me. He didn't need to say. The paper had already endorsed Tony Blair the year before I got the job. I got the job a year after he was elected.
It wasn't necessary to have any of those discussions. I have to say, lots of things were different then. One of them was this. The Sun was full of quite serious comment about policy in the pre-first term. It was about peace in Northern Ireland. Really quite complex stuff. Sure Start, the NHS, their pledges for the NHS on waiting lists, quite modest ambitions compared to what we need now. Reestablishing Britain's role around the world, its relationship with the US. Some leaders were full of policy. There were policy reasons why we backed Tony Blair. It wasn't just because we liked Tony Blair. It was because we thought that him being elected was in the interest of our readers.
Now, that's one of the things I would just say about the terribly weak state of The Sun. At no point does the editor or the team seem to have thought about what is in the interests of their readers. This country is on-- Readers cannot get NHS appointments. The schools are underfunded. The water is not working. The country has broken down. It is the job of a tabloid editor, all editors actually, to edit the paper in the interests of their readers. They don't seem to care about the readers.
Lionel: No, because they've been in decline for a long time. The Sun around your era, and Calvin McKenzie, they were selling 4.5 million copies.
David: 3.8 in my time.
Lionel: Okay. Gone down since Calvin. He's gone.
David: Yes, but big [unintelligible 00:22:12].
Lionel: It was huge. Whereas today, what is it?
David: We don't know. They don't--
Lionel: They're operating a proposition of weakness. I want to go back to something you said, David, where you thought that the era when Rupert Murdoch was essentially presiding over the system that his influence really mattered when it came to the political choices at the top. I think that era has been over for some time. I don't think the tabloids have really mattered for 15 years.
David: I do think, and I said in our own podcast yesterday in the BBC, that The Daily Mail is really like a super tanker of negativity parked on the national lawn. That's what it is.
Lionel: With no water.
David: It leaks negatively into the entire system, and it still does that, and it will continue to do that. My advice to Keir Starmer and the Labour-front bench is to really ignore it. Your press team will have to look at what they do every day. Don't look at it till 11:00 AM. Don't look at it at 7:00 AM. Don't let it infect what you do. This is what a lot of people in business, you know, Lionel, have the same view of the British press. People that run global businesses, they will not look at the British press in the same way that they look at the press around the world.
It can affect your joie de vivre. Your main point, Lionel, is correct, which is there has been an element of Emperor's New Clothes about all this for a long time. The Sun now is a complete irrelevance.
Lionel: David, put your old editor hat on and rate The Financial Times editorial and The Sunday Times editorial. I think they're the words PPE.
David: Yes, and The Economist. I sat down and read them this morning before coming here, and they are like essays. The Sunday Times in particular is a very weak endorsement. It's like, "On the one hand, this has happened, on the one hand, that has happened." It's very nice about Rishi. It's extremely nice about Jeremy Hunt. It's not so nice about George Osborne and David Cameron, but it says about Hunt and Rishi that they're good public servants, which I think in many ways they are. It doesn't really make the case for why it's backing the Labour Party.
It's almost like it's their turn. There is no alternative to use that phrase. The Economist and The Financial Times, there's much more substance there. Planning is the thing, and they move towards the EU. I think those two things are the right reasons.
Lionel: Again, if you could just explain that elaborate courtship that goes on between the newspapers and the parties. Labour has been cultivating The Financial Times for quite some time. Rachel Reeves has had a lot of contact. Again, does it matter or is it not so much buying an endorsement, but it's an insurance policy? It's a protection against attack.
David: Stating the obvious, you would know, Lionel, a lot more about how The Financial Times deals with the political class than I would. Certainly, in my experience, you can't run anything in this country or in Europe or America without understanding The Financial Times and having friends at The Financial Times. It's not that you want The Financial Times' endorsement. It's just that The Financial Times lives in the elite part of the world. Certainly, if you think about Corbin's time, he had people who would have been unable to get through a lunch with Henry Mance.
Let's take him one Financial Times journalist. I always say to people, "If you can't spend half an hour with the editor of The Financial Times, on your own, without an army of PR people and talk about the state of the world, then you're in the wrong job."
Lionel: Yes. For the record, Jeremy Corbin never visited us for lunch during the election, before the election. I think he probably understood that we were never going to back him. It was interesting that he didn't sit down, unlike Ed Miliband, Tony Blair was always there, Gordon Brown, et cetera. Of course, The Financial Times did back Neil Kinnock in 1992, very controversially. That was a wondering editorial, but it caused a lot of angst within the paper and outside. Then in 1997, it was a full-throated endorsement of Tony Blair.
Alan: There are two particular papers I'd love to hear your views on, David. Let's start with The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, to me, whatever its politics, always had the feeling of having its finger on the pulse of middle England. I was astonished by its behavior towards Boris Johnson. Here's a man that was-- The words lies, corruption, cronyism, chaos, partying, bankrupt ethics. Everything that The Daily Mail would hate normally in any politician. Yet, apart from a brief interlude when Jordie Greg was there, it has wholeheartedly 100% gone for Johnson, gone for Truss, gone for Rishi Sunak. It seems to have--
Lionel: -and Theresa May.
Alan: It seems my party, right or wrong. That's a very different way of editing a newspaper from trying to sense where its readers are. It feels as though something has changed with The Mail.
David: There is one word that you haven't mentioned, which explains all of that, and that is Brexit. Brexit has completely changed everything. Of course, it's a tribal divide down the middle of the country. For whatever reason, it was impossible, is impossible, has been impossible for a number of years, if you are a remainer, to get a job on a number of these newspapers. That applies to The Telegraph, to The Sun. I'm not saying everybody on those papers is, but if they are remainer, they keep pretty quiet about it and they wouldn't be public about it.
That has distorted absolutely everything and produced a tribal culture on those newspapers, a prism through which they see everything. As a result of that, they made a series of terrible mistakes.
Alan: I think that's probably right. In terms of journalism, it's an astonishing thing. What you're saying is that political ideology has now trumped any sense of journalistic basics.
David: It's destroyed them. That's what it's done.
Alan: It's consumed them.
David: It's consumed them, many of them as individuals and as newspapers. It's destroyed them. [crosstalk] They've gone mad. You guys think Yelland has gone completely bananas? Have a look at The Telegraph. Look at some of the headlines.
Alan: Let's read because I've been enjoying-- You've been tweeting them. There's my favorite. Alastair Heath, "Armageddon is upon us. Britain will never be the same again." Tim Stanley, "Keir Starmer is about to suck the last remaining joy out of Britain." Tim Stanley, again, "Brace yourself for Keir's war on joy." "Derangement and disaffection are sweeping away the old democratic era." That's Janet. In your tweets, you've suggested that here is a generation of journalists who are either going to have to be swept away.
David: I had the great privilege of coming up in The Sun under Calvin McKenzie. He was a great editor. He obviously has huge faults, but he was one of the great tabloid editors. He used to shout, "Nurse." You'd be in the newsroom and he'd shout, "Nurse," because somebody had gone just going to bit a bit bananas. I often think-- Sometimes I tweet, "Nurse," and I think only a few people understand what I'm talking about. These people need to be marched off the national stage. They have let down their readers. It's like a headmaster. They have let themselves down. I'm not joking.
Brexit was only 52 - 48 and it would not have happened without these newspapers. Of course, the challenge that Kier Starmer has, and Rachel Reeves have now, is the country must move towards its biggest market. To say that that's controversial is-- There will have to be-- Some of the things that aren't necessary, are going to be necessary, these people will have to be ignored.
Alan: Are you saying the same thing as this is a different subject for a different program, but the maleisation of the British press with all these former acolytes of [unintelligible 00:31:29] spread out, editing all these papers. They're all in senior positions, including The Times and The Telegraph. Are you saying The Telegraph has suffered the same syndrome that you're saying has happened at The Mail, where ideology is now completely trumping the normal journalistic instincts that would have been there 20 years ago?
David: Yes, absolutely. The one thing they have all achieved is Brexit. I don't want to go on and on about Brexit, but I think sometimes we need to do that because it is such an important-- It has affected everything. When you see [unintelligible 00:32:06] on the BBC, whoever, of people saying they've given up on politics, that's because of Brexit, because they were promised something that they haven't got. That's why people, vulnerable people, people up in Grimsby and all these other places where the Tories tend to go on away days, places where I grew up-- They go up there, tell the people, "We're going to do this," and then piss off and not do anything.
Of course, people have always been cynical about politicians, but Brexit's made it a lot worse. Then there are these other pillars of the right, which I was just talking about, which are the cult culture wars, net zero, and immigration. Those three things are the things that the tabloids will come at Starmer on from day one. Those are the three things that will decide who takes over the right. As I already said in this conversation once, what the Conservative side, including the editor class that support them, forget is that when you lose power, you become irrelevant.
[music]
Lionel: This is Media Confidential from Prospect Magazine. After the break, we'll have more on the media's role in this election campaign. We'll be right back.
Advertisement: It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about work. You really, really want it all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are. Tap the banner to go to monday.com.
Ryan Reynolds: Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mintmobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. Then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, "What the f*** are you talking about? You insane Hollywood a******." To recap, we're cutting the price of mintUnlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.
Advertisement: $45 upfront for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Full terms at mintmobile.com.
[music]
Alan: In the Prospect podcast this week, Emily Lawfoot talks to the legendary pollster, Peter Kellner, just a few hours ahead of the general election result to try and work out if the polls have shifted in any way. Emily is then joined by Tom Clarke, one of the contributing editors here at Prospect Magazine, to ask what challenges could trip up a new PM in the first weeks of the government. Follow the Prospect podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Right now, we've got a rather amazing election offer. Six months of digital access to Prospect for only £15, which by my calculation, would buy you four cappuccinos depending on whether you buy them in Clapham or Westminster.
That gets you all of our pre-election updates and post-election analysis. Type prospectmagazine.co.uk into your web browser and click the subscribe button now to get unbiased coverage for only £2.50 a month for the next six months.
[music]
Lionel: Welcome back to Media Confidential. Now more from David Yelland and flirting with Nigel Farage. David, there's not a cigarettes papers difference between your views on Brexit and mine. I think it was an act of grave self-harm. The Financial Times was absolutely against it. When you say that people feel let down because the benefits that they were promised did not materialize and they became cynical, the counterargument, which I certainly took seriously after the result. It was quite close, 52 - 48. If you'd tried to rerun the referendum, that would have made people even more cynical. Don't you think?
David: No, you are right. The fact is that the economic system has not worked for most people for a long time, both here and in the US. That's why we've got Trump, and that's why we had Brexit. The system wasn't working. It was working for the elites, but it wasn't working for [crosstalk].
Lionel: I wish that the papers did a better job on, for example, covering immigration. These numbers are even higher now, people coming in who are non-EU, by the way. I mean, higher than the EU immigration that we had. Then the second piece of the argument, which is not investigated at all, is, why? Because the British economy needs immigrant workers, but nobody wants to, or very few people, want to admit that. The newspapers, the news media, even the BBC is not really addressing that at all.
David: No, I thought--
Lionel: Ed Conway at Sky is very good.
David: Yes, I thought Mishal Husain's interview with Farage, the first one, on the Today program, was very good on that issue. She went through which workers would you allow in. She got to butchers and he said, "This is ridiculous." She said, "Isn't that the point?" You're right. That's funny. I forget which of the three leaders. I think it may have been the Financial Times leader. If it was, had a graphic of GDP per head and how it's fallen off in the last three or four years. That, of course, is why people are angry. The system has stopped working for most people, and therefore, in that situation, it's very easy to win votes by blaming immigrants or whoever it is for that decline in life chances. [crosstalk]
Alan: Can I just ask what you mean by--? You say a whole swath of people who have been relevant up to now are about to be irrelevant. That's obviously true of a lot of Torie politicians. The idea of a newspaper, as it were in opposition, is quite an interesting one. The Guardian under Thatcher, I think, had its highest circulation in print terms. The New York Times under Trump. If you were editing a tabloid under Starmer and you were not aligned with his policies, what role would you have and what things would you be going for?
David: You either become part of the regime, which is what The Sun did in a way. The Sun was very-- We had, "This is the most dangerous man in Britain," but we were Blairite, or you become the opposition. Either way, for a great tabloid, either of those two stances is great fun. Because fun is what you're supposed to be doing because these are tabloid newspapers. The current crop, they've got a very aging readership. First of all, the readership is diminished so much that they're almost irrelevant anyway. If you take The Express as a case study, you've got an average age of over 70.
Alan: Big online readership.
David: I can't remember the last time anybody seriously mentioned anything that was in that newspaper or The Sun, for that matter. The Mail is different. The Mail is culturally a very important part of our country and will continue to be. It's not as important as it thinks it is. It's brilliant at projecting itself into the center of our national debate. I sometimes think we might make the mistake of talking about it too much, because generationally, of course, anybody below the age of certainly 40, but probably 50, is simply not looking at The Daily Mail. It's completely irrelevant.
I know that The Mail has a big online following, but that's a global online, mostly showbiz and sport-led. They're not looking at comment. They're not influenced. The Mail is not influencing that generation politically.
Alan: Where do you sense reform? There's going to be a bloodbath on the right somehow or other after this election. Reform's going to be there. Farage is going to be there. How do you see that playing out in what we used to call the Torie press? Are they going to have a flirtation, a love affair with reform?
David: Of all the politicians out there right now, the one that is most popular amongst the editor class is Nigel Farage. They love him. I'm sure that doesn't apply to The Financial Times, but for most editors, political editors.
Alan: I won't speak for The Financial Times, but I think you made a good bet there, David.
David: I'm amazed how many people refer to Nigel as Nigel.
Lionel: Yes, what is it about Nigel and Boris?
David: I'm very friendly with Michael Crick, who I think is a very great journalist, and he wrote this wonderful book about Nigel Farage. I recommend it to everybody. It's typical Crick. It's absolutely in the detail. The real story of Farage is not what you think. I'm not going to go into huge detail. All these stories we've seen in the last few days about racists being associated with reform-- My view, either way I'll take a look at this, I'll try and take a helicopter view, why is it that so many racists are attracted to this party? I don't think it's a coincidence. I do think that a lot of my peer group have danced with the devil quite a lot on the right, and I think it's very, very worrying.
Lionel: Will the papers, to repeat Alan's question, will they be dancing with the devil once Keir Starmer comes in with the new Labour government? Are they going to flirt?
David: Yes, they are. Are they going to flirt with reform is the question? [crosstalk] Yes, they are.
Lionel: Flirt with Farage.
David: They already are doing. If you look at The Sun, I'm a bit of an anorak and I do look at The Sun every day, it is far more pro-reform than it is pro-Conservative. If you look at the amount of coverage-- Two things. Look how much coverage they give, look at the lack of questions they ask, and look how many times you see a senior Sun journalist in a picture frame, with Nigel Farage. If Trevor Cavanagh, believe it or not, or George Pascoe Watson interviewed Tony Blair, there would always be, "Here I am with Tony Blair." Very odd, but that's a very British thing. They don't do that so much now with the Tories, but they do it with reform.
Alan: We talked about the waning influence directly in a B2C, the consumer influence. The influence on the BBC and the broadcasters is still there, isn't it? Because it's very difficult for the BBC not to read the front pages and the editorials and feel they have to reflect them somehow in their coverage. Do you think that's still true and is that still going to hold true under Labour?
David: Yes, it is still very true. In fact, it's become truer because the institutionalized reviewing of the nightly news front pages on Sky, GB News, BBC, everywhere, has become part of our media culture. The agenda, the weather is set by the front pages, particularly The Daily Mail. I'm often quite surprised. I'll get a call at seven, eight, nine o'clock on an evening from a junior person at the Today program. I'll be told, can you come on and talk about this because The Daily Mail have said this. At which point I say, why is it relevant that The Daily Mail have said that?
What The Daily Mail have said has set the Today program-- Not the editor, but the junior members of the team. [unintelligible 00:44:18] them with energy, this is going to happen or that's going to happen. No. It's not going to happen. What we need to do is somehow break down that addiction. I'm as guilty of it as anybody. I still look at the front pages.
Alan: [crosstalk] when you talk to your clients, social media, the general consensus seems to be is retreating from news. What are your clients frightened of now if it's less so than the--?
David: Well, most people in business are global. They're doing business all over the world. Britain's only a small part of it. They look at the British media with quite a jaundiced view. It's quite, "What is going on here?" The media culture here is a peculiar type. Funnily enough, social media has amplified the power of the tabloids in many ways, certainly the front pages. Until people like Nick Clegg went to work for Facebook and Meta, the press operation over at Facebook would often massively overreact to a Daily Mail front page. Because if you're in America, particularly in California, where there are no newspapers.
When you see the front of The Daily Mail attacking Facebook, say, on child protection issue, it looks like the end of the world. You think, "Jesus Christ, what's going on?" They have no context to put-- I was a partner at a PR firm called Brunswick who works for Facebook. We went in there and explained to them that it does look terribly bad, but it needs to be put in context. That's just one small example, and there are many others.
Lionel: David, just thinking ahead, Labour government this week, probably a pretty big majority. You had one piece of advice to [unintelligible 00:46:05], which was, "Don't read The Daily Mail, at least in front page until 11 o'clock." What's your other one piece of advice for the next Labour government?
David: The first 100 days, I think they need to set some targets and hit them.
Lionel: For the media?
David: For the country.
Lionel: For handling the media?
David: I would not put media relations as in the top three things that you need to worry about.
Lionel: Alan, that was a fascinating conversation with a veteran of the tabloid wars back in the 1990s. What he said about Brexit really struck me. It's fractured the Conservative Party. It's fractured the country, and it's essentially consumed the tabloids, consigned them to an early grave with the exception of The Daily Mail.
Alan: I think it's more deforming than that, if I can put it like that, in terms of what he's saying about ideology trumping journalism. When Brexit happened, I was out of journalism. I was running an Oxford college. I knew what I wanted from the media. I thought this was going to be the most consequential decision of our lifetimes. I wanted people to give me the facts on both sides before I voted. A secondary thing was if somebody wanted to tell me what they thought. I wanted to be armed with the facts, and two thirds of the British press, I would say, did exactly the opposite.
They began by saying, this is what we think, we're not going to give you the facts on both sides, and then we're going to tell you what we think again. It was a huge failure of journalism, I think. I think what David was telling us today is that failure continues to this day, where a generation of journalists has grown up for whom ideology is the thing. The secondary aspects of simply fairly informing readers about the facts has become almost a sideshow. If that's so, that's really significant.
Lionel: That's all from Media Confidential today. Thank you, David Yelland, for joining us today. We'll be back next week with more news from behind the headlines and clickbait.
Alan: It could feel like a transformed country, who knows? You can send any questions or comments to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch on X, formerly Twitter, where we are at mediaconfpod. Remember to follow Media Confidential wherever you get your broadcasts. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. Our producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
