“THE press is free when it does not depend on the power of government or the power of money.” — Albert Camus

The slogan “the freedom of the press” is ritually rolled out when attempts are made to challenge vicious, biased attack-journalism. 

The charge against most British national newspapers is that they promote division through racism, political bias or sensational distortion. 

By any measure the British press is not free. Tom Baistow pointed out in Fourth-Rate Estate back in 1985: “The real freedom of the press in this country has long been the freedom of millionaires, whatever their backgrounds or countries of origin, to buy themselves newspapers that will propagate their views.”

Indeed, it is precisely because the British press is dominated by the power of government and money that it creates a massive imbalance which threatens the functioning of a healthy democratic society. 

After the phone-hacking scandal of 2011 Rupert Murdoch’s reputation was in tatters. He was shunned and books appeared predicting the fall of the house of Murdoch. That has all changed. 

Employees of Murdoch’s newspapers have met government ministers or their advisers a staggering 206 times in the last two years. 

This includes editors and executives working for The Times, Sunday Times and the Sun newspapers. 

Boris Johnson met Murdoch twice in his first year as Tory Party leader, the second time 72 hours after the general-election result was announced.

The 2019 general election also revealed how closely political and press power were integrated. 

A bloc of pro-Brexit, Conservative-supporting newspapers remained absolutely on-message promoting the Tory political campaign while viciously attacking Labour, and Jeremy Corbyn in particular. 

Why are we in this situation? Anti-Labour coverage

During the late 1970s an overwhelmingly partisan right-wing national press emerged in Britain. 

Murdoch acquired the Labour-supporting Sun in 1969. From September 1978 the Sun’s editor, Larry Lamb, later knighted by Margaret Thatcher for the paper’s support in the 1979 election, began to hold meetings at her Chelsea home to discuss the kind of campaign she planned. 

The Express newspaper group was acquired in 1977 by Victor Matthews, a committed Thatcherite whose company, Trafalgar House, donated £40,000 to the Conservative campaign in 1979. 

He was knighted a year later. The editor of the Daily Mail and a committed Thatcherite, David English, was also knighted soon after the 1979 election for his loyal “services to journalism.”

The ferocity of this new political alignment in the tabloid press was on display in January 1979 when the Labour government’s voluntary incomes policy collapsed with a series of strikes by low-paid workers. The result was apocalyptic headlines. 

The Sun predicted a “famine threat” and that people would die through the closure of hospital wards. 

Derek Jameson, the then editor at the Daily Express, recalled: “We pulled every dirty trick in the book; we made it look like it was general, universal and eternal when it was in reality scattered, here and there, and no great problem.”

In spite of the dire predictions, the only death it was possible to relate to industrial action was that of a picket who died under the wheels of a lorry.

The so-called “winter of discontent” was a crisis created by the media rather than a real one. 

Media coverage reinforced the totally inaccurate portrayal of a discredited, union-controlled government and played a key role in Labour’s subsequent election defeat. 

It dramatically illustrated how key sections of the press had shifted to become fiercely anti-Labour. 

Blair and Murdoch

Tony Blair learnt the wrong lesson when he was elected Labour leader in 1994. 

He believed the support of Murdoch was crucial to electoral success. That was why he travelled in summer 1995 to Hayman Island, Australia, and appeased Murdoch’s interests: Labour’s long-standing policies on media ownership were abandoned overnight. 

The reality was, in the face of a disintegrating Tory government, which was under attack from the very papers which had supported its election in 1992, Blair didn’t need Murdoch’s support. 

The voting intentions of Sun readers were clear — they were going to support Blair anyway, regardless of what Murdoch decreed. 

The decision by Blair and New Labour to win Murdoch’s support meant that they were in thrall to him. 

New Labour abandoned social-democratic policies and, in government with a huge majority, pursued a defensive economic and social agenda, rather than challenging the neoliberal agenda established under Thatcherism. 

Boosted by Murdoch’s newspapers, Blair disastrously supported George W Bush in launching the Iraq war.

Newspapers today

In 1997 the Sun had a circulation of nearly five million. In March 2020 (the last time it released its circulation figures) it was selling 1.2m. 

Why should we be concerned about the need for urgent reform of a section of the media that seems to be dying? 

National newspaper sales, according to the trade journal Press Gazette, have fallen by nearly two-thirds over the last two decades. 

In January 2000, 16 daily and Sunday paid-for national newspapers had a combined circulation of 21.2m, but in January 2020 the same group of newspapers sold a total of 7.4m copies.

The bulk of our national press is in the hands of three right-wing billionaire proprietors: Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay brothers and Lord Rothermere. 

The readers of these newspapers are getting older and young people don’t buy them. 

As sales and profits plummet, now exacerbated even more by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Barclay brothers are trying to sell their Telegraph titles; in February 2020 News Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Sun and Sun on Sunday, and former publisher of The News of the World, announced a pre-tax loss of £69m.

In May 2020 News UK (formerly News International) announced that its titles would no longer be included in ABC circulation figures. 

Surely we should just let these papers wither and die? 

The problem with this view is that even in their current diminished form, these papers, both print and online, still have enormous influence. 

Indeed, there is evidence that these papers have become even more stridently partisan as their circulations and profits decline because they want to hold onto the readers whose views they amplify.

The stark fact is that without reform of the ownership and regulation of national newspapers, they will remain barriers to the political, economic and social policies we need to move forward on: urgent action on climate change; challenging inequality and low pay; rebuilding our public services; shifting political control back to local structures, and breaking the power of big money and covert lobbying in British politics.

This hard-right Tory government has its own programme of coercive “media reforms” and that’s why we have just published Fix the Media: What We Can Do to open up an urgent debate on the media reform policies we urgently need to campaign around and build broad-based support for. 

Granville Williams edits MediaNorth and edited It’s the Media, Stupid! The Media, the 2019 Election and the Aftermath (2020) published by  the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North).

Details of how you can buy a copy for £4 (inc P&P) or read it online are at coldtype.net/MediaNorth.html. If you want to join our book launch  on September 3, 6.30-7.30pm, contact [email protected].