Roy Greenslade, Guardian - As the Labour party tears itself apart trying to come to terms with its general election performance, it should understand this reality: the right-wing press was overwhelmingly responsible for its defeat.
I agree with my colleague, Jane Martinson, that the fact that the bulk of UK newspapers backed the eventual winner is noteworthy.
It should not be overlooked because I haven’t a shadow of doubt that Ed Miliband lost because of newspaper coverage.
However, this view is not based on a simplistic, and narrow, Sun-wot-won-it analysis. We know that Britain’s best-selling national daily, in company with the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph, consistently ran virulent anti-Labour material during the weeks of the campaign.
We also know that, based on newsprint sales, 57.5% of the dailies backed the Tories while 11.7 % backed Labour and, on the same metric, 66% of the Sunday nationals urged their readers to vote Conservative.
1 comment:
Conservative victory: A good lesson on the downside of "populism", this Brit election! Democracy sucks for all time, now that our educational institutions have so far deteriorated that "civilization: itself no longer fertilizes the soil of its own cultural matrix. Fascism from the left - radical, revolutionary, violent - may be the necessary, if bad tasting, pill for excising this brain rot spreading insidiously throughout our so-called "literate" ("connected") world.
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