The press baron Lord Northcliffe had a lifelong obsession with death. He maintained an aquarium in which goldfishes were separated from a pike by a partition. When bored, he would lift it and watch the water turn a cloudy orange-red as the pike devoured its prey.
Northcliffe’s rival, Lord Beaverbook, was a man of similarly crepuscular tastes, which he projected onto his customers when he instructed his editor at the Daily Express that ‘the public like to know… what men die of – and women too.’
The preoccupations of rich and powerful men are, of course, not merely notable for their service in lightening dense biographies with hair-raising anecdotes and pithy quotes. For as long as the press has existed in Britain, they have also informed the diet of reportage which has educated, informed and entertained the reading public.
A right-wing bias among those wealthy enough to own newspapers should seem relatively obvious, but has the last decade seen a further acceleration? In Ireland, our nearest geographical and cultural neighbour, there exist wealthy media owners and public anxieties around crime, immigration and the use of the public purse. And yet there exists no Irish paper that would depict a left-wing political figure in a dustbin, or their preferred right-wing candidate as the bright, white, life-giving sun in the sky.
When, in 2016, Britain’s entire political class stood apart from her newspapers’ clamour for Brexit, did those organs presage the public’s antipathy to the European Union, or foment it within their readers via the thousands of verifiable untruths which formed the majority of that public’s knowledge of the institution? In the years since, how have fringe obsessions like climate denialism and the Human Rights Act been joined by Cancel Culture and vaccine scepticism as issues unsupported by the British public but espoused by the papers they read by the millions?
Do the paper-reading public fail to see the water they’re swimming in? And is that water, in the manner of Northcliffe’s unfortunate goldfish, getting cloudier as we speak?
We asked a series of journalists and experts how they explained the rightward drift in the UK’s media over the last decade, and how they saw the relationships between patronage, print and power in Britain today.
Madeline Grant, columnist and parliamentary sketch writer for The Daily Telegraph
It’s both at once [the British press becoming more/less right-wing] I think, which itself reflects a growing rot in the British media. We are following America’s example, becoming more partisan in both directions. Law and order/asylum issues are good examples of things where I suspect the BBC is wildly out of touch with public sentiment.
