A Bad Press: Newspapers

Abstract

Like Theresa May, many in the print media will want to forget the 2017 general election. The outcome of the campaign came as a particular shock to those newspapers that have long prided themselves on being able to understand and represent the public mood. Even as recently as the 2015 election and the 2016 referendum, there was much commentary on the supposed ability of the press to make a critical intervention in major votes. But 2017 has challenged this and many other assumptions about electoral politics in Britain. The ‘Tory press’, which is the overwhelming majority of titles, did still contribute to a pro-Conservative effort that saw the party achieve its largest vote share in any election since 1983 and it is plausible that these newspapers helped reinforce, if not necessarily change, their readers’ opinions during a campaign in which they relentlessly attacked and in some cases vilified Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. What very few commentators appeared to realise at the outset of this election was the extent to which, in the words of Peter Hitchens, ‘[p]olitics in this country are a good deal less solid and stable than they seem’ (Mail on Sunday, 23 April).