When I trained as a journalist hundreds of years ago in Colchester, the chief subeditor on the news desk was a remarkable man called Ron Lay Flurrie. He had a lethal pencil that would decimate a junior reporter’s news story in nanoseconds. It was part of our education delivered in a friendly, benevolent way. It didn’t teach us how to write, it taught us to write accurately.
So when I see on the front page of the Daily Express that we have £900bn represented as the ‘staggering value of 62 global trade deals’ my doubts and hackles rise as one.
Don’t be misled. These may be ‘new’ deals, but they are not new money. £660bn of that is trade with the EU, trade that we already had and now appears in our ‘new’ Brexit deal. Much of the remainder is roll-over agreements where we are taking an EU deal with a third country and adopting it as ours, it may be a ‘new’ deal, but does not represent new money.
We cannot lay the entire blame at the door of the journalists, they are merely reporting what has been fed to them by politicians, with their own slant. Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom says that ‘sunlit uplands’ are on the horizon thanks to Britain’s ability to secure its own agreements. She, of course, has a column in the Express. Today, while most papers show concern about Covid, the Express leads with ‘Boris: We’ve done the impossible’. Tell that to all the companies who can no longer export sausages and other raw meats to the EU, to the fishermen, to all the UK shareholders of Ryanair and Wizz Air who no longer have any voting rights or to the City chiefs who, apparently, will now be denied some access to EU markets.
All daily newspapers have their own bias. It is not there specifically to support the political parties, it is there to attract readers who find these messages appealing. The Daily Mirror was always a supporter of the Labour Party because it wanted to maintain its working-class readership. The Guardian was always seen as a Liberal publication because its target audience was the more liberal elements of our society.
The Sun, Conservative (?) and working class, built a readership on its over-endowed, page three girls. The Financial Times on its financial coverage. The reason all these journals adopt some sort of stance, political or otherwise, is not for the benefit of the readers, it is to create a specific readership that attracts advertisers.
When we buy a newspaper, presumably one we like that represents our views, we are pigeon-holing ourselves in a particular socio-economic and political group that leaves us open to the manipulation of our thoughts as well as exposure to highly targeted advertising.
Biased and money-driven it may be, the best thing is that it is in the open, available for everyone to read and make their own decisions, even if there is no official body regulating what is printed. The same cannot be said of all material that appears in social media and elsewhere on the internet, some is designed with the intention of being subversive and misleading.