The UK Election: 8. What’s the Media’s Role in an Election?

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Hello, and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast newscast, but I've been covering elections ever since 2005, meaning this is my sixth UK general election.

Today, we are talking about the role the media plays in deciding the outcome of an election.

My guests are David Yelland, former editor of The Sun and now host of BBC Radio 4's hit podcast, When It Hits the Fan.

Hello.

Hello.

Also here is Katie Razzle, who's culture and media editor for the BBC and also host of the media show on Radio 4.

Hello.

David, your time running The Sun was 98 to 2003.

There was an election in that period, 2001.

Do you think the Sun influenced that one?

Well, I think the British press does definitely influence politics, but but not so much during election campaigns.

I think it's the day-to-day cut and thrust and setting the agenda, which is the real power.

One of my old jobs, when I was chief political correspondent for a bit, and that meant being the first person in the office and doing all the breakfast programmes.

And the front pages of the newspapers, they were very influential in just shaping the news agenda for every news outlet.

Was that the intention?

I think, Adam, you put your finger there on the power of the press now.

And it's interesting to hear you say what you just said, because there's no doubt at all that the press, particularly now the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail is the preeminent tabloid in this country now and has been for some time.

They do set the weather, and they know that they can do that.

And so, you know, if I wake up on Sunday morning and I switch on, say, you know, Lukensburg, and I see the front pages, and then see that her questions of whoever the first guest is are related to those front pages, because of course they are.

They have influenced.

So therefore, the proprietors, the Rothermeres and the Murdochs, still have immense power and they know they do.

And it's partly because a front page is a very shouty device.

And they're brilliant at it.

So let's think of a famous election front page from The Sun.

It was the eve of the 1992 election

and it was Neil Kinnock's face and the light bulb.

You were the last person left in Britain turn out the lights.

Why was that the front page that day?

At that time, we at The Sun thought that Kinnock was going to win.

And all you've got is a blank space and a few words in your head, and you've got to try and set a mood and create a moment.

That's what you want to do as a tabloid editor is create a moment, which is, we're still talking about that moment years later.

So he clearly succeeded.

Although I've spoken to plenty of politicians who say, actually, if you think about...

where newspapers want to be, where everybody wants to be in the media, you want to be on the winning side.

And actually, it became very clear towards the end of that campaign, before that headline, that actually the tide had turned on Labour and Neil Kinnock was fading in the public mood in terms of the person they wanted to be the Prime Minister.

So then the Sun in a sense you could argue was just latching onto that and saying something that was already being felt.

Two things.

First of all the Sun sold nearly four million copies then.

Very different from now.

No digital, no Twitter, nothing.

The second thing is, if you look at the humour in that front page, that tells you that actually Kelvin, the editor, wasn't all that sure.

That, you know, you hedge your bets with humor on the front page if

you don't want people to look back and say, oh, you got that wrong.

You say, oh, I was only having a laugh, you know.

In retrospect, and of course,

during that campaign, Neil Kinnick now says and has said recently on the BBC, you know, the son pursued him and created and caused him huge problems.

So that front page really was at the end of a campaign.

It wasn't at the beginning.

From what you were saying, the people with the real power, though they might not realize it, is the readers.

The sort of the conspiracy theory version is that it's a cabal of editors and wealthy proprietors trying to move democracy in a certain direction.

They were the people that elected prime ministers.

Whatever, I mean, I used to write leaders, you know, I wrote all the leaders when I was editing.

So I was always saying in the leaders that you, the readers, are the people that will decide who the prime minister is.

And whatever else you say about the Sun, that is definitely true.

They were more than the swing.

They were about 30 to 40% percent of the electorate.

That's not true anymore.

But of course, if you've got that audience and you can shift them even a very small 2%, 1%, then you can shift in the election.

And that's why people think the sun changed who was in power.

I'm not sure that was the case, if I'm honest.

Katie, there's kind of two big trends here, isn't there, with the newspapers.

One, the newspapers for decades have been right-leaning.

Then the second big trend is fewer people reading newspapers.

And that is a really big trend.

I mean, we have such a different media landscape from the landscape we had back in 1992, 97.

There is, you know, hardly anybody reads papers, or certainly not the way they did.

There's one thing to say, which is the newspapers are expanding, you know, they've expanded into digital, lots of them, but it's just not the way it was.

It's much more fragmented.

And maybe, you know, actually, we had Andrew Neal on the media show the other day and he was saying this is good for democracy, actually.

The papers had too much power.

And now the media landscape is much more fragmented and that probably is good for democracy.

Katie, our world of broadcast is very different because it's regulated.

There's law.

Absolutely.

There's law and there's a lot of it and there's certainly a lot of it around election time.

So we always have to fulfill this thing called due impartiality, which is essentially, you know, impartiality is not favoring one side or the other.

And then the due bit is about it being adequate or appropriate to the subject and nature of the programme, but particularly during election campaigns.

So that's why people see at the end of, you know, if you've done an interview with a candidate during the election period, you know, then the full list comes afterwards.

But that is very much about fairness and balance and ensuring that we do nothing to influence how people vote.

And that's obviously very different from the newspapers because, in a sense, you know, they are trying to influence how people vote.

And it's not so much that we have quotas for what coverage each party gets, but we do have sort of yardsticks to guide us.

Yes, there would be a problem if you got to the the end of the campaign and the BBC and other, you know, ITV channel 4, whoever it might be, the public service broadcasters hadn't, to their own mind anyway, treated the parties fairly.

That doesn't mean that you give the Green Party as much coverage as you might give the Conservative Party or the Labour Party, but you do give them coverage that you think is the appropriate amount.

That's why parties like the Liberal Democrats often their vote share goes up during elections because they're finally getting the coverage that they never get through the rest of the time.

david with your other hat on as a pr man rather than a former newspaper editor it shifts the rules doesn't it when you're in an election period in terms of how people are treated it does and i funny enough i think it also influences the newspapers as well i think that let's just take the daily mail daily mail is doing spread after spread on the lib dems they say pretty nasty things about them but they're there

not normally on the in outside of an election period they wouldn't be there at all

um katie one of the innovations in broadcasting in britain in the last few years is news channels or news and opinion channels where they might have a serving politician as a presenter.

And Ofcom, the communications regulator, has been involved in that space this year.

Yes, they have.

And very specifically, Ofcom came out ahead of the election making clear that they were watching.

very carefully, that they would be watching all the TV and radio stations with shows hosted by politicians and that they could face fines if they break impartiality rules.

Now, it's worth saying that no politician who's standing is allowed through the election campaign to be a TV presenter.

So those people, whether they're on LBC or GB News or wherever, they have had to step down for the election period.

It's interesting.

I'm a bit of a student of GB News actually.

And

it is very balanced at the moment.

The power of GB News is a little bit like the power of Fox News, although Fox News is a much bigger thing, which is outside of an election, the setting of the agenda.

Everyone that's there and discussing it and everyone that's looking is coalescing around one side of the argument.

But during the election campaign, that's not happening, funnily enough.

It is worth saying, of course, that the ones to talk about in terms of influence, everybody says, is still the BBC.

It is still the 6 and 10 o'clock news, which still brings in huge audiences.

You know, I've been told that shadow cabinet ministers were told, you know, even ahead of this campaign, the key thing is get your stories, get yourself on the 6 and 10.

Then you throw in the news alerts, you know, the BBC's BBC's digital offering.

And it's potentially every time you get one of those news flash type things that comes onto your phone, that is reaching maybe seven million people.

Right, let's talk about the TV debates.

Love them or hate them.

And where are you on that, Adam?

I'm completely impartial.

Actually, no, I love them.

What's I find a little bizarre is that they only, in Britain, only started in 2010.

It took so long to get that off the ground.

They really did define that campaign, even though actually in the end, I don't think they made any difference.

And all the, I agree with Nick ended up, you know, not meaning enough for the lib dams and all of that.

But they were so defining, but at the same time, they are so constricted in terms of the format and everything.

Well, someone who knows a lot about hosting debates is David Dimbleby.

He chaired the BBC's leadership debate in 2010 and he sent us this voice note all about the experience.

I mean, the thing about these so-called debates, they're not really debates, they're kind of gladiatorial blood sports.

The first time, I think, in Britain that we had anything like a debate was in 2005, when we did a big question time thing.

Kennedy for the Liberal Democrats, Howard for the Tories, and Blair for Labour.

And what I do remember is that the intensity of the audience, the excitement of the audience, being able to have a go at these politicians one by one for the first time.

Why don't you have a full independent inquiry answering all the questions rather than just specific word questions which you decide upon?

Do you know how many inquiries we've had?

You decide the wording every time.

And it wasn't until the next election in 2010, we actually had the formality of politicians agreeing to appear side by side and be questioned, even though it was very anodyne.

We had, I think, 76 rules of engagement about who could say what.

The audience had to be completely silent.

I wasn't allowed to intervene except on a point of information.

Mr.

Brown, can I just ask you to clarify something?

You said a little bit back that both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives wanted to abolish certain tax credits.

And when I did intervene, on one occasion, immediately in my ear was a voice saying Labour's protested that that was an unfair supplementary question.

So it was all kind of surrounded by these crazy rules.

But nevertheless, the public enjoy it because they like to see the party leaders really going into the ring against each other.

I always, always, always get something out of watching them, no matter what the format is.

Clearly, from the party's perspective, it's a really good way to lay out your stall for the broadcasters.

You know, clearly everybody wants to have the debate.

And actually for the viewers, I mean, I think that ITV debate, the first one, the first one was just the two headers, Sunak Vistama.

That probably benefited from being first.

But I mean, around 5 million people at the peak on ITV, you know, and ITV is saying it was the most watched program on terrestrial TV that evening.

So clearly, you know, there's still an appetite for these things.

The BBC format with Michelle Hussein, they had seven parties.

That had 3 million viewers.

Right, let's talk about social media.

I mean, this is such a huge kind of epoch-defining subject.

I'm not really sure where to start.

Well, I can tell you where you can start.

Remember, I mean, this is a joke.

This is the first TikTok election.

It's always got to be a first-something election, hasn't it?

The thing that I didn't realize until I started looking into it was that TikTok doesn't allow political advertising.

Unlike Facebook, for example, or YouTube, where you get the ads and you know their ads, TikTok, it's about harnessing something that is quite smart.

If you want to create something that people are going to share, that's going to be funny, but resonate with people, so it starts, the algorithm starts feeding it to everybody because it's popular.

And so there have, you know, early on, there were some really funny ones.

I did actually have a good conversation with a Conservative Party candidate who said, look, the fact is.

The election was called and we weren't expecting it.

We've been scrambling to get our campaign going.

We understand Facebook and Instagram, and actually, we think those are the kind of people we want to target because we need to get the sort of 30-plus-year-olds.

But we just don't have time to learn how TikTok works.

So, she said, She's not doing TikTok this election.

If someone else wants to do it for her, fine.

But she just doesn't have time and all the other things she's trying to sort out to get on TikTok.

David, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Katie, thanks to you too.

Thanks so much.

On the next episode, we'll be talking about how the election plays out in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

And you can find previous episodes of the series on BBC Sounds.

Just search for understand the UK election.

Bye.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

Winner, best score,

winner, best book.

be qualified.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

A Happy Place comes in many colors.

Whatever your color, bring happiness home with CertaPro Painters.

Get started today at Certapro.com.

Each Certipro Painters business is independently owned and operated.

Contractor license and registration information is available at Certapro.com.