If anything social media should be praised for offering an alternative that actually connects with so many people.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
All the newspapers in the screenshot are notoriously right wing, as is every other paper that gets mentioned, apart from the Guardian. I guess that one was included to make the biased sample seem less obvious, and since they happen to be quite neutral on Corbyn, so they don't offset the stats too much.
This study is the equivalent of only looking at "Fox News" and other similar news broadcasts, and drawing the conclusion that American media as a whole is very conservative and supportive of Trump.
I'd take the opposite interpretation. It probably says even more about bias that those are the sources available to choose from (though I'd also say the Mirror is left wing, the Guardian sort of centrist and who knows what's going on with the Independent though in further reduction of the free media pool they've just been bought by a right winger).
I wouldn't call it sampling bias if it reflects the actual existing reality, those are the media sources available (except in Scotland and NI) and they're biased against the opposition.
Although there are overall probably more left wing than right wing papers among the small ones (like the Daily/Morning Star, as you mentioned), there do seem to be more conservatives newspapers among the big names.
That comes as a bit of a surprise to me, given the situation is the opposite when it comes to non-print media. I struggle to think of a news channel which is obviously conservative. I definitely wouldn't call BBC that, and others like Channel 4 are as openly left-wing.
As someone who predominantly follows television and online news, I haven't personally noticed any conservative bias in the available options, and even a slight under-representation if anything.
Also, more of the best-selling papers are right-wing than left, so it's natural there will be more.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/0...
My memory of that time is that the nationalists were making a lot of claims during the campaign that they'd not laid any groundwork for, and which didn't hold water. Mostly of the form "after leaving the UK we'll still have access to X" or "Y won't change" but they hadn't actually asked anyone in the British government, so there was a lot of public back and forth over that, in particular, what it'd mean for Scotland to keep using the pound. Because they talked about future hypotheticals it is hard to say whether they were 'debunked' or not.
One claim I remember very clearly was that post-independence Scotland would be able to keep funding its much higher levels of government spending because of high oil prices. The media did question this claim, and it turned out rightly so: oil prices collapsed just months after the vote and never recovered rendering the SNP's financial plans irrelevant. Independence would certainly have meant rapid and dire cuts in spending.
However nothing I saw would have risen to the level of "disinformation", whatever that means. It was just people disagreeing on the relative merits and probabilities of things.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/reference/
https://wingsoverscotland.com/weebluebook/
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-wee-black-book/
Fully sourced and referenced.
Stu Campbell isn't everyone's cuppa, but his writings on the shite, filth and corruption that went on during the Scottish Indyref in 2014 are reasonably bulletproof.
I'll happily admit that the one thing the SNP messed up on was the currency question and that they should have had the balls to say they'd launch their own currency and central bank, or create a Scottish Pound tied to the UK pound (at least for the first few years - and is not unusual, there are many dollar currencies tied to the value of the US$).
I can also answer questions on the balance of media exposure between pro-Union parties and the Yes parties (SNP and the Scottish Greens). Professor John Robertson (an academic who's work was to analyse media bias all around the world) of the West of Scotland University performed an analysis of this and when he presented his findings there were calls for him to be fired from his job - by BBC executives.
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/06/30/i-was-bullied-bbc...
https://newsnet.scot/tag/prof-john-robertson/
http://www.parliament.scot/S4_EducationandCultureCommittee/B...
If Campbell wanted to criticise bad electioneering he would need to get his own house in order first. I don't think re-litigating the old campaign is necessarily a good use of time but the first page of his Blue Book has several exceptionally dodgy claims in it, really, claims I'd consider to both completely false and some are extremely offensive. How can he criticise his opponents for relying on "scare stories" when his own positions are on such thin ice?
e.g.
the only reason terrorists might attack us is because we’re part of the UK.
It's staggering to me nationalists really made this argument. Did Campbell miss the terrorists killing people in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Russia and many other places that aren't the UK?
This claim can only be rooted in delusional racism and hatred of the English, to believe that somehow Scotland wouldn't have the same problems as everywhere else in the world or that terrorism is a specifically English problem.
Many of the other claims don't make sense (e.g. "We don’t affect the outcome of UK elections"), are self contradictory (e.g. "Scotland is a country" but the point of the campaign is to make Scotland a country), or have been proven wrong by subsequent events (e.g. the oil wealth related claims). They're very far from bulletproof and remind me of why I soured on the SNP's campaign despite being a natural supporter of devolution and local government. There certainly are good arguments for Scottish independence, but the material in the Blue Book is a good example of mendacious and manipulative campaigning.
I think, given that both sides are complaining about being attacked, the media probably aren't actually that biased overall.
However, what I would much prefer to see is much more moderate coverage of the different political parties. However, that would require that the political parties make moderate claims about each other, rather than just painting the other parties as the devil incarnate.
At the moment, media coverage of UK politics is dominated by outrage. I get it, outrage sells news stories to a very large proportion of the population. It puts me off, and makes me distrust the news. I'd like to see more "We think this policy would be best because..." and less "OMG the other party are killing babies as we speak." Social media does not achieve this.
This is a very “Judgement of Soloman” type stance to take, as it ignores the merit of the complaint each side is making.
I'm getting very little actual real reasonable information about what the politicians will actually want to do. The truth is, good things will happen and bad things will happen in the country. No political party can prevent that. They might be able to make a very small change, but that's it. They are all trying to make improvements, and they have different ideas on how to do that. Which one is right? Well, if we knew that, the parties would agree on it and argue about something else.
I once felt that this was true in the UK, particularly around the BBC. To some extent, there is still a bit of truth in it. But I don't think it would be possible to hold that view honestly any more after the current election campaign, and to do so would require willingly turning a blind eye to some particularly egregious behaviour.
It's not as simple as a blatant "bias", either. The UK's tabloid press has always been pretty sketchy in this regard, and the decline of the Telegraph, which is now a blatant organ of the Conservative party, is astonishing. The current thing that's happening is more complex – there's a weird mix of credulous establishmentarianism and an inflexible media culture that's making it hard to deal with the rapid change in the methods by which information is spread. I have no idea how to deal with this, but it's actually sort of frightening to watch how much it's deteriorated in even the past few weeks.
However, I will argue that this is partly/mostly because the main thing the political parties are feeding the media is negative messages. I'd like to see some constructive messages instead.
Even the political leaflets put into my letterbox are giving negative messages - "Anything but Boris", "I am the only candidate who can get rid of the Tories", "A vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Corbyn", "Don't let Labour destroy our region", etc. What I wanted to see was "We recognise this particular problem (for example, underfunded NHS), and we think the way to solve it is to take this particular action. We know this will have this other knock-on effect, but we believe this is the best choice."
The other thing I see in the political leaflets is of course empty promises. I think all of the parties have promised to save the NHS. None of them really say how, or why their method is better than the other parties' methods.
It's just a load of mudslinging at this point. I'd seriously vote for a candidate who just said "You know, our country is pretty nicely tuned at the moment. We could spend a bit more on this, or a bit less, depending on your political philosophy. But I plan to stop changing everything all the time." As it is, I might be spoiling my ballot. I'm in a safe seat anyway.
LSE study [1]:
> The results of this study show that Jeremy Corbyn was represented unfairly by the British press through a process of vilification that went well beyond the normal limits of fair debate and disagreement in a democracy. Corbyn was often denied his own voice in the reporting on him and sources that were anti-Corbyn tended to outweigh those that support him and his positions. He was also systematically treated with scorn and ridicule in both the broadsheet and tabloid press in a way that no other political leader is or has been. Even more problematic, the British press has repeatedly associated Corbyn with terrorism and positioned him as a friend of the enemies of the UK. The result has been a failure to give the newspaper reading public a fair opportunity to form their own judgements about the leader of the country’s main opposition.
Loughborough University study, as reported by Media Reform UK [2]:
> Research published by Loughborough University has shown that during the first two weeks of the campaign, Labour attracted by far the most negative coverage in the national press of all the major parties. The Conservatives on the other hand, unequivocally got the most favourable coverage. We might expect that, given that most national newspapers (including the three largest titles across both print and online) have endorsed the Conservatives during successive recent elections.
Media Reform UK study on claims of anti-semitism in the Labour party [3]:
> Looking at the overall figures in absolute terms, The Guardian and BBC television recorded the two highest number of inaccuracies (8 and 6 respectively), followed closely by The Sun(5). Proportionate to the volume of coverage, BBC television still featured the highest rate of inaccurate reporting and this position holds when incidences of misleading coverage are included.
[1] http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documen...
[2] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/featured/wheres-the-impartial...
[3] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/La...
Tories wanting to sell the NHS is fake news. It’s fear-mongering. Labour already sold the NHS essentially, allowing provisions of services by private companies. The Tories haven’t made any cuts to the NHS while in power.
So why do labour and their supporters keep touting rubbish?
As a Brit I've also found the rhetoric around the NHS to be depressing. People talk like one of the major parties has a manifesto pledge to shut it down, but there's no such discussion anywhere. One major party spends much of its time attacking policies the other doesn't actually have. This doesn't seem right.
This inflates journalist egos, and leaves them more open to manipulation. They want to think they are important, not the publication. They have a personal "brand". There's always been some of this, but that "brand" was usually well earned, after decades of coverage, and used in a very humble way. When word came of how John Simpson "liberated Kabul", he was rightly denigrated. Now in John's defense it was a warzone, and people can speak too quickly.
"Celebrity" journalists, with personal following thanks to things like twitter, get "scoops" from "unnamed sources" which turn out to be lies, and spread them far faster than the truth can emerge.
This is the second part of the problem - speed. 20 years ago, news was gathered by journalists, and packaged into a well researched piece for the news bulletin at 6pm or 9pm or whenever. 24 hour news started to erode this, where speed was more important than accuracy, but things like Twitter completely destroyed it. It's no longer important to be right, it's important to be first.
News organisation, and the BBC specifically, had a duty to resist the noise of "social" media, and instead concentrate on being accurate. Channel 4 news still does this, but the BBC doesn't. Laura can do immense damage by errantly tweeting that a labour activist had got into a fight with the health secretary. Doesn't matter if they retract it later.
The final problem is the lack of challenging from presenters. Politicians can lie to millions of people and are completely unchallenged. There's a time for that - it's a "party political broadcast". In the news, if someone comes out with a lie, they need to be immediately told that's a lie, and not allowed to continue. If they keep lying, they should not be given any airtime at all.
And this stuff about lack of pushback is just in people’s heads - there’s massive pushback all the time. From this morning, for example.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/conservative-robert-b...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-punch-...
> The story, and the prime minister's weird and wooden response to it, provided the perfect chance for Labour to punch at one of the Conservatives' vulnerabilities
...designed purely to game search for the word "punch" after she publicly, falsely accused protestors of punching an advisor to Matt Hancock because senior Tories told her to. And even when provided with video evidence that this never happened, she wrote "doesn’t look like punch thrown" [1] rather than the true, factual sentence "no punch was thrown".
[1] https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1204091610843226112