“I don’t even read the Sun and it’s my job to read everything that’s politically important. I think that’s a symbol of the declining power of the mainstream media”.
So says Andrew Neil, presenter, among other things, of the BBC TV’s Daily Politics in an interview in the latest issue of the quarterly magazine Calibre.
But is he right? Can we safely ignore, ahead of this year’s general election, the newspaper that famously, and foolishly, boasted after the 1992 election: “It’s The Sun wot won it”?
There is no doubt, as Neil says, that the Sun’s political significance is on the wane. It does not have the clout it had during the 1980s and 90s. He believes “the influence of the Sun was enormous” during the three elections won by Margaret Thatcher.
It was surely influential too before the 1992 election in which it persistently lampooned Labour’s leader Neil Kinnock during a close-run fight with Thatcher’s successor, John Major.
And yes, Neil is also correct in saying that Tony Blair - along with his communications aide, Alastair Campbell - thought the paper’s leverage was so important that they got it on side well ahead of the 1997 Labour landslide.
It is generally accepted, however, that Major’s administration was so widely disliked that Blair would have won whether the Sun backed him or not.
Similarly, Blair won the 2001 and 2005 elections with handsome majorities, and there is little if any proof that he did so because of support from the Sun.
Although the Sun made much of its switch from Labour to the Tories in 2009, the paper’s antipathy to Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg during the subsequent campaign was ineffective. David Cameron did not secure a majority in 2010. The Sun had not won it.
That suggests Neil is correct, does it not? Only up to a point. Too many political observers - plus publishers and editors - seem to think that what newspapers do during the final month of a general election campaign makes a difference. That just isn’t so.
It is a much longer-run process. Newspapers, meaning the national press as a whole rather than a single title, help to form public opinion during the years between elections.
For example, critical press reporting and commentaries for five years, from the 1992 exchange rate mechanism fiasco onwards, ensured that Major was a dead duck well before he faced the electorate.
By the time Brown took over from Blair in 2007, he and the Labour party were being widely disparaged in the majority of papers. The Sun’s decision to turn its back on Brown followed, rather than led, public opinion.
But Cameron did not manage to garner anything like the positive press support enjoyed by Thatcher, nor even that granted to Major prior to 1992.
And here’s the point. Throughout his five years as prime minister, Cameron has had a very poor press indeed. He has been criticised fiercely at times by the traditional Tory-supporting press, including the Sun. The die is cast. He cannot hope to win a majority whatever the Sun does on his behalf in the next two months.
The election will be fought around an agenda that the newspapers have already set. In party terms, this has been anti-Labour (particularly anti-Ed Miliband), anti-Lib Dem (particularly anti-Nick Clegg), faintly pro-Tory/Cameron, faintly anti-Ukip (but broadly favourable to Nigel Farage).
In policy terms, the papers have largely side-lined the economy, elevating to prime position instead, opposition to continued membership of the European Union and the related issue of immigration. That favours Ukip and/or the Tories.
Of greater significance still, because it has been a consistent press theme stretching back many years, has been a negative portrayal of all Westminster politicians (plus the main parties). Again, this favours Ukip. (This echoes, incidentally, the familiar cry in the United States against big government in Washington).
The Sun has played a central part in that ideological rejection of the traditional parties and their parliamentary representatives.
But leaving aside Neil’s views on the Sun, his other substantive point is that the digital revolution has already made the influence of “mainstream media” less relevant.
He argues in his Calibre interview that although newspapers are “still an important part of the debate”, bloggers and the Twittersphere cannot be ignored. He does not, however, go so far as too suggest that this “diversity” is of crucial importance to political agenda-setting.
He says: “I read more bloggers now than mainstream columnists, because they’ve got more interesting things to say. Too many columnists today make you think, ‘Yeah, I think you’ve said that 10 times before and I’ve just noticed your column has not go a single fact in it’”.
In an unfinished sentence and/or thought, he does refer to the “concentration of ownership in the British press with the Murdochs, the Barclay brothers, who are my proprietors, couple of others, Richard Desmond...” before adding that “they don’t rule the roost anymore”.
Neil is chairman of the Press Holdings, owned by Sirs David and Frederick Barclay, which runs The Spectator magazine. He was editor of the Sunday Times for 11 years until 1994.
Source: Calibre