Media Matters

Many people yearn for a Press that is fairer and more balanced. They deprecate partisanship, and sometimes admiringly point to supposedly more even-handed American newspapers.

Yet it is the outrageous partiality of British publications, especially the tabloids, that often leads to light being shone into the murkier recesses of our political life. Partygate and Beergate are two cases in point.

The Daily Mirror broke Partygate. It believes Boris Johnson is a liar, a scoundrel and an awful human being. It guns for him at every opportunity. When Dominic Cummings was still the apple of the PM’s eye, the paper combined with the Guardian in May 2020 to reveal that the errant chief adviser had breached COVID regulations by undertaking a jaunt to Barnard Castle.

Without the Boris-hating Daily Mirror, we would know less about rampant partying in No 10 than we do. At any rate, damaging revelations would have emerged more slowly. The paper published the first of a succession of stories about rule-busting beanos in No 10 and Whitehall under the byline of its political editor, Pippa Crerar, at the end of last November.

Equally, without the Sir Keir Starmerloathing Daily Mail there would be no Beergate, and we would be in the dark about the Labour leader’s curry and alleged infraction of COVID rules in Durham on 30th April 2021.

It was the Mail that discovered that Angela Rayner, Sir Keir’s deputy, had also been present, though this had previously been denied by Labour officials.

Such investigations require enormous stamina, and this stamina has to be fuelled by political animosity. The Mirror was fortunate because, just over a week after its first story was published, ITV broadcast a video showing senior Downing Street staff joking about holding a party in No 10 before Christmas 2020. Nonetheless, the paper had to plug away with its stories before they were fully taken up by the rest of the media.

The Mail had a much longer slog, partly because in Sir Keir’s case there was only one alleged infringement, and partly because he stirs up less vitriol than does Johnson. When it first published a picture of the Labour leader swigging from a bottle of beer, other newspapers and broadcasters paid little attention. It took the revelations about Angela Rayner, plus a leaked memo which implied that the event might not have been as workorientated as Sir Keir had maintained, for the story to achieve lift-off.

If there were no partial newspapers, and simply broadcasters trying to be even-handed, I suspect Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer would be sleeping much more easily in their beds. The BBC, which despite everything still dominates the airwaves, very rarely breaks controversial political stories. When such a piece is published by a newspaper, Auntie ponders before deciding whether to give it wider circulation.

It’s true that newspapers sometimes indulge in political cross-dressing: they run investigative pieces that aren’t designed to finish off their enemies. It was the Mail, after all, that first published the stuff last year about Carrie’s expensive wallpaper at No 10. That was intended to embarrass the Prime Minister, not to bring him down.

The fact remains that extreme partisanship in newspapers – perhaps especially in the less well-behaved tabloids – is necessary for a healthy democracy. They must have enormous reserves of animosity to pursue their vendettas. Of course there has to be a kind of equilibrium, so that the dislikes of the Mail and the Sun on the one hand are countered by those of the Mirror and the Guardian on the other. That is why we need a pluralist Press.

Don’t take too seriously those highminded people who argue that we should have fairer and more balanced publications. We need newspapers that know how to take on their enemies.

Readers may be interested to learn how the irrepressible Piers Morgan is faring on Rupert Murdoch’s new news channel TalkTV. The answer is not terribly well.

His lowest audience so far, according to official figures, is an abysmal 24,000, though he usually does better than that. He is, however, regularly trounced by Nigel Farage on the rival GB News. Somewhat implausibly, Morgan maintains that TV viewing figures don’t matter very much and he is doing fine online.

I may have strange tastes, but I quite like his hour-long show since he is opinionated, well informed and on the button. There is something rather endearing about him. Nonetheless, I can see that his long tirades against ‘wokeness’ may have limited appeal.

The main problem, I suspect, is that there are simply too many news programmes: Robert Peston on ITV, Sophy Ridge on Sky, Newsnight on BBC2, Andrew Neil (for a time) on Channel 4 and Laura Kuenssberg (soon) on BBC1, plus countless others on Sky, GB News, the BBC News Channel and now TalkTV.

In such a crowded field, William Shakespeare might struggle to retain our interest after a while. How can poor Piers Morgan be expected to flourish every night?