Party-Lines or Headlines? ‘Why Political Parties Can’t Connect With Young Voters and Press Partisanship is a Parody Around the World’

Yesterday, Glastonbury-addled socialists peeled themselves out of hungover stupors to play their part in the predicted Conservative downfall (did the Conservatives time it purposefully to catch Corbynites on a comedown?).

But whether centrist Keir Starmer quenches voters’ thirst for change will be another question altogether. Yesterday, many voters pictured themselves not among traditional left-right tribes, but according to a new course of fracture – a divide separating the cautious from the reckless, reformists from revolutionaries, mainstreams from mavericks; those still believing change can come through the system, and those for whom only radical change will work.

Perhaps if papers spent more time writing about parties’ actual policies and less time fussing over polls, we could have voted on something more solid than our blind and desperate need for anything new.

But judging by the past couple of weeks, political correspondents prefer predicting how we’re going to vote rather than providing us with the information we need to vote well.

Curiously, pollsters’ embarrassing track records have only made them double down on trying. In 2015, Mathilda’s unidentified relative had to pierce his eyebrow thanks to an ill-advised bet against the Conservatives’ unpredicted majority. One year later, he voted for Brexit because (like many) he never thought it would actually happen. Pollsters, please stop.

The mainstream vs. maverick divide is especially defining among young voters today. Nigel Farage has almost three times as many TikTok followers as the Conservative and Labour parties put together. But the political maverick now leading the far-right Reform party has been shunned by the mainstream media, which auction off their political endorsements between more mainstream political elites. Farage now has half a decade of TikToking under his belt and is reaping the rewards.

“I think the dumbest thing that political candidates did was not join TikTok years ago,” journalist and content creator Sophia Smith Galer tells Media Storm this week.

Mainstream MPs turned their noses up at TikTok like they turn their noses up at their TikTok-aged constituents. They conveniently blame the app’s Chinese origins, but rarely mention TikTok’s admirable ban on political adverts.

It was only once Rishi Sunak announced the general election that the leading parties graced TikTok with new accounts mere weeks ago. Sunak’s cringeworthy opening line may well have been: “Sorry we didn’t consider you worth talking to until we had to ask for your vote!” At least it’d get points for authenticity; but the fact young users like authenticity is exactly the kind of TikTok-101 that eludes political comms teams, who have come to rely on unholy marriages between the men they’re trying to put into Whitehall and the ones running our mainstream media.

Rather than videos of MPs attempting to rap, try making simple policy breakdown videos – suggests internet personality GK Barry, who also joins Media Storm this week.

The thing is, it’s hard for parties to make policy breakdowns for young people when they don’t make policies for young people. Neglecting youth voters is established practice: these two columnists were the cohort of tripled-uni-fees, and while Nick Clegg’s “I’m sorry” video did crack viral internet culture, it did not make us forgive him.

Today’s young voters care about climate anxiety, housing prices and university access – incidentally, all policies axed from Conservative and Labour manifestos before campaigning even began. It’s not hard to understand why politically homeless youths are knocking on the doors of fringe radicals.

Mainstream politicians are not the only ones selling their dignity for empty engagement on TikTok. Mainstream news outlets are doing it too: either mutating and rotating longform website videos into uploadable (and unviewable) TikToks, or replacing news of actual substance with vaguely topical memes.

“I am so pessimistic about news media and their lethargy in serving digital audiences,” admits Smith Galer.

But it is urgent they do better: the number of under-35s claiming high interest in news has halved over the past decade. Smith Galer knows there’s a market for quality journalism on TikTok: hers has amassed 160 million views.

GK Barry hosts The Turnout on Kiss Radio, where she tempts her young followers to the polls by betting Alistair Campbell to watch Love Island if they do.

Embracing new media and new generations does not have to be a death knell for mainstream institutions. “This is not a story of hopelessness, this is a story of opportunity”, promises press regulator Lexie Kirkonnell-Kawana on Media Storm. “News is changing but people still want news.”

Of course, social media can be a minefield of disinformation, deep-fakes, deregulation, and Elon Musk. But as CEO of the independent regulator Impress, Kirkonnell-Kawana understands social media isn’t the only regulatory Wild West out there: what of the UK’s newspaper sector?

Our highly partisan papers do not colour within the lines that separate ‘political news’ from ‘political opinion’. It’s within this blurry playing field that Lib Dem, Conservative and Green MPs have been able to distribute campaign ‘dailies’ blaring titles like ‘Tunbridge Wells Telegraph’ and ‘West Dorset Courier’.

The Express’ senior political correspondent doesn’t share our concerns about this, he wrote on X: “all parties do it, we don’t need faux shock and outrage”. We agree, in that if The Express had expressed outrage, it wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on – so blurred is their own line between reporting and propaganda!

“So is the press regulated?” asks Kirkonnel-Kawana: “My answer to that is just ‘no’.” She’s often surprised the British public isn’t “up in arms about the relationship between the political class and the media class”. But maybe it’s no surprise since most of the British public aren’t aware.

Today’s take home message is this: media literacy should be taught in schools. In election times, the case for this is unshakeable. It took us until journalism Masters level to learn that our press’ partisanship is a parody around the world – it appears our papers are the only ones not joking about it.

Media Storm’s latest episode ‘Party-lines or headlines? General election, GenZ and propaganda in the papers’is out now.