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The Media is Displaying the Same Blind Spots that Allowed the Conservatives to Push Britain to the Brink

The British press’ selective scrutiny of the new Government is letting the country down, writes Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes

This is a free preview from the November print edition

The good news is that the rest of the media finally seems to have opened its eyes. For the past five years, Byline Times and other independent media outlets such as openDemocracy have documented a flood of conflicts of interest around the previous Conservative Governments.

We checked procurement contracts, the Register of MPs’ Interests, donations declared to the Electoral Commission, and stacks of shell companies in Companies House to discover what amounted to a carousel of cronyism and corruption – up to £4 billion in COVID contracts to Conservative associates and donors alone.

The bad news is that, in the first three months of the new Labour Government, much of the established press is displaying the same blind spots that enabled successive Conservative Governments to leave Britain on the brink.

These blind spots do not only relate to the selective holding of power to account, but also the wider, toxified political-media culture which the press contributes to creating – while denying that it is a power structure wielding considerable influence over the society in which we live.

The mendacity we have seen from those in positions of power, in all forms, in recent years has degraded our democracy. With Keir Starmer pledging a ‘government of service’ to clean up the mess, the same media outlets that turned a blind eye to corrupting governance under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, now appear more than happy to fix a firm eye on the very issues they for so long ignored.   

The alleged Taylor Swift furore swirling around Westminster’s lobby journalists and tabloid front pages, as this edition of Byline Times went to press, is a case in point. 

The Sun, the Daily Mail, Sky News, and the BBC all saw fit to lead on an allegation that the Home Secretary ‘pressured’ the Metropolitan Police to provide a blue-light escort for the American pop superstar when her Eras tour came to the capital, with the Prime Minister – who attended Swift’s concert with his wife (a so-called ‘freebie’ he later paid for) – meeting the singer and her mother for 10 minutes after the show as an apparent ‘thank you’. Scandal unbounded.

The Prime Minister then said he only met Swift to speak about the terrible murder of three young children attending a ‘Swifties’ dance workshop in Southport on 29 July, which sparked this summer’s unprecedented racist riots. Details of increased police security for Swift were also only in discussion after a terror threat at her previous Eras concert in Vienna, it emerged.

We at Byline Times are proud to act as watchdogs of politicians who are paid for by the public purse. So it is only relevant to point out that – funnily enough – the rest of the mainstream press was completely silent three years ago, when it emerged in court that then Home Secretary Priti Patel had ‘pressured’ the Met to end an Extinction Rebellion protest outside the newspaper works owned by Rupert Murdoch. Patel was one of only two politicians to attend Murdoch’s 2016 wedding to Jerry Hall and, of course, he and his executives paid more visits to Downing Street under the Conservatives than Taylor Swift has album tracks. 

Could it be that some American influencers are more awkward to talk about than others?

The problem is that today’s headlines often erase yesterday’s, and a sense of proportion is lost. Every supposed Labour ‘sleaze scandal’ is the result of valid public disclosures of gratuities and gifts, and appears negligible compared to the torrent of sinecures, crony contracts, and other questionable disbursements that occurred under the last administration. 

Nevertheless, what our Political Editor Adam Bienkov calls the ‘great noticing’, is still useful for all the hyperbole. There are structural problems with party finances and the corporate lobbying around Parliament which threaten to divert Labour as much as the Conservatives. 

One way to keep a sense of proportion, and counter the widening cynicism that ‘all politicians’ are just ‘in it for themselves’, is to identify and remedy those structural problems. Unfortunately, most of the established press is incapable of providing such a public service – because much of it is itself a prime example of this structural failure. 

As the papers focus on Angela Rayner’s DJing skills, Victoria Starmer’s dresses, or where the Prime Minister’s son revised for his exams, they are not only personalising things – holding power hostage rather than to account – but deliberately neglecting matters of much more importance, which get buried beneath these hyped-up ‘scandals’.

Where is the in-depth coverage of Israel’s near destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, after 70 kilotons of munitions have been dropped on it during the last year, with material British aid and assistance? 

Where is any mention of Brexit, which a rapidly diminishing proportion of the electorate now supports, as it continues to stifle much-needed growth in the UK economy? 

Where is the ever-present threat of Russian electoral interference, as the former head of MI6 recently admitted that Brexit was “intended” to “marginalise” the UK as part of Vladimir Putin’s plot against the West? 

Where is the discussion of what Labour will do to address widening inequality in this country, and how poverty, and populist urges, are to be tackled when it comes to economic hardships and economic grievance?

Strikingly, much of the news industry has revealed itself to be in turmoil following this year’s General Election. 

Cuts to BBC News and investigations continue apace. Hedge funder and GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall has taken over the Spectator, the new Editor of which is lead Brexiter Michael Gove. We still have to see if the right-wing owner of the New York Sun will take over the Telegraph. The Observer appears to be up for sale – but to the loss-making owners of Tortoise

With so much of the news industry making losses, it is easy prey to billionaires and oligarchs, who often have their own crony connections to foreign governments in Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, Israel, and beyond. At best, funded this way, these news organisations are likely to display a wilful blindness towards the private interests of their paymasters, if not active complicity.

That is why we at Byline Times want to use this moment to thank our readers. You keep us independent and sustainable. You keep us honest and genuinely in the public interest. We are now looking at ways you can directly own part of Byline Times and be more involved as we take the banner of independent journalism further towards greater impact and accountability, to embody the values that matter to us all.

Watch this space.  



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