Same news event, two very different ways of covering it!
The way the Sun and the Mirror covered yesterday’s news about Dominic Cummings’ trip to Durham during Lockdown when he and his wife had Coronavirus symptoms demonstrates the clear biases of the two newspapers.
These are great examples of media bias for the media topic within A-level sociology .
The Right Wing Sun
Donald Cummings has strongly neoliberal views and was very pro-brexit (hence why he’s been working with Boris), as is The Sun.
So what how does the Sun ‘set the agenda’: It goes with another headline and gives us a small headline on Cummings – and notice the quote – from Cummings, and a defiant sub title from The Sun.
The Left Wing Mirror
The Mirror, in stark contrast to The Sun devotes the whole page the Cummings story, and note the main text – ‘No Regrets’, ‘No Apology’ – implying that’s what we were expecting, given that he’s clearly broken the law, as we’re reminded top right.
Note that The Sun doesn’t even mention this – it’s just Cummings ‘doing what is right’ – already taking us away from what he did.
And there’s similar examples of bias in the full storys on pages 4-5 of both newspapers
The Sun…
The Sun reminds us that Cummings ‘did not break the law’ and then focuses on just copying word for word what Cummings said, reiterating and thus justifying his point of view.
The Mirror
Starts off with a quote from an expert and the article here is more on other people’s comments and the negative affects (masses of people on the beach)
So, same event, two very different versions which clearly show how biased the media is, and how they clearly use agenda setting to try and sway the public’s opinion.
Is the UK biased against the conservatives? How do we even measure this?
More conservatives complained to the BBC about anti-Tory bias in its 2019 election coverage than Labour supporters complained about there being an anti-Labour bias. (Source).
This trend is consistent with complaints about bias received by the BBC throughout 2019 – most complaints were from conservatives, complaining about the BBC being anti-Tory or anti-Boris – especially The Today Progamme, Andrew Marr Show and Newsnight.
However, the above analysis is based on formal written complaints, which is not a valid indicator of the nature or extent of bias in the media – there may have been more complaints on Twitter and Facebook about the BBC being pro-Tory in its election coverage, but these aren’t ‘formal’ complaints and so don’t need to be dealt with by the BBC.
Hence we need to treat the above figures with caution, especially when Tory voters tend to be older, and Labour voters tend to be younger – the former are more likely to make formal written complaints, the later more likely to take to social media.
Writing in the Observer, Peter Oborne calls out the BBC for being biased towards to Tories and against Labour, so there is definitely a difference in subjective opinions over what counts as bias.
NB – sociologically speaking, all of the above should be dismissed as subjective value judgments – there is nothing factual about the nature or extent of bias in the BBC in any of this!
Is it possible to measure political bias in the BBC objectively?
For the BBC as a whole, probably not, because it’s so difficult to measure agenda setting – what’s kept out of the news, which is itself ideological.
Where the narrow news agenda is concerned I guess any attempt to objectively measure bias would need to focus on specific programmes – say Newsnight, where one could count the air time given to different guests, and the kind of interaction between the presenter and the guests too, and the amount of time given to pro-Tory and pro-Labour issues.
However, the later is tricky – although inequality is more of a Labour issue, is devoting half a Newsnight programme to it biased towards Labour? It’s still something the Tories have to deal with.
Also, how do decide whether a presenter ‘asking hard questions’ is biased against an interviewee or just doing their job?
In short, it’s difficult to measure bias on Live T.V. shows, much easier in News Papers.
Examples of right wing media bias from the filthy Daily Mail, from the 2019 general election.
There’s nothing quite like a General Election to reveal the bias in mainstream newspapers, which is a major topic within the media option for A-level sociology.
I mean, we all know that the mainstream news is biased, but during elections, any attempt to report political events in a fair or neutral way just seems to disappear altogether.
In the case of the the UK’s most widely circulated, and most offensive, newspaper, The Daily Mail, even the most cursory discourse analysis reveals a very strong pro Tory and anti Labour stance, often framed as ‘pro-Bexit and anti-Brexit, and also often personablised as pro Boris and anti Corbyn.
Below are a few examples from the filth that is the Daily Mail.
‘Vote Boris’
I mean could the pro Tory bias be any clearer?!?
Corbyn in the Dock
Corbyn on trial – implies he’s done something so wrong as to be accused of being a criminal. And next to it an assertion by Boris presented as truth.
Labour’s Brexit Portrayal
So here the headline moves away from the personal attacks, but we’re back to it underneath – with a ‘sneering’ Corbyn, implying he’s somehow evil and arrogant, not caring about the people.
Corbyn’s Two Fingers to Leavers…
This is probably the most disgusting headline of all: as if Jeremy Corbyn is that flippant about how leavers feel, and as if the issue is that simple.
And finally: how to help the Torys win…
Conclusions
Mainstream newspapers may be less well circulated than ever, but they do offer a very easy insight into just how biased they can be. And if this bias is in the print version, you can be it’s in the online versions, and not just at election times, although at less fraught times, the bias will be a lot subtler!
The polls clearly show that most people think Boris will be a strong leader, and a different type of leader to previous PMs, but not in a good way: most people don’t trust Boris and think he’s going to make a terrible Prime Minister….
Most people think he’ll be a different type of leader…
But almost 60% of people don’t trust Boris
One of the more creative questions was what Hogwarts House Boris Johnson would be in – no surprise that 42% of the population put him in Slytherin – which values ambition and cunning.
We need to treat these results with caution: the negative responses may be because of the lack of say most people have had over Boris being elected, or about the lack of any kind of progress over Brexit.
In other words, people may not be expressing their dissatisfaction with Boris in particular, but possibly at the whole of the inept political class in general!
Having said that, I’m not going to dismiss criticism of Boris: he is an Eton educated millionaire who seems to be prepared to lie and spin his way to the top, always putting his own personal ambition ahead of anything else.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, seems to be firmly against corporate greed and Tory neoliberal policies which allow Corporations the freedom to exploit workers.
His explicitly political stance against mainstream political and economic institutions seems to be a good example of a religious leader getting involved in political conflict.
At the Trade’s Union conference Just last week Welby described zero hours contracts as ‘the reincarnation of an ancient evil’ and accused Amazon of avoiding tax and ‘leaching’ off the public.
The Archbishop seems to be firmly in the ‘Jeremy Corbyn camp’: he has been speaking out against Tory austerity policies since he took up office in 2013. He has consistently criticized modern capitalism and tory welfare cuts; and has previously stated that he wanted to see the payday loan company Wonga put out of business (so at least he’s got something to be happy about!).
Welby probably has a lot of direct experience to draw on: all over the country Church of England churches have been setting up food banks and acting as night shelters for the homeless, effectively playing a role in filling the Tory’s welfare gap.
Relevance to A-level sociology…
This seems to be a great example of a major religious leader standing up for the poor, in the tradition of Liberation Theology.
Potentially this is religion acting as a source of conflict… here Welby is railing explicitly against mainstream political and economic institutions.
This is most definitely NOT an example of religion acting as a conservative force: this is a religious leader demanding radical change.
Final thoughts….
There is possibly an element of hypocrisy to Welby’s views: The Church of England itself has shares in Amazon, and even uses zero hours contracts.
This further suggests that Welby’s views might be out of step with the rest of the Church of England. Maybe the views of this one individual are genuine, but maybe he actually has any real power to really bring about any kind of far reaching, radical social change?
‘nudge politics’ involves governments implementing small social policy measures to help people make the ‘right decisions’. This post considers some of the pros and cons of this type of social policy agenda.
The idea behind ‘Nudge’ was that by exploiting traits of ‘human nature’ such as our tendencies to put of making decisions, or to give into peer pressure, it was possible to ‘nudge’ people into making certain decisions.
10 years on, it seems that government all over the world have applied ‘nudge theory’ to achieve their desired outcome. They have managed to implement some relatively ‘small scale’ social policies and make huge savings at little cost to the public purse.
In the U.K. for example, David Cameron set up the Behavourial Insights Team (or Nudge Unit) which seems to have had some remarkable successes. For example:
Reminder letters telling people that most of their neighbours have already paid their taxes have boosted tax receipts. This was designed to appeal to the ‘heard instinct’.
The unit boosted tax returns from the top 1% (those owing more than £30K) from 39% to 47%. To do so they changed their punitive letter to one reminding them of the good paying taxes can do.
Sending encouraging text messages to pupils resitting GCSEs has boosted exam results. This appeals to the well-recognised fact that people respond better to praise.
Sending text messages to jobseekers reminding them of job interviews signed off with ‘good luck’ has reduced the number of missed interviews.
As with so many public-policy initiatives these days, the Behavourial Insights Team is set up as a private venture, and it now makes its money selling its ‘nudge policy’ ideas to government departments around the world.
The Limitations of Nudge Politics
Methodologically speaking there are a at least three fairly standard problems:
Firstly, the UK’s nudge unit hasn’t been in place long enough to establish whether these are long-term, ’embedded success’.
Secondly, we don’t really know why ‘nudge actions’ work. The data suggests a correlation between small changes in how letters are worded and so on and behaviour, but we don’t really know the ‘why’ of what’s going on.
Thirdly, I’m fairly sure there aren’t that many controlled trials out there which have been done to really verify the success of some of these policies.
Theoretically there are also quite a few problems:
The book and the ‘team’ above both talk in terms of ‘nudging’ people into making the ‘right decisions’… but who decides what is right? This theory ignores questions of power.
It also could be used towards very negative ends… in fact I think we’ve already seen that with the whole Brexit and Trump votes….. I’m sure those campaigns used nudge theory to manipulate people’s voting outcomes. It doesn’t take a massive swing to alter political outcomes today after all!
Finally, I cannot see how you are going to be able to ‘nudge’ people into making drastic changes to save the planet for example: I can’t imagine the government changing the message on its next round of car tax renewal letters to include messages such as: ‘have you ever thought about giving up the car and just walking everywhere instead? If you did so, the planet might stand a chance of surviving!’.
Final thoughts: the age of the ‘nudge’?
I think this book and this type of ‘steering politics’ are very reflective of the age we live in. (The whole theory is kind of like a micro-version of Anthony Giddens’ ‘steering the juggernaut’ theory.) This is policy-set very much favoured to career politicians and bureaucrats who would rather focus on ‘pragmatic politics’. It’s kind of like what realism is to Marxism in criminology theory: not interested in the ‘big questions’.
I just cannot see how this kind of politics is going to help us move towards making the kind of drastic social changes that are probably going to be required to tackle the biggest problems of our times: global warming, militarism, inequality, refugees for example.
Surveys which ask how people intend to vote in major elections seem to get it wrong more often than not, but why is this?
Taking the averages of all nine first and then final polls for the UK general election 2017, the predictions for the Conservatives show them down from 46% to 44%; and Labour up from 26% to 36%.
The actual vote share following the result of the general election shows the Conservatives at 42% and Labour at 40% share of the vote.
Writing in The Guardian, David Lipsey notes that ‘The polls’ results in British general elections recently have not been impressive. They were rightish (in the sense of picking the right winner) in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010. They were catastrophically wrong in 1992 and 2015. As they would pick the right winner by chance one time in two, an actual success rate of 67%, against success by pin of 50%, is not impressive.’
So why do the pollsters get it wrong so often?
Firstly, there is a plus or minus 2 or 3% statistical margin of error in a poll – so if a poll shows the Tories on 40% and Labour on 34%, this could mean that the real situation is Tory 43%, Labour 31% – a 12 point lead. Or it could mean both Tory and Labour are on 37%, neck and neck.
This is demonstrated by these handy diagrams from YouGov’s polling data on voting intentions during the run up to the 2017 UK general election…
Voting Intention 2017 Election
Seat estimates 2017 General Election
Based on the above, taking into account margin for error, it is impossible to predict who would have won a higher proportion of the votes and more seats out of Labour and the Tories.
Secondly, the pollsters have no way of knowing whether they are interviewing a representative sample.
When approached by a pollster most voters refuse to answer and the pollster has very little idea whether these non-respondents are or are not differently inclined from those who do respond. In the trade, this is referred to as polling’s “dirty little secret”.
Thirdly, the link between demographic data and voting patterns is less clear today – it used to be possible to triangulate polling data with demographic data from previous election results, but voter de-alignment now means that such data is now less reliable as a source of triangulating the opinion polls survey data, meaning pollsters are more in the dark than ever.
Fourthly, a whole load of other factors affected people’s actual voting behaviour in this 2017 election and maybe the polls failed to capture this?
David Cowley from the BBC notes that…. ‘it seems that whether people voted Leave or Remain in 2016’s European referendum played a significant part in whether they voted Conservative or Labour this time…. Did the 2017 campaign polls factor this sufficiently into the modelling of their data? If younger voters came out in bigger numbers, were the polls equipped to capture this, when all experience for many years has shown this age group recording the lowest turnout?’
So it would seem that voting-intention surveys have always had limited validity, and that, if anything, this validity problem is getting worse…. after years of over-estimating the number of Labour votes, they’ve now swung right back the other way to underestimating the popularity of Labour.
Having said that these polls are not entirely useless, they did still manage to predict that the Tories would win more votes and seats than Labour, but they just got the difference between them oh so very wrong.
The problem of obtaining representative samples (these days)
According to The Week (July 2017) – the main problem with polling these days is that finding representative samples is getting harder… When Gallup was polling, the response rate was 90%, in 2015, ICM had to call up 30 000 numbers just to get 2000 responses. And those who do respond are often too politically engaged to be representative.
In the recent June 2017 General Election, Labour won more votes than it did in 2001, 2005, 2010 or 2015, proving almost all the forecasts and commentators wrong.According to this Guardian article there are three main reasons for this…
It motivated young people to get out and vote.
A lot’s been made of the historically high turnout by 18-24 year olds…. It looks like in key constituencies – from Harrow West to Canterbury (a seat that has been Conservative since 1918) – the youth vote was vital. Labour showed it cared about young people by promising to scrap tuition fees, an essential move to stop the marketisation of higher education, and it proposed a house-building programme that would mean many more could get on the property ladder.
This is in stark contrast to the two other major parties – the Lib Dems in 2010 under Nick Clegg lied to them, and the Conservatives have attacked them – cutting housing benefits for 18- to 21-year-olds, excluding under-25s from the minimum wage rise and slashing the education maintenance allowance. At this election, Theresa May offered nothing to young people in her manifesto. Their message was: put up with your lot. Under the Tories, young people have been taken for granted and sneered at as too lazy to vote.
The NUS reported a 72% turnout by young people, and there is a definite thread in the media attributing the swing towards Labour as down to this.
However, this is contested by Jack Sommors in this article who suggests that it was middle-aged people who swung the election result away from the Tories.
‘Lord Ashcroft’s final poll, which interviewed 14,000 people from Wednesday to Friday last week, found people aged 35 to 44 swung to Labour – 50% voted for them while just 30% voted for the Tories. This is compared to 36% of them voting Labour and 26% backing the Tories just two years ago’.
A further two reasons which might explain the swing, let’s say among the younger half of the voting population, rather than just the very youngest are:
Labour offered localised politics, not a marketing approach
Labour rejected the marketing approach to politics in favour of a strong, localised grassroots campaign… this was not simply an election May lost; it was one in which Corbyn’s Labour triumphed. Labour proposed collectivism over individualism and a politics that people could be part of.
Labour offered a genuine alternative to neoliberalism…
Labour offered a positive agenda to an electorate that’s been told its only choice is to swallow the bitter pill of neoliberalism – offering a decisive alternative to Tory austerity in the shape of a manifesto packed with policies directly challenging what has become the economic status quo in the UK. Labour no longer accepted the Tory agenda of cuts (a form of economics long ago abandoned in the US and across Europe): it offered investment in public services, pledged not to raise taxes for 95% of the population, talked about a shift to a more peaceful foreign policy, promised to take our rail, water and energy industries out of shareholders’ hands and rebalance power in the UK.
So how is this relevant to A-level Sociology…?
In terms of values…It seems to show a widespread rejection of neoliberal ideas among the youth, and possibly evidence that neoliberal policies really have damaged most people’s young people’s (and working class people’s) life chances, and this result is a rejection of this.
In terms of the media… It’s a reminder that the mainstream media doesn’t reflect public opinion accurately- just a thin sliver of the right wing elite. It also suggests that the mainstream media is losing its power to shape public opinion and behavior, given the negative portrayals of Corbyn in the mainstream. .
Value-Freedom and explaining election results…
The above article is written with a clearly left-leaning bias. Students may like to reflect on whether it’s actually possible to explain the dramatic voter swing towards Labour objectively, and how you might go about getting valid and representative data on why people voted like they did, given that there are so many possible variables feeding into the outcome of this election?!
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The idea behind ‘Nudge’ was that by exploiting traits of ‘human nature’ such as our tendencies to put of making decisions, or to give into peer pressure, it was possible to ‘nudge’ people into making certain decisions.
