The Media in UK Politics

[Music] Welcome to another episode of the Politics Shed Podcast. This time we're going to look at the impact of the media, in particular the way the media might influence the outcome of general elections. It is easy to believe that the media has a great deal of impact indeed on how we vote, but is this true? There are a number of reasons why we tend to think the media has maybe more influence than it does. First, the media is all around us. We live in that media-saturated society that is often claimed. There's more media, more of a time, in more forms than ever before in human history. Secondly, the media tend to tell us that they're influential. They claim it, most famously in 1992 when the sun said it's the sun what one it, claiming to have swung the election for the conservatives. And a third point might be that it's through the media that we see the elections unfolding. We see politics through the media. Commentators in the media tell us what's happening. The media presented as a race, narrowing, widening, someone catching up, something changing, a gaff was made. It seems the fabric of the election, indeed politics itself, is shaped by the drama a narrative of the media. So surely, it must be hugely significant. So the media is the environment in which politics takes place. Politics is in effect, mediatized. So much so that today, it's difficult to imagine what politics might be like without the media. The old politics, the politics of personal relationships, taking place in corridors behind scenes, political intrigues in palaces. Today the politics or media politics takes place through, by and with the media. The media is the place where politicians speak to us. And we speak back to them through the proxy of journalists. Journalists are our spokesmen far more than our representatives are. They ask the questions we're anxious to ask. They put politicians on the spot in the way we never can. It's also the way politicians talk to each other, leaking information about each other, campaigning on their own behalf. We have just been through an election for the leader of the conservative party. To all intents and purposes, an organisation which is choosing a leader for itself. And yet, it used the media. The hustings were media events. The structure was taken place on television. Liz Trasse avoided too many interviews, which he soon act tried as much as possible to capture the headlines. The intrigue of politics that might have taken place behind closed doors many years ago now takes place in briefing rooms, in bars where something is mentioned to a journalist, in a leak, in sources. Or in straightforward self-representation. The media is also the place where politicians and governments get feedback. They see how policies are running. They manipulate and attempt to shape the media agenda, sometimes called spin. When bad news or bad statistics or disappointing statistics about the economy about to be released, politicians might try to mask this with announcements. Photo opportunities on showy foreign visits. Certainly, during Boris Johnson's struggle to hang on to his job, it seemed the best place for him to go was Kiev or Kiev and visit President Sylensky. The man of the hour, in the place of the hour, avoiding the headlines and shaping them. So in this sense, the media is several things. It's a window on the world through which we see the world. A world we can never experience in person politicians will never meet, we'll see before our eyes. It's also a signpost. It shows us the way things are going. It indicates the agenda. What we are concerned about. It's also a filter. In the sense that that which the media finds interesting. A dog bites a man, not the news. A man bites a dog, the news. The news is drama, the news is interesting, the news is a race. That goes through personalities rather than policies. So here's the big debate that's been raging ever since the first newspaper hit the stands. Well, the first pamphlet was handed out on a street corner. Is the media a mirror? We see the world reflected in it. Or is it a projector? And it makes the world we see. The philosopher Bojrilar, when asked what he thought about the first Gulf War, replied that it hadn't happened. Meaning the Gulf War, that phrase, that term, was a media construction. He had no idea what really happened. But the thing they called the Gulf War was shaped, made, created, and produced by the media. And a final way we might think of the media is as a necessary part of our constitution. It's the watchdog. It holds politicians to account more effectively than Parliament. It helps Parliament to function. It informs the people so they can make judgments on how to vote in a liberal democracy. If politics is something you wish to dispense with, then destroy the media. It's become a relationship where politics and the media happen. They are almost the same thing. In Russia today, Putin has very much destroyed the media, annihilating critical voices, using the media purely as a mouthpiece, purely as a projector, of a particular propaganda message. It's similarly true in China. In liberal democracies, then, a free media, free to do all the things we said, all the problematic things of shaping and manipulating and being manipulated, is politics and has become an indispensable part of politics. This brings us to the forms the media takes today. Newspapers, television, radio, and social media, the internet, the earliest of these are newspapers. Newspapers started their lives with the emergence of literacy among the population, and the ability to print, the printing press and a reading population, but used pamphlets and pamphletiers. Politics of the 17th and 18th century began as pamphlets being handed out on corners, pinned up on the doors of bars and pubs and inns. They happened external to politics itself. They weren't controlled by the government. In that sense, they formed around partisan groups, individuals who criticised the government. Sometimes salatiously, sometimes scandalously, with cartoons such as Gil Ray in the 18th century to grotesque representations of the king, or they were produced by supporters of the government arguing their case. In this sense, the history of British newspapers, indeed newspapers generally, is one of partisanship, particularly in the UK. The concept of the journalist uncovering the truth came rather later. The function of newspapers initially was to comment and criticise first and to inform later. However, a literate public expected to be informed. And quality newspapers, newspapers that wanted to meet the demand of a public that wanted to know what was happening, developed the concept of the informed journalist, of speed, a race to inform the public of the outcome of a battle could make the name of a newspaper and networks of journalists across the world. Sending their messages in carrier pigeons or later by telegraph became a feature of newspapers. First then, to comment and secondarily and soon just as importantly to inform, newspapers also were commercial enterprises that are to sell. Penny Dreadfuls, lurid pamphlets with grim images of murders such as jack the rippers exploits in the east end, or hangings, or scandals or crime, sold quite well, for a penny. So newspapers today can be said to comment, inform, and entertain. Newspapers in Britain are commonly divided between those serious newspapers, sometimes called the broadshifts, although mostly few of even the serious newspapers are printed in a broad sheet form. Most are printed in the form of the tabloid. But still the term tabloid means more emphasis on entertainment, on crime and cricket and crumpet. That's to say, on crime, sport and sex. That sells newspapers. So the broad sheets then and the tabloids distinguish between those newspapers who emphasize information and at least suggest some sense of objective reporting of the world's events. Although all newspapers in Britain are overtly partisan, the telegraph and the times tend to be conservative. The male and the express likewise. The son similarly conservative. The Guardian newspaper Liberal Left Wing. The Daily Mirror supports the Labour. They will declare their support for a particular party, lampoon and ridicule the other parties, a vertically, clearly with no suggestion that they are ashamed of their bias. And it is in this sense, as I said earlier, that newspapers will claim to sway the result of elections. How true is this? How influential are newspapers? The argument that newspapers have a huge influence on British politics is a particularly British argument, since the British are the world's great newspaper reading public. The heyday of newspapers, the mid-20th century, when millions of newspapers would deliver through millions of letterboxes every morning by paperboys and papergirls. The newspapers, being overtly partisan, often claimed, as I said before, to have swung the result of elections. 1979, headlines in the newspapers, "Crisis, what crisis?" Mocking James Callahan's apparent indifference to the winter of discontent was said to have swung the election, or at least influenced the election heavily, in favour of Mrs. Thatcher. Since Callahan put the election off from the autumn, when he might have won, to a less favourable spring, when he was forced to call the election. 1992, it was the sun what won it? Having lampooned. Neil Kinnick. More things head, do lightbulb and stating, "If Labour wins the election tomorrow, the last one out of the country turn out the lights." After the surprising victory of the Tories, the headline, "It's the sun what won it?" That was 1992. In 1997, Tony Blair determinedly sought the support of the Murdoch newspapers. That's the times, and the sun. The sun was then the most popular newspaper in Britain, and the most popular newspaper in the world. Blair sought the support of the Murdoch Empire, and gained it. And all of those newspapers supported Labour in 1997, producing, so they saw it, Labour's landslide victory. In 2017, the polling organisation Yugav reported that 74% of daily mail readers voted for the conservative party. Not only do newspapers claim to influence politics in terms of the results of elections by influencing our voting, but also by conducting media campaigns. In the 1970s, the scandal over the misuse of the drug philidamide, resulting in numerous birth defects in babies. The Times newspaper campaigned for compensation for the victims. The media campaign, resulting from the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the Black teenager, killed by a white gang in London, led to a public inquiry. A campaign, championed by the news of the world in 2000, led to Sarah's Law. After the murder of a child, Sarah Payne, the newspaper campaigned for the law, which would allow parents to apply to the police to be told information about people who had contact with their children. Newspapers then have an influence on public policy. They can direct public attention, magnify public interest, and shift the position of governments, resulting in new laws, or the abandonment of the policy. What influence do they have on elections? Apart from their claims, and the apparent influence of notable headlines, one thing is clear, newspapers aren't what they used to be. Since the heyday in the mid-20th century, newspaper, journalism, and newspapers themselves have declined significantly in number. The news of the world as long since disappeared. The independent is found only online, and the numbers of newspapers delivered through doors are steadily reduced. And the mighty sun newspaper that once dropped through three million letterboxes, now a little over one million. So now let's look at some of the claims that we reviewed before, some of the claims the newspapers made about those important headlines in moments at swinging elections. Back to 1979, James Callahan was actually far more popular than Mrs. Thatcher, consistently through the campaign. Crisis, what crisis, may not have influenced people so much as a legacy of loss of trust in Labour. The bailout by the IMF, the winter of discontent, these surveillance issues were rather than specific headlines. In 1992, it may have been Kinnick's personality, still a sense that Labour wasn't ready for government, or more importantly, that effectively there had been a change of government. John Major had replaced Mrs. Thatcher. People felt that there wasn't new start. In 1997, however, even though Blair now had the mighty Murdoch press on his side, he also had another legacy, and a loss of trust, and other valence issues. Black Wednesday, where the government seemed to have lost control of the economy, and for the first time, opinion polls from 1992 were showing that the Conservative Party were less trusted to run the economy than Labour. In the words of the famous aphorism, it's the economy stupid that really governs the way people vote. One piece of evidence that newspapers aren't as important as they like to think is 2017. Where headlines in the Sun newspaper, lampooning Corbin, or bin Corbin, and the Daily Mail's vigorous attack, giving many reasons why you shouldn't vote for Labour, so Labour's vote increase anyway, one of the highest votes it had for years. Do newspapers simply reflect their readers' interests? In other words, they know they're selling a product. In 1997, it may simply be that the newspapers under Murdoch recognised a mood change in the times, the arrival of a new Labour, a new Labour which was very popular, and therefore the papers were following the public. The Sun newspaper vigorously tore through much of the late 20th century, but in Scotland, the Scottish edition of the Sun supported Labour, because in Scotland, tourism and Conservative supporting newspapers weren't going to sell so well. That this all suggests that papers simply follow their readers, rather than changing their views. 41% of Sun readers don't vote Conservative, and indeed 20% of Sun readers don't think the newspaper has a particular bias. They're really not reading the Sun for its political views. It's now time to talk about the broadcast media. First radio. Now television and the internet. The internet, of course, is a very particular kind of broadcasting. We'll come to that later. One radio first appeared. The ability to talk to millions of people at the same time, who seem as really quite terrifying. If a speaker could work a crowd up into a frenzy, what might the radio do to an entire population? One of the earliest media theoretical models was the hyper-derning model, which says that information can be inserted into people's minds. Therefore, the power of propaganda, the ability to sway a population, needed to be regulated. In 1938, a radio broadcast by Orson Wells, made convinced thousands of New Yorkers to flee the city, fearing a Martian invasion. It's certainly possible that today many Russians believe the state version of the war in Ukraine, or that many thousands of people were convinced of the necessities of violence in Rwanda during the genocide. The power then of mass media shouldn't be underestimated. So from the beginning, the BBC and other broadcasting organisations are carefully licensed and restricted and operate within a regulatory framework. They must, above all, show no bias. They must present information in a balanced way. This makes them quite different from newspapers. Although, as we shall see later, the emergence recently of more overtly-biased broadcasting channels, such as Fox News and the United States, or the shock jocks in America. Certainly now in Britain. Radio shows, radio broadcasters, and UK TV can be more obviously biased, but the BBC is steadfastly objectively independent, and to a large extent is still trusted as giving an objective view of things. In the 50s and into the early 60s, politicians will treat you with great deference, simply asked to explain themselves, and during elections, other than reporting that there was an election occurring, no comment was made. The political parties are given equal or fair access to television. Depending on a formula relating to their support and the number of candidates, critics of the BBC's studiously balanced approach, or the fair access laws which give larger parties more access to television, and smaller parties less access, and emergent parties none at all, might suggest that rather than producing an unbiased world, it produces one that reinforces the establishment, maintaining a strict overt and window. The overt and window is an ocean devised by Joseph Overton in the 1960s, to suggest that there are certain topics that operate within a window of acceptability, those things that can be talked about. For instance, the National Health Service in the UK can indeed be talked about in the sense of more support, or who will look after the health service more effectively, to privatise the National Health Service, to abolish it, to replace it, is outside of the window. It can be argued that the effect of Mrs Thatcher and then Tony Blair's new Labour meant that during the 80s and 1990s and into the new century, left wing politics, nationalisation, the redistribution of wealth, was rather outside of the window. It is possible that in 2017 one of the legacies of Jeremy Corbyn is that some of those topics, such as re-nationalisation, are now acceptable to talk about. Now let's look at the way the broadcast media influences policy and influences the results of elections. In the US presidential election of 1960, John F. Kennedy went up against Richard Nixon. The presidential debate they conducted on television has subsequently become famous as an example of the impact of the media. Kennedy's handsome looks, his preference to wearing makeup, Nixon's nervous, anxiety and shifty appearance, was said to have swayed the election. TV debates and debates among leaders have become a feature of British elections. And TV moments, gaps, absurdities, accidents are often cited as a point in which in the election, the results of the election may have turned. In 1992, Neil Kinneck held an election rally just before, a few days before, the election itself. His hysterical repetition of it's all right and we're winning and the greatest day of his life appeared by many to have taken the election result of granted. Did it put people off? In 2010, the apparently reasonable centigrown taken by Nick Clegg in the three-way leader debate, producing a kind of Clegg Mania or to resumay's refusal to debate in 2017, an empty chair left on stage instead. In 2017 also, the BBC's soft interviews on the now show and the early evening revealed to resumay to be awkward, later described as the "maybot". Her suggestion that the naughtiest thing she'd done in life was run through a cornfield was widely ridiculed, Corbyn on the other hand, like Jam, Well and Elotmance, and seemed all together more reasonable and evancular than the left-wing firebrand the tabloids had suggested he was. Once again, as we said earlier with newspapers, the media do like to suggest that things happen because of them. But how important are election campaigns really? And indeed, how important are the media during those election campaigns? A pinion pole suggests that actually in the six weeks, or eight weeks of an election campaign most people don't change their minds, but end of the campaign pretty much as they started it. The big events, the gaps, the blunders and the stupidities probably don't have much effect. Overall, it's an issue of valence. It is often said that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And generally, the most important factor in elections is how people feel about themselves the economy. It is the economy's stupid. In 1979, the near-bankrupts of Britain and turning to the IMF for a bailout was heavy in people's minds as was the winter of discontent. In '83 the economy was picking up. In '87 the economy had yet turned down. In 1997, people remembered Black Wednesday when the British government lost control of the economy. And lost three billion in a day. Black mania in 2010 actually saw the liberals lose seats. And 2019 was primarily dominated by the issue of Brexit. And getting it done. Now before I get on to the topic of social media or new media, that's the internet and social media before I get on to that, it's probably worth just considering what we've learned so far. One thing it's fairly straightforward to learn is that it's very difficult to disentangle the role of the media from all the other influences on voting behaviour and political thought and political ideas. Clearly people influence by their age, their social background, their class, their locality and so on. The media then plays a role, but it's very difficult to determine exactly how decisive that role is. Certainly in elections it's probably not a decisive role. Social scientists and media theorists have adopted a number of models to try to understand the impact of the media. The most famous and one I mentioned earlier is the hypodermic model. It was a response to the Soviet Union, the Nazis and the thought that propaganda and brainwashing would be possible. A real fear that the media had a special kind of authority, especially the mass media radio television film, and that people could be instantly transformed and persuaded as if you could inject an idea into their heads like a hypodermic needle. Mostly this is rejected as simplistic. Certainly some people can be persuaded by very powerful things they see. By and large, most human beings aren't that easily persuaded. So other models have been adopted to try and explain what it exactly it is and what role it is the media plays in society. The reinforcement model suggests that people seek out the media that reinforces their beliefs. In other words, conservatives read the telegraph or the Sun, labor supporters read the Guardian or the Daily Mirror and in the United States if you're conservative, you watch Fox News and if you're more liberal, you watch NSNBC. This tells you what you want to hear. It reinforces your beliefs. It's very comforting for you to hear the things you think are true anyway. It gives you a reinforcement of your beliefs. When we come to look at the social media, the term echo chamber is often used, particularly since social media such as TikTok or Twitter use algorithms to send you the information that you seem to be interested in. Much has been lately thought about the impact that has on the polarization of politics, particularly the United States, but polarization of politics generally. People of a conservative disposition becoming more conservative, therefore more right wing and people of a left wing disposition becoming more left wing, since they seem to be more and more convinced of their own beliefs. So the reinforcement model in a sense through social media is becoming stronger. The marginal effects model, a third model of media influence, the marginal effects model suggests that while the media can't be said to determine the results of elections outright, it can certainly have a limited effect. One, two percent here or there, a close election might be influenced by media reporting. Third, important model of media behaviour or media effects might be the agenda framing model. This model suggests the media's real influence is to establish those things we are talking about. Those things which are in the news. The news is often about the things that are in the news. It sort of feeds on itself. Sometimes called the news cycle, or the issue attention cycle. Now the issue attention cycle is said to be what the people are interested in, that what the people are interested in, or what readers and listeners and viewers are interested in, is often what the media is themselves interested in. This is connected to the idea of the overt and window we mentioned earlier. Those things that are in the news, partygate under Boris Johnson, sleaze with John Major, immigration, crime, as best in response to a particular crime outrage. The things that are being talked about, and the ideological window, or rather issue window the things that can be talked about, may well be established rather more by the media than we like to think. This framing of the political agenda, or the focusing of the public's attention on issues, may be the greatest effect the media has. These four main models of media effects, the hypodermic model, the reinforcement model, the marginal effects model, the framing, agenda model, there are a number of subdivisions. For instance, the UCISN gratifications model is really a variation on the reinforcement model. That is, people use the media to reinforce their own beliefs, or people use the media for their own uses. People read the Sun for entertainment and sport, not primarily for politics. People watch the television, for entertainment, people read magazines, not for the political content, but for their particular interests that are pursued through the magazine. The UCISN gratification model suggests more empowerment to the audience. Another model that does this is the reception model, but the audience is far from passive, that people are not stupid. If I read the Sun, I know it's a conservative newspaper. I read it for its sport, maybe. Therefore, I might take an oppositional attitude to its politics. So, the reception model gives people a number of readings. There can be oppositional readings, or negotiated readings. There was accept some of it, but not others. You know it's partly false, or you say, "Well, you can't believe what you read in the press, can you?" You're critical in other words, and it may be that only a few people read the media uncritically, and simply accept what it says. There's some suggestion that in this media age, people are increasingly media literate. In other words, they expect things to be exaggerated, probably made up, probably lies, so they're much more cynical than they used to be. People are far less trusting of the things they see in here than they used to be. Or at least, we might hope so. The left has tended to be rather attracted by models which see the audience as rather passive, and it was easily swayed by dominant elites. And dominant ideologies, creating false consciousness. And the right has tended to lean towards the audience simply as a marketplace. People read what they want to read, and newspapers and media provide people with what the audience wants. However, every recent years, the right has also been rather attracted by the power of the media, seeing the dominant elites this time. Not as capitalism, but as the left, the literate. The liberal elites. This is particularly strong. Vain of thought, from people like Fox News. In fact, Fox News in the United States was set up deliberately in a sense, to counteract what they saw as the dominance of the media by the left and the liberals. Now, I'd like to look more directly at the new media, social media, the internet. The biggest change, of course, is that it's 24/7. It's always with us. There are no deadlines, no paperboys delivering newspapers or papergirls. There are no hold-the-front pages. It's always with us. If this is a good thing or a bad thing, we'll have already suggested. That these new forms of media, and they are really rather new, we're talking about the last decade or so, have led to polarisation and more extreme views, the production of conspiracy theories, particularly in the United States, but around the world. And generally, a sense that people can use them as echo chambers or as filter bubbles. People look at the media they wish to see. Optimists, and indeed they're still our optimists of the new media, look for a new public space. An unmediated news, not filtered through editors and biased newspapers, where people can find information they wish to find. Be more critical, be more informed than any human being in the history of well, information. Or are people disappearing into their own silos, simply reinforcing their own prejudices and beliefs, reinforced by algorithms, and really rather clever mechanisms for delivering the "hit" of information that most entertains. The media or the new media has provided politicians with a way of manipulating the news agenda directly and bypassing the news themselves, or at least directly manipulating the news. Twitter, for instance, has been used by Donald Trump as a way of creating the media agenda, setting the media weather. Trump once suggested that he could have shot someone in Times Square and still be popular. His idea was that anything he did was always news. As Aska Wild once suggested, there's only one thing worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about. What about the impact of the new media on elections? The first problem the new media is producing for elections is the problem of the origins of the information and the equity of access, access to television is strictly controlled in the UK. But access to the internet is uncontrolled, where the money's coming from, who's paying for the adverts, who's paying for the information, and who's behind the campaigns on the internet are all hidden at a lack of transparency in digital communication, is becoming increasingly apparent. The concern that political advertising is largely unregulated on the internet was reflected in January 2022 when the European data protection supervisor proposed regulations to ensure transparency in digital advertising across the EU. In the UK, the situation is somewhat different. The Communications Act of 2003 bans all political advertising on broadcast media, and this is enforced by off-com, the Office of Communications, and by the advertising standards authority, which regulates the honesty and truthfulness of advertising generally. But as of 2022, political advertising on the internet remains largely unregulated. In 1998, the Neil Committee on Standards in Public Life considered political advertising as part of their investigation into party funding. Parties should seek to adopt a new code of practice. The Electoral Commission, which is an independent body which regulates party and electrical funding, consulted on the issue in 2003, and in 2004 produced a report political advertising and recommendations, but argued that any regulation of political advertising on the internet should be voluntary. The principle reason that in the UK, social media and the internet are seen in the same light as newspapers. At a long tradition of freedom, of expression, in print advertising, and possible clashes with the Human Rights Act, mean there is hesitancy to regulate the internet and political advertising. The Electoral Commission statistics show that the proportion of money spent on digital advertising is steadily increased from 0.3% in 2011 to 42.8% in 2017. But that was just political advertising. Not including direct access to voters on social media, targeted advertising and targeted contacts. In a 2018 report, digital campaigning, increasing transparency for voters, the Commission made a series of recommendations, a change to the law so that digital material must have an imprint, saying who is behind the campaign and who created it. And to amend the rules for reporting and spending and make campaigners sub-divide the spending returns into different types of spending, these categories should give more information about the money spent on digital campaigns. And some digital and social media companies have voluntary introduced measures to improve transparency for voters. For instance, Facebook's ad library offers a searchable collection of all ads currently running across all products. And Twitter recently announced that it would be banning all political advertising globally. In the United States, Donald Trump was banned from Twitter. How Twitter will respond, under its new management, of Elon Musk. We'll have to wait to see. In a study of the media effects on the 2019 general election, by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University, authors Dr Richard Flescher, Nick Newman and Dr. Anne Schultz concluded that in fact, the big news wasn't so much polarisation as a lack of engagement. They wrote that while much elite and public debate during and after the election focused on the risks of political polarisation, their evidence suggests that young the voter spent just a few minutes a day on news sites suggests the real issue is lack of political engagement. Older people, use the news both online and traditional news sources far more than young people, and as campaigns went on all groups looked at the news less. And yet in another way, the use of the new media looks strangely familiar. With the BBC news accounting for the most, 28% of all time spent reading news stories during the election, but the mail online came next with 21%. And then the other newspapers in line of their traditional popularity, the Sun, the Mirror, the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent, in that order. But while at the beginning of the campaign, election news made up 51% of the stories most viewed by people on the internet, as the campaign continued, it declined to 24% by week five, with interest picking up again, after the results were announced. Another suggestion, social media and the new media would favour the Labour Party, or left-wing or radical groups of the left, because it was a young medium and viewed most commonly by young people, this is the evidence most based on observing young people spend a lot of time staring at their phones. In fact, it was older people who used the internet for news more than younger people, and the proportion of news looked at online favour the Conservatives, with 31 looking at Conservative endorsing websites, and 33% impartial, with only 12% of those surveyed looking directly at left-endourcing or labour-endourcing websites. Other key findings of this report suggest that despite hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on social media advertising by political parties, only around one in seven, that's 14% of the survey respondents, said they'd seen one of these political ads online, this compared with almost two-thirds, 63% who'd seen a political leaflet, and one in ten who'd received a visit from a political representative at home, 9% that is. Another finding was the people who used social media for news, accessed more online news sources during the campaign than those who did not. Similarly, those who say they used search engines to search for news topics were also found to access more different sources of news on average. This suggests that people who use social media for news consumed more news from opposing camps rather than less, which goes against the idea of silos and echo chambers. And finally, 2019, the Reuters study, suggests that around 35% of those who watch TV debates said these had helped them inform the decisions, so television is not dead yet, and possibly, at the impact of social media on elections may as yet not be that significant. Finally, it's time to conclude this podcast on the media and its impact on politics. It's important to note that the media is politics. It has a symbiotic relationship. Politicians need the media, the media need politicians. The media is both an obstacle to a politician, a fearful obstacle, Tony Blair describing the media as a "ravening beast". That was after he left office. Tony Blair was also noted as one of the most clever manipulators of the media. It's also a resource. The relationship, therefore, is one of manipulation and one which is adversarial. The media are attempting to expose to uncover, but also, they're attempting to entertain. In this sense, the media need politicians to sell newspapers, and politicians knowing this, as Donald Trump was so clever at doing, can manipulate the media. Photo opportunities, visits to hospitals, TV debates, create entertainment, which the media need, spin and manipulation. The media then is a watchdog, speaking truth to power, exposing, scrutinizing, informing, entertaining, agenda setting, and participating. Far from simply holding up a mirror to politics, the media is politics. Thank you for listening to this podcast. I hope you found it useful. Whether you came across this podcast on Spotify or Angkor or any other podcast provider, or you found it on the politics shed website, you might wish to look, rather more, the shed website, there's much more detailed information to support my observations on the impact of the media. Please search politics shed. [Music]