What did Europe ever do to the British press? Whatever it was, it was bad enough to guarantee decades of the kind of coverage normally reserved for serial killers and water companies. On increasingly right-dominated social media platforms, it’s pitchforks at Dover.
Now, Keir Starmer has stepped into the flames with his plans for a European “reset” – otherwise known, depending on which title you read, as “shameless… worst case scenario” (the Daily Express), “Brexit betrayal” (the Daily Mail) or “Brexit surrender” (the Sun). The Times did quietly concede: “Improving relations with the EU after years of rancour would be positive.” The Guardian sniped that, “Britain’s interests are served by restoring ties that should not have been severed in the first place.” The BBC, terrified to the point of paralysis by criticisms of its Brexit coverage, is sticking rigidly to bothsiderism.
The Prime Minister is not so foolish as to imagine there will be much support among the press for closer EU relations – regardless of the £140bn economists calculate Brexit has cost our economy. This debate has always had less to do with facts and figures, and more to do with feelings – feelings that, of course, were stirred by the media.
Research shows that people in Liverpool voted Remain by significantly higher percentage (58.2) than the rest of England because, since the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, its residents have engaged in an almost total boycott of the Sun. Working-class readers turned instead to the more pro-European Mirror or gave up on papers entirely. They were saved almost two decades of relentlessly negative coverage about bendy bananas, imperial measurements and euro-mountains.
King of the bendy-banana stories in the early 1990s was the Telegraph’s young Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson, who filed countless stories only vaguely adjacent to the truth. (One, “Italy fails to measure up on condoms”, falsely claimed Brussels bureaucrats were rejecting attempts by Italian manufacturers to reduce the width of condoms.) Emma Tucker, then Johnson’s counterpart on the Times and now editor of the Wall Street Journal, has talked about the frustration of dealing with furious newsdesk calls demanding she follow up a Johnson exclusive – only to find the tale had been spun out of nothing. Still, Johnson helped foster anti-European sentiment in a generation.
Old habits die hard, and recently Johnson was back in his Daily Mail column saying Starmer was planning to hand back control to Brussels, before urging readers to “fight, fight and fight again for the freedoms the people voted for in 2016”.
And yet last week a YouGov poll on behalf of Best for Britain showed people in every constituency in England, Scotland and Wales backed closer ties to the EU than the US. Could this be the moment the Europe debate reveals how out of touch swathes of the British press has become?
NBC News, National Public Radio (NPR), the New York Times and Politico are being asked to move out of their Pentagon offices, and will be replaced by One America News Network (OANN), Breitbart, the New York Post and HuffPost. That’s one of the US’s biggest broadcasters, NBC, replaced by OANN, a far-right network that was estimated as having a pitiful 14,000 viewers in 2019, and has been mired in lawsuits for broadcasting lies about the 2020 election. And that’s NPR replaced by the far-right Breitbart, once run by the former Trump svengali Steve Bannon.
The Pentagon – which is now under the control of defence secretary (and former Fox News host) Pete Hegseth – is saying there’s nothing untoward. The moves are all part of a new “annual media rotation programme” under which all outlets will get their turn in the coveted work spaces.
But this is Trump’s assault on the independent media in action. Kevin Baron, a former vice-president of the Pentagon Press Association, says it is “the erasure of journalism at the Pentagon”. The next four years will be a war of attrition between the Trump administration and those journalists intent on holding it to account.
Along with many companies, Amazon pulled ads from X in 2023 because, well, why would anyone want to promote their brand in a toxic dung hole? Elon Musk is now bringing legal cases against brands that withheld their business, such as Lego and Nestlé. But Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has reportedly chosen this moment to increase its ads on X. You really can judge a billionaire by the company he keeps.
The actor Toby Jones did more than most to make the British public care about the Post Office Horizon scandal. Could he do the same for phone hacking at Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers?
Bosses were relieved by the settlement with Prince Harry and the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson last month. But a compelling drama about hacking played out in the nation’s front rooms could be far more damaging. In the upcoming seven-part ITV series The Hack, David Tennant will play Nick Davies, the Guardian journalist who investigated hacking at the News of the World from 2002 until the paper’s closure in 2011. Jones will star as Alan Rusbridger, then editor of the Guardian. He may lack eight inches of Rusbridger’s height, but has a likeability which could give the scandal new impetus.
[See also: Sara Sharif and the case for transparency]
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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI