UK’s press barons are the other election loser

It’s a bad day to be a UK press baron. Fleet Street’s finest had lined up to endorse Theresa May ahead of an election that backfired badly for her.
Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid Sun, credited for swinging elections in the past, had called on Brits to keep Jeremy Corbyn’s “sinister Marxist gang” from power. Given the result could also jeopardize his effort to take over Sky Plc, there’s little wonder he was said to have done this:
The debacle underscores how the influence of Britain’s top media properties is waning. Newspaper readership has slumped over the past ten years, even if the Sun and Daily Mail still attract tens of millions of readers a month online and in print.
Social media was the real battleground the campaign, with targeted ads, Facebook live videos and political hashtags the weapons. Attack ads can go viral on social media far quicker than any editorial: look at how one anti-Corbyn video hit 300 views per minute in the wake of the terrorist attack on London.
In a world where political messages from cherished friends and followers are a dime a dozen, endorsements from traditional media will have trouble getting through to voters.
All this was true a year ago, though, when the Brexit vote went Murdoch’s way. The Sun called for Brits to vote to leave the European Union, and they did. But that may be to mistake cause and effect. It’s possible that the perceived influence of traditional media is really a canny sense of knowing which way the popular winds are blowing — or which side’s echo chamber has the biggest heft.
A week before the Brexit vote, Vote Leave’s Facebook page had 487,559 likes, more than Remain’s 474,409. Whether the tabloids won it or not, calling the referendum result right seemed to give added weight to the wave of strident, pro-May front pages that spewed forth.
So what’s different this time around?
Trust in all media has been on the wane, for one thing. The term “fake news” has gone global after elections in both the US and France were hacked, and it doesn’t seem to have spared the newspapers.
Voters are losing faith in established institutions: One survey published in January recorded the largest-ever drop in trust in media, government, business and non-governmental organizations. Five out of eight top U.K. papers are already seen as fairly or very right-wing, according to YouGov, which probably colors readers’ views of their endorsements.
The surprise of the campaign has been youth turnout. For whatever reason, a push by Labour on social media to encourage people to vote seems to have paid off. Turnout among 18 to 24 year olds may have been as high as 72 percent. More millennials tried to register to vote ahead of the election than before the 2015 election or Brexit referendum, according to Bloomberg News.
It’s notable that the one poll that forecast a Labour lead ahead of the vote was conducted by an ad-tech startup sending questionnaires to smartphones.
This U.K. election may not bring a political shake-up on the scale of Brexit, with Theresa May pushing to stay on as Prime Minister. But for the press, that seemingly psychic connection between the moguls of old and their readers has been severed. For billionaires who like to be listened to, that’s got to hurt.

— Bloomberg

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Gadfly columnist covering finance and markets. He previously worked at Reuters and Forbes