Most people, if they read a paper at all, read only one. Try this experiment. On a single day, walk into a supermarket and look at the headlines on all the papers, including as wide a range as you can find. It will be obvious that:
Not all major stories appear in all papers.
Even when papers make the same choices, they might put stories in a different order of importance.
The way they tell a story may be radically different, leading to very different conclusions.
It is not just a simple matter of party loyalty, with PM has brilliant idea in one but PM does very stupid thing in another. They have very different views of what the world looks like, how it works, what matters and how we should understand it. They know what their readers want to hear about and that is what they tell them about. They know what their readers tend to like, believe and tolerate and won’t, on the whole, want to upset them with radically different views. You might see this as cynical manipulation of a passive market, but (a) the journalists might very well believe what they say because that is also how they see the world and (b) many readers probably know their paper has an ‘angle’ but they like it, and they believe, rightly or wrongly, they can see through it if they need to.
Now compare those newspapers with the television and radio headlines. Some stories won’t be on t.v. because there are no pictures to go with it. Radio might give it much longer as it can just ‘phone in a report at the last minute. The way media technologies work will affect what stories appear and how they are told.
And note we are speaking again of ‘stories’, shape-making stories that ignore some data and present other data in a certain way to make sense of what might otherwise be random stimuli. If a big story breaks (soccer star in bath with his best friend’s wife) then other people start looking for stories to go with it, or similar stories. But what does it matter? Because he or she is unfaithful? Because it was the night before the big match? Because he lied and was then caught out? Because he was being blackmailed? First you decide if it is a story at all, then you decide what kind of story it is, then you look for more stories like it or related to it (best friend has had no bath for two months, referee caught in shower with coach etc).
This becomes more serious when we consider, for example, how media outlets owned by rich private individuals can create a sustained attempt to silence a point of view:
To conclude, the degree of viciousness and antagonism with which the majority of the British newspapers have treated Corbyn is deemed to be highly problematic from a democratic perspective. If, as the British philosopher Onora O’Neill (2002) also argued, the high degree of media power needs to be accompanied by a high degree of media and democratic responsibility, is it then acceptable that the majority of British newspapers uses its mediated power to attack and delegitimise the leader of the largest opposition party against a rightwing government to such an extent and with such vigour?
Academic”Report”on”Journalistic”Representations”of”Jeremy”Corbyn – p12 (link to full pdf here)
Opinion differs on how far traditional media influence voting patterns, although there is obviously a serious debate to be had here. What is very clear is that the relatively new social media raise more issues of a different kind.
Next page: Social media analysis (fake news and technology)