Perceptions are all-important when it comes to politics, not only how the body politic views the candidate, but how they see themselves. The collective media plays a hugely important role in both these cases.
With the increase in 24-hour news accessible from anywhere at any time via smartphones, this has never been truer. A breaking story now reaches more people, faster than at any other time in history.
In the UK, rhetoric reigns supreme, tabloid newspapers (whether online or offline) being the number one source of news consumption. These papers sell their print copies and their online ad spaces with sensationalism.
The more attention grabbing the headline, the more extreme the viewpoint, the greater the profit margins. This is all achieved with little to no risk to the papers themselves.
In the name of freedom of the press, they have been allowed to “self-regulate” for years. This led to widespread abuse of privacy by investigative journalists with no risk of real repercussions, culminating in the “hacking” of a murdered teenager’s phone to access her voicemail messages in the hope of breaking a story.
An independent inquiry was set-up by the judiciary which presented shocking findings in 2012 of intrusion into the privacy of thousands of people, from celebrities to grieving parents of murdered or missing children.
The report also found that the current system of regulation was woefully inadequate. This led to one of the country’s most prominent newspapers to close its doors permanently pending criminal investigations into its senior management.
The result of this was the introduction of a Royal Charter for press regulation to create an independent body to issue fines and require prominent apologies for inaccurate reporting. How useful this system will be is yet to be seen, since, in an extremely media-savvy move, the government changed the bill at the last minute delaying the introduction of the body until after the general election.
This has led to the Daily Mail’s website, arguably the most sensationalist popular newspaper, a newspaper renowned for its barely concealed racism, homophobia and panic-peddling xenophobia, being the most visited English-language news site in the world.
But what does this mean for public perceptions? What happens when a society is bombarded day to day with sensationalist stories that have little basis in fact or are one-off cherry-picked examples peddled as the norm? The result is an extreme gap between reality and perception.
On average, people think 41% of the welfare budget goes to people who are unemployed, the actual figure is 3%. People assume that 27% of welfare is claimed fraudulently, the real figure is 0.7%. When asked what percentage of girls between 15 and 19 give birth each year, becoming a “dreaded” teenage mother, the average estimate is 16%! The real rate is a rather more normal 3%.
Combine this with a global recession, a crippling austerity program and voter apathy accelerated by a move to the centre ground of politics by all parties, and you have a recipe for the rise of extremism.
It’s no coincidence that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) running on a nationalist, anti-immigration platform were last week officially declared a “major party” by Ofcom (our media regulator), granting them legitimacy and free election broadcasts on the BBC, not to mention inclusion in the televised debates.
The Green Party was not offered the same honour however, even though their membership currently stands higher than UKIP. The Green Party policies obviously don’t have the same amount of attention-grabbing, newspaper-selling sensationalism as the far-right does.
