Category: Election Campaigns
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Rishi Sunak's cheerleaders in the UK's dominant Conservative supporting newspapers are urging on the government to press ahead faster and further with initiatives to drive wedges between Labour and the Tories ahead of the general election.
A champagne cork popped on The Sun’s front page (23.11.2023) as it applauded a tax cutting autumn statement that fired the starting gun for the 2024 campaign.
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After a lifetime’s interest in the way the news media can shape the outcome of general election campaigns, I am having to come to terms with a sea change in the way politics are reported and rethink so much of what I have written in the past.
Dramatic falls in the daily sales of Conservative-supporting newspapers -- and our near total reliance on smart phones and laptops -- has been transformative.
Increasingly news is communicated in headlines and delivered on social media, reducing the influence of carefully crafted newspaper campaigns and the impact of their front pages and political commentary.
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Keir Starmer’s previous backing for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is one of the few lingering lines of attack that can be exploited by Conservatives-supporting newspapers.
Having had to witness the Tories trashing their claim to financial prudence and currently mis-manage a worrying Winter of Discontent, the party’s tabloid cheerleaders are having to scrabble around to produce anti-Labour story lines.
Corbyn lives on as a threat to the country in the minds of Daily Mail headline writers.
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From the start of the Conservative leadership contest there was a bidding war on new policy initiatives with Liz Truss way out in front in offering what her supporters believed was a true Thatcherite agenda.
She promised the party membership she would implement a raft of punitive restraints on workers’ rights – a shopping list that was so far reaching and malevolent that it would have delighted Norman Tebbit.
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Further evidence has emerged about the damage inflicted to Labour’s 2019 general election campaign by the orchestration and manipulation of attack lines generated by Conservative-supporting newspapers that were then backed up on social media.
Unlike the 2017 campaign when Theresa May failed to take advantage of the ammunition being provided by her press cheerleaders, there was deadly synchronisation between Boris Johnson and the Corbyn-tormenting Tory tabloids.
At the start of the 2019 campaign a well-timed intervention by the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove helped to pivot the Johnson campaign on to territory where the Labour leader was especially vulnerable.