Like reconstituted chickens, culture wars and so much else that makes us sick and sad, it started in America. A once-healthy scepticism about bias and selective reporting has turned into demonisation and loathing. Members of the so-called mainstream media (or “MSM”) are conformist and censorious stooges, the story goes, conspiring together to keep the truth from the masses and to maintain the status quo. Supposedly the press’s traditional role of holding power to account is now occupied by lone-wolf social media users and disruptor-podcasters.
Today, we have a US president who has labelled the media an “enemy of the people”, incited crowds at rallies to jeer at the press pen and is threatening publications with legal and regulatory steps that will threaten their survival. Associated Press (AP) was banned from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico instead of Donald Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America”. As a result, AP – America’s foremost press agency for more than 170 years – was not in the Oval Office for Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent public mauling. Instead Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice – a channel that trades in right-wing conspiracy theories – was able to ask the Ukrainian leader why he wasn’t wearing a suit, to an appreciative wink from the US president.
Some publications are already choosing to temper their coverage and ingratiate themselves with Trump to avoid such an onslaught. The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has announced that the newspaper’s opinion section – previously home to a variety of political positions – will now champion “personal liberties and free markets”, in what is seen as a bid to curry favour with the president. All this has become possible because of efforts to demonise the mainstream media stretching back decades.
In the UK, the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, has built his brand of populist appeal on the sense he is “being straight” with people otherwise denied the truth by the mainstream media. The jailed far-right agitator Tommy Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) has gained a following largely on the basis that he is a “journalist” revealing stories the MSM has suppressed. The manosphere influencer Andrew Tate – now sheltering in Trump’s Florida – has done the same, referring to the mainstream press, which has reported on his misogyny and violence, as “irrelevant” and “ops” (young-person speak for “enemy”).
Many brilliant pieces of journalism have been denigrated as supposedly revealing MSM bias. In 2021, the same Washington Post, which is now being muzzled by its owner, undertook a major investigation into the 6 January storming of the Capitol Building. Trump responded: “There is no greater threat to America than leftist journalists and the Fake News, which has avoided a careful examination of the fraudulent 2020 election… Instead of reporting the facts, outlets like the Washington Post sow division, hate, and lies.” In the UK, the Daily Mirror’s investigation into the Covid lockdown breaches of partygate – published during my editorship – won awards, but also fury from Boris Johnson supporters who felt he had been unfairly attacked. Henry Hill wrote for UnHerd that the Mirror’s “balance of coverage compared to much more serious issues – inflation, spiralling fuel and food costs, etc – feels misjudged”. Good journalism that reveals misconduct only seems to feed the narrative that the press is partisan and even engaged in cover-ups.
This contagion is spreading not just within the right but across the political spectrum, sweeping up the legitimately disaffected to reach anyone who dislikes having “their truth” countered or feels there is under- or over-reporting on any particular topic. Recently, I sat in a TV studio where a woman named Bonnie Blue, who found her 15 minutes of fame by sleeping with 1,057 men in a day, denounced the “mainstream media” for questioning her life choices. In recent weeks on X, the mainstream media has been attacked by the right for being “selective” in its reporting on the Southport murders, for “lying” about the 6 January riots, and for “failing” to report that Labour is a “party of paedos”. Meanwhile, left-leaning users accused the MSM of insulting Michelle Obama for not attending the Trump inauguration and of “editing out” Musk’s apparent Hitler salute. In the US, a Gallup poll published on 27 February indicated that trust in the media was at its lowest in more than five decades.
The “mainstream media” is a wide net that captures centuries-old newspapers and widely watched broadcasters. Fox News in the US and GB News in the UK rail against it. Yet both are owned by media moguls: Fox News, America’s most-watched cable station, by the billionaire Rupert Murdoch; and GB News, partly, by the multimillionaire Paul Marshall, who was described by the Economist last year as one of Britain’s most influential people. Social media users who blast the MSM are led by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of X, who has a role in the Trump administration. It is hard to imagine three more “mainstream” figures.
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But a self-pitying howl on behalf of the mainstream media (of which, as a New Statesman columnist and former editor of the Daily Mirror, I am surely part) would serve little purpose. The question is how mistrust of the press became so, well, mainstream – and why that matters.
Relations between rulers, masses and those who report on both have rarely been smooth. Julius Caesar managed his public image by ensuring his own Commentarii de Bello Gallico (“Commentaries”) were the prime source of information on the Gallic War. Napoleon bullied French newspapers into publishing pieces he had written describing his battlefield successes – and destroyed those that did not comply.
But by the 20th century, the newspaper trade was less easy to control. In the US, ownership was highly localised. In 1900 there were 2,042 daily newspapers, with 2,023 different owners. In the UK that same year, there were as many as 2,000 daily and weekly newspapers. Titles were often polarised, sensationalist and highly politicised. But none of that mattered because there were so many of them; there was no sense of a single news industry.
The first wire services, such as the US’s Associated Press and the UK’s Press Association, which telegraphed stories across their respective countries, were founded in the mid 1800s. With them came a greater standardisation; journalistic conventions took hold.
Meanwhile, the consolidation of an industry that could then make its owners vast profits led to the rise of a few all-powerful moguls. By 1992, only 22 companies owned and operated 90 per cent of the media there.
In Britain, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere, Camrose and Northcliffe owned nearly half of the daily newspapers by 1937. By 2021, just three news groups, Reach PLC, Murdoch’s News UK, and DMG Media (now firmly back in the hands of Viscount Rothermere), owned 90 per cent of the UK’s print media.
Television, on the other hand, was mainstream from its inception. In the US, it was dominated by “the big three” – ABC, NBC and CBS – for decades. In the UK, the BBC was the sole operator for over three decades until Independent Television was launched in 1955.
By the second half of the 20th century, the media had become so mainstream that few seemed to notice. Trust in the media (along with medicine, the Church and the law) was high. When Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America”, signed off his nightly CBS Evening News, watched in the 1970s by 30 million people, with the line “And that’s the way it is”, no one questioned it. And when, in 1950, the News of the World became Britain’s bestselling newspaper under the motto “All human life is there”, that, too, was accepted.
And yet, beneath the feet of the news titans, the plates were beginning to shift. In the US in the 1960s and 1970s, a small but growing set of alternative publications such as the Village Voice and the Black Panther reported on the women’s and civil rights movements. Meanwhile the establishment became infuriated that marches and sit-ins were being covered on prime-time bulletins watched by millions of middle Americans. A sense grew on the right that news outlets, staffed by college-educated liberals, were acting against the nation’s interests.
The segregationist, populist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, was, in the late 1950s, among the first to push the idea that the news was being twisted to fit the politics of northern liberals. Richard Nixon, who blamed news outlets for his failed bid to become governor of California in 1962, picked up the idea and ran with it. “The press is the enemy,” the then president said in 1972.
Many had quietly mumbled something similar before, but Nixon criticised reporting publicly and frequently. He began using “media” instead of “press”. His former speechwriter William Safire later recalled: “The press became ‘the media’ because the word had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the press hated it.”
It was Nixon, too, who popularised the phrase “silent majority” – that group of common-sense folk apparently unseen by the liberal media. Painting the press as elitist and out of touch with the silent majority was a vote-winner; they don’t see your struggles, Nixon implied, but I do. The tactic became known as “working the refs” – a reference to competitors accusing the referee of bias.
Yet at the same time as Nixon was vilifying the press, some of the greatest journalism of modern times was being carried out. In 1973, the Washington Post’s investigation into Watergate ended his presidency.
The transatlantic partnership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher by turn courted and bullied the press. Reagan was a showman who gave TV networks what they wanted. Thatcher backed Murdoch’s battle with the unions at Wapping and ushered in Channel 4, but later went head to head with the BBC, threatening to break it up. The brash consumerism of the late 1980s was a boom time for the mainstream media. There was money to be made from mass communication – and little space for its critics to be heard.
With the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, “citizen journalists” who had previously felt shut out could build audiences at almost no cost. Bloggers began breaking stories and highlighting issues – particularly around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – that were not especially covered elsewhere. News blogs, such as Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report, proliferated.
The relationship between these newcomers and the established press was fractious. Bloggers attacked the mainstream for its news selection and connections to the political establishment. The mainstream attacked bloggers for their amateurishness and small scale. For the blogosphere to survive, it had to make an enemy out of the MSM, inferring it had become a propaganda arm of the powerful, and to present itself as the true voice of authenticity and independent journalism.
In 2008, Sarah Palin, then governor of Alaska, took on Nixon’s mantle during her failed vice-presidential bid, hitting out at the “lamestream media”. Three years later (and while working as a Fox News contributor) she elaborated: “Let’s be encouraged with a sense of poetic justice by knowing that the ‘mainstream’ media isn’t mainstream any more. That’s why I call it ‘lamestream’, and the LSM is becoming quite irrelevant, as it is no longer the sole gatekeeper of information.”
She had a point.
The US journalist Walter Lippmann had coined the phrase “manufacture of consent” in the 1920s, in reference to the management of public opinion that democracy required to flourish. Noam Chomsky took the idea further in his book with Edward S Herman, Manufacturing Consent, asserting the mass media’s role was to mobilise public support for government and business interests. In a 1997 essay, “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream”, Chomsky claimed the media perpetuated a particular world-view because it is comprised of people who had attended elite universities, and whose rise to the top of news organisations was due to their willingness to conform. It is not that journalists are instructed to hold a mainstream view; the mere fact that they’ve reached the position they have is proof of their orthodoxy.
Or, as George Orwell wrote in “The Freedom of the Press” (his original introduction to Animal Farm), literary censorship in Britain was “largely voluntary”. “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question,” he wrote. “It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.” An increase in “alternative media” online during the late 1990s and early 2000s gave space to any number of “unfashionable” opinions from left to right.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media was in financial trouble. Advertisements for property and jobs – “sits vac”, as they were called – and cars moved online, removing a huge source of income for local newspapers. Brand ad campaigns followed suit, having a similar impact on nationals. Print circulations tumbled, and revenue from digital news didn’t come close to meeting the shortfall. From 2005-21, roughly 2,200 American local newspapers closed. In the UK, 300 local titles closed between 2009 and 2019.
Increasingly, content was shared across titles with the same owners. The mainstream became more consolidated. The advent of the smartphone and social media in the 2000s accelerated the collapse in print revenues, and simultaneously gave a publishing platform to anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account. As Musk posted on the night of the US election last November, addressing users of his platform X: “You are the media now.”
The rise of social media created digital “filter bubbles”. There was no reason to leave the echo chamber – not even to check the weather. Instead, algorithms directed readers to content they either agreed or disagreed with, confirming their beliefs that those who thought differently were, if not corrupt, then at least morons. Buyers of papers had long chosen to read the title that most closely aligned with their world-view, but online, the idea of a publication as a curated, wide-ranging and at times challenging whole was lost.
As the mainstream press attempted to monetise the digital environment, broadsheets turned to a subscription model. To succeed, these needed to build a strong sense of shared values: journalism that confirmed its readers’ views became a greater commercial necessity. The tabloids and local papers attempted to survive on the last vestiges of print revenue and digital advertising. But with Google and Facebook swallowing the majority of paltry advertising yields, the need to churn out high-volume, low-quality content became overwhelming. Clickbait journalism – in which an irresistible, over-promising headline masks an unsubstantial story – may have generated short-term revenues, but led to the diminution of news brands in the public eye.
Meanwhile, misinformation became a lucrative business. Social media business models were built on attracting eyeballs to adverts, which meant content had to incite extreme emotions and algorithms had to create addictive behaviours. Whether the content was true made no difference to the money it made.
[See also: Volodymyr Zelensky’s war of wills]
The atomisation of the media landscape and growing cynicism about news coincided with falling levels of trust across society. During the 2010s a series of high-profile scandals – in politics, business, medicine and policing, as well as the media – led to a collapse in trust in institutions. In 2015 the widely respected annual Edelman Trust Survey reported: “The UK is drifting in the ‘trust doldrums’, as trust in government, business and media flatline.”
The media did little to help itself. There had been growing unease about press intrusion since the death of Princess Diana in 1997. But the revelation that the News of the World had accessed the voicemails of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler changed everything. It led to the Leveson Inquiry, which attacked journalists’ behaviour, newspaper management, and collusion with the police. There was a sense that the press had been too powerful for too long, and that its excesses had not been challenged because of its relationships with those at the top of government.
Journalism had also changed, from a trade in which a working-class kid with a bit of shorthand and a lot of spark could join a local title and go on to reach the top of the business, to a “profession” with graduate-entry schemes and journalism-specific degrees. In 2019, research published in Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison’s book The Class Ceiling showed journalism as one of the UK’s most elitist professions, alongside law and medicine. A consensus grew that the media was out of touch.
The Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 led to an outpouring of anger towards the press, which was accused of failing to hold those in power accountable for mistakes that proved fatal. The feelings of many were articulated by the Justice 4 Grenfell coordinator Ishmahil Blagrove on Sky News: “You are the ones who facilitate this,” he said. “You are the mouthpiece of this government. You are the people who make this possible. You are the ones who validate it. You are just as culpable.”
The mainstream media was also criticised with failing to predict or even trying to understand the movements behind Jeremy Corbyn’s successful Labour leadership bid in 2015, and, in 2016, Leave’s victory in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. More than half the British public and 69 per cent of Labour voters believed the press was deliberately portraying Corbyn negatively.
Such accusations echoed the questions raised by Chomsky: was the mainstream media unaware of – or unwilling to report on – issues of concern to millions? Was coverage, led by the interests of a privileged class of media professionals, out of touch with the silent majority? And was it denying these people the recognition and dignity they deserved?
The mainstream media may well have been selective in the stories it covered and those it failed to see entirely. There was sometimes poor reporting and terrible behaviour. But it had a purpose: to establish a broadly agreed set of facts. That collective mission is now slipping away, and those seeking out objective truths increasingly come under attack.
Editors, despite their vulnerabilities, make judgements about the stories they believed their readers wanted and ought to read. Now, such “decisions” increasingly lie in the hands of algorithms, designed to hold attention – and generate revenue – by confirming a particular world-view and generating anger towards those who disagree. Polarisation pays.
The normalisation of vitriol towards the press makes it easier for politicians to move against it. In the US, the media is already under attack from the Trump administration. In the UK, as the BBC nears the end of its charter, support for the licence fee is dwindling. Despite its many flaws (including the recent furore over a perceived lack of due diligence regarding a Gaza documentary that featured the children of Hamas members), it remains our most-read and trusted news brand. Yet for those at the margins, it has become a poster-boy for the elitist, liberal mainstream.
What can be done? Some will call for greater press regulation – although there are fewer examples now of the morally questionable excesses once associated with the tabloids. More urgently, we need to resist the best efforts of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to avoid regulation of social media.
We need to look again at who makes up our newsrooms, and crucially which voices are being heard in decision-making. Journalists will often assert their objectivity – but we are humans, shaped by our own experiences. Objectivity may be an ambition, but it is not a characteristic. We need to continue dogged investigations into miscarriages of justice. We need to take back control of the word “journalism” and leave “content creation” to others. We need to amplify the voices of those who are otherwise unheard – and not just with vox-pops in Clacton. In short, we need to do the stuff that takes time and costs money. Without better resources, it will only become harder to do the journalism that commands attention and respect, and contributes towards a well-functioning democracy.
The world of information is about to feel what may yet be its greatest shock since the advent of the printing press. AI will be able to aggregate content into reports on whatever niche interest you can imagine, quickly and cheaply. In fact, it is already doing so. With this revolution comes huge risks of misinformation being shared at best negligently, and at worst at the behest of bad actors. The press might view AI as a threat, but it also presents an opportunity for journalists to rebuild faith in human-made, trusted news. In an increasingly fractured online world, there is much to be said for a strong, consolidated mainstream.
There may be a futility in the mainstream media trying to persuade its detractors that it is valuable and trustworthy. Many are lost to the unregulated extremes of the online world, never to return. But the diplomatic debacle over the war in Ukraine is a foretaste of what awaits in a world without a mainstream media. The Zelensky-Trump showdown at the Oval Office on 28 February did not happen behind closed doors, as many high-stakes diplomatic meetings do, but was broadcast live. Yet despite seemingly incontrovertible documentary evidence, a fractured media offered wildly different accounts of what passed between the two presidents. The right-wing online outlet Breitbart, for instance, reported Zelensky behaved “menacingly” and “irritated his hosts by objecting to diplomatic efforts” to end the war. A week before their meeting, Zelensky responded to Trump’s blaming the war on Ukraine by saying the US president is “living in a disinformation space”. Without a mainstream media committed to the accurate and fair reporting of the facts, we may soon be joining him.
[See also: Sean Baker’s American dreams]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out