The journalist as amateur scientist

Paul Romer has talked about two types of discourse, one political and one scientific. He uses that distinction to critique aspects of current practice among economists. I want to do the same for journalism.

Political discourse involves taking sides, and promoting things that your side favours. It is like a school debate: you consider only evidence that favours the point of view you want to promote. Scientific discourse involves considering each piece of evidence on its merits. You do not aim to promote, but assess and come to a conclusion based on the evidence. That does not prevent the scientist arguing a case, but their argument is based on considering all the relevant evidence. There are no sides that are always right or invariably wrong.

Of course, any scientist makes choices about what evidence is relevant, and this will be influenced by existing theories. Ideally the theory you prefer can be changed by new evidence, but scientists being only humans can sometimes be reluctant to accept evidence that contradicts long held theories. But there are always younger scientists looking for new ideas to make their name. The scientific method works in time, which is why we are where we are today.

My argument is that journalists should be like amateur scientists. Amateur because part of their work will involve seeking out expertise rather than starting from scratch, and they do not have the time or resources to investigate each story as a scientist might. A term frequently used is ‘investigative journalist’, but that normally means someone who has weeks to work on one story. Instead I’m talking about journalists who only have a day. The key point is that they should not search for evidence that fits the story they wanted to write before doing any research, but allow the evidence to shape the story.

For example, suppose the story is about EU immigrants and benefits. What a journalist should note is that unemployment among EU immigrants is lower than natives. What a journalist who wants to write a story that makes immigrants look bad might do is say that the number of EU immigrants without a job make up a city the size of Bristol. This combines selection of evidence (where is the equivalent figure for natives is not reported) with simple deception: most people conflate ‘without a job’ with ‘unemployed’, rather than being people happy looking after children, for example.

If this all strikes you as obvious, at least to journalists working in broadsheet newspapers, the example above is taken from the Telegraph, and the post in which I discuss it contains a tweet from a Times economics editor saying that all journalists (and yours truly) take a stance and select facts that supports this stance.

There is actually a third type of journalism, which you could call acrobatic discourse, because it is always looking for balance. It is sometimes called ‘shape of the earth: sides differ’ journalism. Its merit is that it appears not to take sides, but as this extended name is meant to demonstrate, it is certainly not scientific. It is the kind of journalism that says the claim that £350 million a week goes to Brussels and could be spent on the NHS is ‘contested’, rather than simply untrue. In that sense, it can be uninformative and misleading, whereas scientific reporting is informative and is not misleading. Here is a twitter thread from Eric Umansky on a particularly bad example from the New York Times. Of course acrobatic journalism is easier and keeps the journalist out of trouble.

One of the side effects of acrobatic journalism is that it typically defines the two sides it wishes to balance. It therefore tends to be consensus journalism, where the consensus is defined by the politicians on either side. To see why this is problematic you just need to look at how Brexit is discussed and reported by the BBC since the referendum.

I began writing this post during the debate surrounding Nick Robinson’s Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture. It is certainly strange for that debate to focus on outfits like The Canary, rather than the elephants in the room that produce political journalism to millions every day, who also tend to criticise the BBC whenever they get the opportunity. Yet the copy from these newspapers, and not The Canary, is regularly discussed by the broadcast media. The emergence of left social media journalism is a result of the consensus defining by-product of acrobatic journalism, which for a year or more defined the other side as the PLP rather than the Labour leadership.

I suspect many journalists would say that my idea of them being an amateur scientist is just impractical in this day and age, when they have so little time and resources. But what I have in mind (journalism as amateur scientists) is not very different from what journalists on the Financial Times do day in and day out. Chris Cook is an example of a journalist working in the broadcast media who does the same. But it is wrong to blame individual journalists for being more acrobatic than scientific, because the institutions they work for often demand it.

Nick Robinson’s lecture is much more nuanced and interesting that the subsequent media discussion would suggest. For example he identifies the problem with the way Facebook selects news that is discussed in more detail by Zeynep Tufekci in this TED talk. But there are two elephants in the room that he fails to discuss: the role of the increasingly politicised right wing press I have already mentioned, and the conflict between scientific and acrobatic journalism, both of which he praises without addressing the conflicts between them. [1]

[1] There is a clear example of this in the comments he recalls making on the Brexit debate just before the vote. He proudly says he called the £350 million claim untrue, but he then adds

“I did, incidentally, also say that the Remain claim that every household in Britain would be £4,300 a year better off was misleading and impossible to verify.”

This is acrobatic journalism at its worse. Yes, the BBC did think the £4,300 figure was ‘misleading’, but only because they did not talk to an economist who would have told you it was not. It shows a failure to be a good amateur scientist. But worse that that, this clumsy attempt at balance puts the central claim of the Remain campaign in the same bracket as £350 million a week lie, which it certainly is not.

Problems with triangulating over immigration

I have talked before about why triangulation over austerity did not work for Labour, but why triangulation over Brexit seems to be more successful. Tony Blair’s latest intervention suggests it is worth asking the same question about immigration. (The report that he launched is well worth reading.) It is a question that lies at the heart of many Labour MPs views on the politics of Brexit.

One of the lessons from austerity is that it is very dangerous to triangulate on an issue where you appear, as a result, to admit fault or blame. If the deficit is a problem (in 2011, say), why did you let it get so large on your watch? This was why ‘too far, too fast’ failed: you acknowledge a problem, and therefore implicitly admit guilt. Getting over the idea that there is a delicate balancing act between reducing the deficit and protecting the recovery is difficult, particularly as it is also an incorrect idea.

It is an obvious point, but exactly the same was true for immigration. Just look at the headlines. The parallels with immigration and the deficit are clear. In office, Labour did the right thing in ignoring the deficit in 2009, and they also did the right thing in allowing substantial EU immigration before then. In both cases the instincts of many voters is to do the opposite: the government should tighten its belt in a recession just like the rest of us, and the country should be able to control and limit who comes in. In both cases, the moment a government that in the past appeared to ignore these voter instincts starts to appear to suggest the instincts are valid, they trash their own record.

You could argue that while this is clearly right for Miliband and 2015, it has less salience for Corbyn rather than Blair today. You could go further and say that what works for Brexit will work with immigration. Just as triangulation gets you the votes of those who sort of want Brexit but worry about the economic consequences, so too could triangulation over immigration get you the votes of those who want to control immigration but are worried about the economic consequences of May’s obsession with hitting targets.

Here I think we need to look at a second problem with triangulation, which is that the nature of the political debate is influenced by it (is endogenous to it). With Brexit it means that neither of the two main political parties is making the case against Brexit, so the (non-partisan) mainstream political debate tends to ignore the anti-Brexit case. One of the unfortunate consequences of the way the BBC and others interpret impartiality is to see it in terms of the two main political parties, rather than (in this case) the population as a whole, so the views of half the population get largely ignored.

You could argue that this may be of secondary importance for an issue like Brexit, because the anti-Brexit case is still fresh in the mind from the referendum campaign. But that is much less true of immigration. Immigration is now well and truly defined in the media as a ‘problem’, and it is very rare to hear a politician (or anyone else) sing its praises. (Jonathan Portes does his best, but when a well known BBC commentator says his views will not win many votes, you get a clear idea of what is going on. [1]) May is quite safe from the media when she says immigration reduces wages and access to public services. The implication of all this together with a large partisan print media is politicians fear talking about the benefits of immigration because that may ruin a carefully triangulated position.

The reality is of course very different. Study after study after study (from academics, not partisan think tanks) shows how much we benefit from EU migration, and how it has virtually no impact on wages. Immigration increases the resources available to provide public services by more than it uses those services. Yet this knowledge is not reflected in the media discourse. The reason is straightforward: the political right wants to use immigration as both an excuse (for the impact of austerity) and a weapon (to achieve Brexit, for example), and the left by and large keeps quiet because it is triangulating.

People in the media may object by quoting polls that suggest the public overwhelming wants to control immigration: they are just reflecting that opinion. (But see footnote [1].) But polls also say people want less taxes. If you dig deeper public attitudes are far more nuanced than the public debate suggests. Here is some data, from an international study, by IPSOS-MORI:

“British people have become more positive about the impact of immigration over recent years. Forty-five per cent say immigration has been good the economy, up from 38% a year ago and from 27% in 2011, and 38% say immigration has made it harder for native Britons to get a job, down from 48% a year ago and 62% in 2011. However, Britain is one of the countries most worried about the pressure placed on public services by immigration, with 59% concerned – although this too is down from 68% a year ago and from 76% in 2011, when Britain was the most worried of all the countries surveyed.”

In other words, as I have emphasised before, the thing that most worries people in the UK about immigration is a myth. Yet triangulation, together with the way the media creates what I call ‘politicised truths’, means that voters are unlikely to find out what the facts are. [2]

The way this ambivalence is often articulated is through the issue of skill. 75% of people want skilled migration to stay the same or increase, while the consensus is that we should have less low or semi-skilled migrants. Yet if you name some categories of semi-skilled migrants, it turns out a majority want the same or more care worker, waiters, construction workers [3] and fruit pickers. As Rick says “apart from the care workers, construction workers, waiters and fruit pickers, what have low skilled* EU migrants ever done for us?” Skill has just become a way of people reconciling their wish for lower immigration in abstract with a recognition that immigration is good for the economy. It is like wanting lower taxes achieved through improving the efficiency of public services.

So how can something that people are ambivalent about become a major political issue that helped push us out of the EU? One answer is the sheer weight of numbers, and for some particular regions not previously experiencing inward migration that seems to be true. (It also reflects the inertia in public service provision.) But the rise of anti-immigration sentiment elsewhere in Europe where recent flows are not exceptional suggests other forces are at work. In part it is far-right parties exploiting fears about terrorism. But much more importantly in the UK, it reflects the deliberate exploitation of immigration as an issue by the Conservative party.

This predates the increase in immigration from Eastern Europe. In 2001 William Hague talked about Tony Blair wanting to turn the UK into a ‘foreign land’. The political temptation on the right to play the immigration card is strong, but until Brexit it has always been duplicitous. The wiser heads in the Cameron/Osborne government never wanted to hit their own targets because of the economic damage it would cause, and as a result they did not even bother to use all the controls that were available with free movement. As Chris Dillow says, immigration was the only scapegoat left to deflect concern about austerity and stagnant productivity. Immigration scapegoating became part of what I have called neoliberal overreach. [4]

This is I think the main reason why triangulation over immigration is not an effective strategy. By trying to appeal to those who are moderately concerned about immigration, Labour falls into a right wing trap, which is to implicitly validate their scapegoating. You can only convincingly argue that scarce public services are due to austerity rather than immigration if you can argue at the same time that immigration brings more resources to the public sector than it uses. You can only argue that economic policy is responsible for stagnant wages if you also say that it is not the fault of immigrants. Labour should go with its members and argue for the benefits of immigration, and in particular free movement with the EU. [5]

[1] This simple exchange illustrated so clearly to me why the BBC’s so called mission to inform and explain is often no more than a joke. Rather than regard popular beliefs that are incorrect as something the BBC has a duty to try and reverse, they are instead used to dismiss expertise.

[2] This is not just a UK phenomenon: around the world politicians use immigrants as scapegoats.

[3] I’m often told that economic studies of the benefits of immigration ignore ‘existing capital like housing’. Yet we need migrants to help build more houses for natives as well as migrants. The only thing that migrants cannot bring to the UK is more land, but with an effective regional policy which we desperately need anyway we have plenty of land.

[4] Some have asked why I called it overreach, when most just talk about the collapse of neoliberalism? For a start, using immigration as a political weapon is not a natural consequence of neoliberalism, and instead comes more from the social conservative part of right wing parties. Also while I think neoliberalism encouraged austerity, I can quite imagine those with neoliberal views forsaking it.

[5] There is an argument that free movement should be opposed because it is unfair to non-EU migrants. Yet you could make the same point about any trade agreement between two countries: it is unfair on all other countries. Arguments about equity that make some people worse off and no one better off give equity a bad name.

Economists show how Fox news changes votes

As I have noted before, economists are getting into media studies (we are natural imperialists) and beginning to provide empirical evidence on an age old, and critical, debate. Are some media outlets biased simply because their viewers or readers are partisan, or do these media outlets play a causal role in changing political views? And do readers/viewers discount the bias in media outlets, or does this influence how they vote?

We now have clear evidence on this in the case of US News Channels, and the answer is that Fox News changes votes in a big way: by magnitudes easily enough to swing elections. Those who argue that partisan right wing media does not matter very much now need to bring some counter-evidence to the table if they want to sustain that position.

The latest piece of evidence has just been published in the American Economic Review. Why is the study in a top-rank economics journal? One thing empirical economists are used to doing is looking for good ‘instrumental variables’, which in this particular case, means finding something that influences whether people watch Fox News that has nothing to do with their politics. If you then look at what these ‘accidental’ viewers do, that gives you a handle on the causal role of watching Fox News.

Dylan Matthews at Vox has an excellent explainer piece on the research, so I will not repeat the details here. Let me instead just list four key points.

1. Fox News is the dominant (by primetime viewers) US news channel. A sizeable minority of Fox News viewers are not Republicans.
   
   
2. The study’s data does not go beyond 2008, but in that year they estimate that if Fox News had not existed, the Republican vote share would have been over 6% points lower.
   
   
3. In contrast the more left wing MSNBC was far less effective at gaining votes for Democrats.
   
   
4. Fox News is not just setting its ideology to maximise viewers - it is much more Conservative than that. Instead it choice of ideology maximises its persuasive power.

The ‘headline figure’ of over 6% points in point (2) is an overestimate because other networks do shift their ideology to gain viewers. So if Fox News disappeared, other networks might have shifted right to capture ex-Fox viewers. But the key point is that Fox is acting in a way to maximise the propaganda power of its extremely right wing message, and it is successful in changing a significant number of voters minds. The apologist line that the media is ‘just reflecting the views of our readers/viewers’ does not hold for Fox News. In short, it is a propaganda organisation, not a ‘for profit’ news organisation. During one sample period, an analysis of the content of Fox suggested that over half the facts it reported were untrue.

One of the nice things about the study is that its results are reasonably consistent with earlier work based on the initial roll out of Fox News in 1996 to 2000 (which I referenced here). That earlier analysis used a different method to identify the causal impact of Fox on voters choices, so it is good that two different methods come to similar conclusions.

To some this will be no surprise (except perhaps that the research is in an economics journal). To paraphrase Obama, if he watched Fox News even he wouldn’t vote for himself. It fits my own account of how US politics has shifted so far to the right, and has become so partisan. To UK readers the obvious question is whether we can just substitute Mail/Sun/Express for Fox. In my view you can, and Brexit goes a long way to proving that. But explicitly or implicitly, the consensus view appears otherwise. Whether from left, right or centre, analysis of voter behaviour typically ignores or marginalises the role of the press. This and earlier studies suggest that is no longer good science.

Fox and their UK equivalents in the press have an importance way beyond academic studies of popular opinion. The story of Fox News and Trump are inextricably linked, as is Brexit and the right wing press. When you can serve large sections of the population real fake news - news that denigrates particular minorities or ‘outsiders’ and pushes the political views of their owners - then tyranny becomes quite compatible with democracy. Governments wield the ‘will of the people’ against pluralism and the rule of law, all enabled and even dictated by media as propaganda. We have examples within the EU and on its doorsteps. We are not there yet in the UK and US, but we are getting very close.

The BBC and Patrick Minford

Over the last few days the BBC has given considerable publicity to Patrick Minford’s new report published by the ‘Economists for Free Trade’. I have looked at both the BBC News website entry and listened to the Radio 4 Today programme’s discussion. They are both classic ‘2 sided controversy’ formats, with Monique Ebell from the National Institute of Social and Economic Research (NIESR) providing the main opposition.

So why was this coverage something the BBC should be deeply ashamed about? There are two main reasons, but first let me make a more general point which applies to journalism more generally. There is no quality control in most of the media when it comes to giving publicity to a report like this. There is a very simple reason for this, and that is the primacy given to immediacy. In a better world, when a report like this came out, journalists would spend a few days ringing around to see what the reaction of other experts were, or nowadays just look at reactions on twitter.

In this particular case such a strategy would have thrown up some apparently large errors, and this should have led journalists to question whether they should give the report any publicity. They might at the very least have waited until the full report was published next month.

Let me give an analogy. Suppose a report of a medical trial had suggested a miracle cure for some serious disease. The report had not been peer reviewed, and its author had connections to a drug company that stood to benefit from the alleged cure, but the BBC had decided to give it considerable publicity nevertheless. Within days it became clear that there were serious problems with the report, and that there were other existing papers that came to a completely different conclusion. The BBC would then look very foolish, and many sufferers from this disease would have been given false hope. I suspect for that reason the BBC would be much more cautious. Yet if the report is about a subject matter with any political implications this caution appears to go out of the window.

Now let me get to the two reasons why the BBC should be ashamed in this case. First, Patrick Minford is no expert in international trade. He is a macroeconomist, who in his younger, less obviously political, days served as something of a role model for me. He published a very similar argument about the benefits of unilateral trade liberalisation during the referendum campaign. It was heavily criticised by individuals or groups that are experts in international trade. So we have already had the quality control, yet the BBC decided to ignore that. Returning to my analogy, it is as if there had been earlier claims of miracle cure that had been thoroughly debunked by medical experts and the BBC had ignored these.

Second, at no point in either of the two items I looked at is there any mention that the overwhelming consensus among academic economists is that Brexit would be harmful to the economy. We just have reports that give two opinions, with no context whatsoever about which opinion is the consensus view and which is the maverick. It is exactly equivalent to giving considerable publicity to a report from some climate change denial outfit, and including a response from one or two climate scientists with no mention of what the consensus among climate scientists is. Again to draw on my analogy, it is like reporting a miracle cure and failing to say that nearly all doctors thought this was rubbish.

This last point about ignoring the clear consensus touches a particular nerve for me, because it is exactly what the BBC appeared to many of us to do during the referendum campaign. Yet when the Royal Economic Society complained about this, they were told that the economic consensus had been mentioned in this and that bulletin. Whether this was cherry picking by the BBC is not easy to establish after the event. [1] Well here is an example where it was not mentioned, and I would like to hear from the BBC why this information was not thought to be useful to convey to its audience. [2] 

On both counts, this is very bad journalism, even if you do not think economics has the same standing as medicine. The BBC may have thought they had brushed off complaints from economists, but here is a specific example where they really do have a serious case to answer. As Ben Chu rightly says: “The legitimate news story around Minford’s work is how bad science can survive and thrive when it supports the desires and prejudices of powerful people in our society … the BBC ... has become part of the problem.” Brexit is the Emperor's New Clothes, and no one - including the BBC - dares say that the Emperor has no clothes.

[1] Not easy but not impossible: it would cost a few thousand pounds in research time for someone to go through the main news reports during the Brexit campaign and establish how many times the economic consensus was mentioned.

[2] Channel 4 News did put the point to Minford that many economists thought his work was flawed, to which he responded by saying “all these trumped up economists and the consensus they are all hired hands”‘. A very political answer from a very political economist, and therefore very revealing, but not a question the BBC apparently thought worth asking.  

Brexit remains an exercise in deception

I talked last week about how the Leave campaign involved lies at its centre. Not the occasional exaggerations of the Remain campaign, but claiming things that were the opposite of the truth. Like there will be more money for the NHS, when in fact there will be less. That particular lie probably swung the result, according to the man who organised the Leave campaign.

Labour people tell me that public opinion on Brexit will turn once these lies become apparent, and at that point Labour can safely take up the Remain cause. What this overlooks is that the managing of information characterised by the Brexit campaign continues. The Tory tabloids continue to distort the truth, and the Telegraph acts in a very similar fashion. The UK government appears more interested in saying stuff to please its UK audience than actually negotiating with the EU, and its studies of the impact of Brexit remain secret [1].

Meanwhile the opposition give no hint of the costs that Brexit will involve, and by design or conflicted confusion are just a tiny bit less pro-Brexit than the government. The broadcast media, and particularly the BBC, appear hopeless at questioning the facade that both main parties and supporting think tanks have erected. I have never heard a politician pulled up for saying we must retain access to the Single Market: all countries have access to that market! (This is the kind of journalism we should be seeing.) Individual MPs are intimidated into silence by the power of the Tory tabloids.

When I talk to Leave voters, all they tell me is how the economic ‘catastrophe’ predicted by Remain did not come to pass, or other Leave nonsense talking points like the exchange rate was overvalued anyway. They are often unaware that falling real wages are the direct result of the Brexit depreciation, and as a result the economy hardly grew in the first half of this year. They, and many people who voted Remain, do not realise that the government’s position papers are largely fantasy and that the EU is in a position to dictate terms. This is not because these voters minds are closed. They just get their information from sources that go along with the government’s Brexit fantasy, unless they are fortunate enough to read the Financial Times. No wonder there has been no major change in public opinion since the referendum.

Those in the Labour party should realise more than most how the media can present a one-sided reality which many non-political voters accept, until they see for themselves the other side during a general election campaign. The problem with a ‘wait and see’ attitude to Brexit is that its major economic cost will not become apparent until years after we actually leave the Single Market. Few realise that the original Treasury study, with the central estimate of an average annual cost of £4,300 per household (6.2% of GDP) was not some piece of Remain spin but a perfectly reputable study, which economists at the LSE said was “overly cautious”. Instead we get nonsense like this reported by the BBC. [2]

Some time ago I calculated a conservative estimate for the cost of austerity, and it was £4,000 per household. Ironically it was based on OBR estimates that the MSM largely ignored, just as they ignore the OBR’s estimates for the short term cost of Brexit. But my austerity cost estimate was a total cost, over all the years of austerity. The Treasury estimate is a cost each year. There is therefore a strong liklihood that Brexit will be far far worse than austerity in terms of lost resources, and unlike austerity there is no way of avoiding these costs once we are outside the Single Market.

For Labour party members and MPs I would put it this way. Imagine winning the next election but having to accept continuing austerity. Winning an election after leaving the Single Market will probably be much worse, and of course the media and voters will blame it all not on Brexit but on Labour’s ‘far left’ policies. Winning an election after Brexit is a poisoned chalice.

[1] Here is Mike Galsworthy on this and the earlier 'Balance of Competences' reviews that the government kept very quiet about before and during the referendum.

[2] I’ve talked to people at the BBC, including their economics editor, about why they cannot apply the BBC Trust’s recommendations on science coverage to economics. (The Trust’s conclusion, in summary, is that in controversial areas the BBC should go with the overwhelming scientific consensus. In other words recognise scientific knowledge, and not treat it as just an opinion.) I think a summary of their response to my question is that economics should not be regarded as a science: there is no economic knowledge, just opinions. What that attitude means in practice is that the public do not hear from the many experts in international trade we have in the UK (and there are many), but instead they hear from Patrick Minford.

The politics of lying

When people say ‘all politicians lie’, they cannot seriously mean they all hold to the same standards of veracity as Donald Trump. But how do you measure degrees of lying in politics?

Paul Krugman suggests that the Republican party’s problems began when they started pushing the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves. The notion that cutting taxes will bring in more rather than less tax revenue is a theoretical possibility but has been shown by study after study to be empirically false. But why was this lie worse than others?

I would suggest the following. The lie became (and continues to be) a major plank of Republican policy. We are not talking about being economical with the truth with statistics to present a party’s policies in a more favourable light. This lie was ultimately an attempt to legitimise cutting taxes on the very rich, and reducing the size of the state (because when the tax cuts did not pay for themselves the next step was to cut spending to control the deficit). It was a lie that went completely against expert opinion, and was at the heart of Republican economic strategy.

Lying in this fundamental way distorts the whole direction of political activity. It and its supporters begin to focus on ways to hide the truth. It means setting up think tanks whose aim is not just to push the party line, but also to provide a counter-weight to, and therefore neutralise the power of, real expertise. Such think tanks involve an element of ‘pay us your money and we will push your interests’, which is why right wing think tanks are the least transparent about their funding. It also means using partisan media outlets to present an alternative reality to voters.

If you can get away with this, then why stop at one crucial lie. Politics becomes about choosing the lies they can get away with that will promote their cause. It is about what lies sound plausible to particular voters, or what lies a partisan press can reliably sustain by selecting evidence to support them. Lines between politics and journalism in partisan outlets become blurred.

We see the politics of lying all the time in totalitarian regimes, or regimes that control much of the mean of information. What I think has surprised many is that two nations that pride themselves on their democratic traditions and independent media can reach a point where the leader and ruling party of one lies all the time, and the other undertakes a huge constitutional change on the basis of a campaign where one side lied with impunity. The Brexit campaign did not lie for the fun of it, but because it would gain them votes, and what evidence we have suggests their lies were believed.

It is not hard to understand why these two longstanding democracies succumbed so easily to the politics of lying. First, they tolerated the growth of a partisan media that danced to whatever tune their owners played. Second, the remaining non-partisan media placed even-handedness between each side, the political horse race and entertainment above informing the public and telling the truth. The Clinton email controversy illustrated clearly a failure to apply any notion of balance. Calling the £350 million a week figure ‘contested’ was literally being economical with the truth. The BBC’s mission to “inform, educate and entertain” has a secret caveat: informing and educating does not include anything deemed political.

What I find surprising is not just that this happened, but that the non-partisan broadcast media has so little interest in doing anything about it. In the US, when Trump complained about his coverage, CNN hired someone nominated by Trump. In the UK the BBC sees no evil, and bats away letters from the Royal Economic Society about its Brexit coverage as just one more irritating complainant. Understandable given business models and constant attacks on Fake News/Liberal bias by the political right, but it means both countries remain wide open to the politics of lying.

Longer read on similar themes: Post-truth and propaganda

The media cannot reform itself until it acknowledges its power

As regular readers know, I have for the last few years been banging on about the importance of the media in influencing public opinion. (It formed a key part of my SPERI/News Statesman prize lecture.) It is not a partisan point about whether the media is politically biased in a particular direction. Instead it is a claim that the media can and sometimes is profoundly important in influencing major political events. I think it is fair to say that such claims are often dismissed, particularly by the media themselves.

Take the Brexit vote, for example. A general view is that it is down to a dislike of immigration, but few people ask whether the concern about immigration was to a considerable extent manufactured. The left has decided that Brexit reflects the revolt of those left behind by trade and technical innovation, largely ignoring the evidence that this was only part of the story. You will find extensive studies of why the UK voted to leave the EU, some of which I reviewed here, but none to my knowledge look at the influence of the tabloid press. Although my own immediate reaction to the vote put the press at centre stage, I faced a problem that anyone who blames the media faces. How do you prove that the media are not simply reflecting opinion rather than molding it?

We are now seeing studies that attempt to get around that problem by looking at what economists call natural experiments. The most well known found that “Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News”. Here is another that argues that the media has combined with special interests to misinform voters about climate change. The evidence that the media does not just reflect but also influences voter opinion is mounting up.

I argued in a post immediately after the 2017 election that this event also showed how powerful the media’s impact was in the UK. Since the second Labour party contest in 2016 until shortly before the 2017 general election, the public’s view of both Corbyn and the Labour Party was largely intermediated by political journalists. The polls showed that labour was unpopular and Corbyn even more so. During the general election campaign, both Corbyn and Labour gained direct access to voters. The popularity of both surged.

Now it is possible that both Corbyn and the party underwent some huge transformation in those election weeks: the manifesto surprised everyone by including popular measures, and the party surprised everyone by being totally united behind it. I just do not believe this can account for the extent of the surge we saw. A much more likely explanation is that Corbyn and Labour had been portrayed by the media in a negative light until the election.

It might be tempting to suggest exactly the opposite: that the Labour surge shows the diminishing power of the Tory press. However, as Roy Greenslade notes, these papers are mainly read by the old not the young. Furthermore, among those aged 65%+, the share of Labour voters between 2015 and 2017 was unchanged. Instead the Labour surge showed not only the importance of social media, but also how the broadcast media can have considerable independent influence when it does not follow the Tory press.

The Corbyn surge need not reflect any deliberate anti-left bias, but just a self-reinforcing process. The disunity within Labour until the second leadership election had a large negative impact on the polls. Political reporters took these polls as evidence that Labour and especially Corbyn could not win, and this influenced the way both were reported until the general election. Pretty well everyone, including myself [1], took the pre-election unpopularity as reflecting informed voter opinion rather than an impression largely manufactured by media coverage.

The Labour surge was also a reflection of May’s awful election campaign. But exactly the same points can be made here. May did not suddenly become robotic and unresponsive during the campaign. The serious faults that were portrayed then were also clearly evident in the year before, and during her time at the Home Office. But rather than investigate these, political reporters chose to focus on the polls and believe that her position was impregnable.

Gary Younge has described the failure to at least investigate the possibility that Corbyn might gain in popularity during the election as “the most egregious professional malpractice”, but as far as I can see he is virtually alone among journalists in thinking how the Labour surge might reflect on their own reporting. Instead the tendency has been to focus on the inadequacy of the polls (which is quite unfair because the differences in the polls largely reflected quite understandable different views about expected turnout among younger voters) and more generally journalists failure to predict the result.

Indeed I think Younge understates the lessons of the surge. If the media was able to convey a largely false impression of Labour, Corbyn and May before this election, it seems reasonable to suppose that there have been other episodes where the media has had a large influence. The list in my lecture cited above could just be scratching the surface. This potential power often used without awareness or responsibility breeds mistrust, as Andrew Harrison relates here.

One of the unacknowledged problems in the broadcast media is the perpetual focus on Westminster, which was one of the factors that led to discounting Corbyn. Which naturally leads us to Brexit. I’m constantly told that any challenge to the referendum has to wait until public opinion turns. And looking at all the facts available it should turn: real wages are falling and output is stagnant as a direct result of the Brexit decisions, there will be less rather than more money for the NHS, and so on. But we should have learnt from the 2015 general election that this kind of simple economic determinism does not always work. Then real wages had fallen by much more, we had the worst recovery from any recession for at least a century, and the Conservatives won on the basis of economic competence.

The Westminster focus means that on Brexit the 48% get largely ignored. The right wing media that gave us Brexit are continuing to mislead as they always have. On the broadcast media that most people watch, there is no one championing a second referendum. Instead the presumption is that Brexit has to go ahead because ‘democracy’ demands it. There is the danger the media that created Brexit will sustain Brexit, just as the media sustained a view that Corbyn was hopeless and May was masterful until people had direct access to both. As a result, those pushing the idea that a second referendum should only be held if the public demand it are in danger of being as naive about the power of the media as those who wrote off Corbyn’s chances

[1] To some extent this was, I’m afraid to say, a classic example of not having faith in my own ideas. But I was also surprised at how quickly the broadcast media was able to swing from Corbyn bashing to focusing on May’s inadequacies. The problem the Conservatives and their press backers had was that scare stories about Corbyn were ‘old news’, whereas seeing the Conservative election machine fall over itself was a new experience, and therefore far more newsworthy. But, once again, this poor performance was also very clear from various decision taken in Downing Street in the year before.

GE2017 and the Media

There is a danger of missing the point about Labour’s surge and the media. The issue is absolutely not that political commentators were surprised by Labour’s sudden popularity among voters. Of course they were surprised, because there was no evidence for it before May 2017. The dismal showing of Labour in the council elections at the start of May was real enough. Those on the left who say they knew it would happen are using the word ‘knew’ in the same sense as football supporters knowing their own side is going to win.

We all have a pretty good idea why the surge happened. In style Corbyn was everything May was not, and Labour’s policies were popular. What the media should be worried about was that both those things came as a surprise to the public. As I said here, a general election campaign is unusual because the public get to see much more of the party leaders and hear much more about their policies, and the broadcasters are duty bound to be impartial. But the character of May and Corbyn did not change overnight, and neither were the policies offered by either side very different from the stance they took before the election. So why were people so surprised?

Someone more cynical than I might suggest that the media’s job is to distort reality: to portray May as more competent than she was and to portray Corbyn as incompetent. What happened in the election campaign is that the electorate got a proper look at the two main leaders and their policies, and realised what the media had been saying was false.

That cynical view is completely appropriate to most of the right wing press, whose job is to distort reality as much as they can get away with. (Remember that damning article about May just before the election that was pulled by the Telegraph?) But why did the truth about May and Corbyn not make any impression on the public until the election? Did political commentators know no more than the public, and were just as surprised as the public about May and Corbyn’s character and their policies during the campaign? If that is the case, they were poor journalists. Or is it that they failed to communicate what they did know?.

Is the problem that the broadcast media feels duty bound to just present soundbites (May can do those), and the independent press in the UK is just too small? Or is the problem that the right wing media for one reason or another sets the parameters for other journalists. Is it that political journalists like winners and despise losers, so let the polls influence how they portrayed individuals and parties? I do not know the answers, but these are the questions the media needs to reflect on.   

What does Labour's poll surge tell us

This isn’t another discussion about whether Labour can ‘win’: I’m far less qualified than others to make predictions of that kind. Nor is it the appropriate point to ask whether the Parliamentary Labour Party (and to a lesser extent myself) were wrong to think a Corbyn leadership would be disastrous: that discussion should be postponed for a week. Instead I want to ask what the Labour surge tells us about the way political information has been disseminated in the UK.

Sir David Butler says “the movement in the polls over this campaign is bigger than in any election I’ve covered since 1945”. (Some data here.) There are three obvious explanations for this surge. A terrible Conservative campaign which led many to think Theresa May had serious failings, a good Labour campaign which led many to think Jeremy Corbyn was not the ogre some said he was, and a Labour manifesto which contained popular policies. The point I want to make is that none of those developments should have come as a surprise. Yet to the parts of the electorate that created the surge they have been a surprise enough to change their vote.

I have talked about Theresa May in an earlier post, and none of the failings that the campaign has exposed were out of character. For example the ‘dementia tax’ U-turn was little different to the U-turn on self-employed tax. One thing that was clear about Jeremy Corbyn is that he runs good campaigns, and the idea that his appeal would be precisely limited to Labour party members was never likely to be true. (Whether it can extend to older Conservative voters we have yet to see.) Finally it was clear to me from the start of his leadership that he would try and adopt policies that were popular, robust and which most MPs could live with. Those that suggest the manifesto marks the end of UK capitalism have no credibility, as an examination of other European countries would demonstrate.

So if May’s weaknesses and Corbyn’s strengths were pretty clear before the campaign began, why have they come as a surprise to those involved in answering the questions of pollsters? The difference between an election campaign and everyday politics is that in a campaign politicians get more time to talk directly to the people. Outside of a campaign, politicians have to rely more on the media to get themselves and their policies across. So part of the story behind the surge is a failure of the media to accurately portray the abilities of politicians. [1]

I’m not talking on this occasion about the bias of the Tory press, because if this was all we would see swings to Labour during every election campaign, and that normally does not happen. More important I think is a failure of centrist and left leaning commentators, who almost all took one side in Labour’s internal divisions. The impression many gave was that Corbyn was hopeless and his policies would be laughed out of court. When neither turned out to be true, his and his party’s popularity improved dramatically

Unfortunately for Labour supporters there is a potential corollary. One idea I have seen put forward is that the polls may be exaggerating the surge because those being polled are paying more attention to the campaign than the average voter. All of the factors I identified above may be having proportionately more impact on voters being polled. (This might explain why many Labour MPs say they do not recognise this surge.) All the more reason to leave retrospectives on Corbyn's leadership until after the vote.

[1] Another factor is Brexit. May emerged as Conservative party leader in chaotic circumstances, without even having to win a contest among Conservative party members. In such chaos, she did not get the scrutiny she deserved. Politics since then has been mainly about Brexit, and while the Conservatives largely united behind May, Labour were more divided. The election was a reminder that other really important issues exist.

The media’s unbalanced referendum

We now have a number of studies of how the media as a whole treated the EU referendum.

1. Levy, Aslan and Bironzo from The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
   
   
2. A short piece by Deacon et al from Loughborough in this volume.
   
   
3. Cushion and Lewis from Cardiff (full paper here)
   
   
4. Moore and Ramsay from King’s College, London
   
   

The Reuters Institute study looked at the press, and after weighting for readership and visibility they found that pro-Leave articles outnumbered pro-Remain articles 68:32 (page 34). One interesting finding that I had not seen before is that voters generally split in a similar way to the balance of articles in the paper they read: the only notable exceptions were the Times (more pro-Leave articles but more pro-Remain voters) and the Mirror (more pro-Remain articles but roughly even voting split). Of course you can read this result two ways: voters were influenced by their paper or their paper reflected their reader’s views.

The King’s College study shows how the Leave campaign, through the newspapers that supported it, were able to reframe the debate on the economics of Brexit. An example that sticks in my memory was Obama’s intervention. I remember seeing an interview with a random voter asking what she thought of this, and she responded by saying how dare Obama interfere with our referendum and blackmail us over trade. It struck me as a very odd reaction at the time (particularly as Obama is popular in the UK), but of course she was simply parroting what she had read in her newspaper. The King's study clearly reveals how the Leave press used the techniques of propaganda to support their side.

The Cardiff study focused on the main news broadcasts. In contrast with the press, there was no bias in favour of Leave or Remain. However what they did find was that broadcasters essentially acted as mirrors for the two campaigns. The Remain campaign focused on Tory politicians, so the broadcasters did as well. As a result, Conservatives received much more coverage than politicians from other political parties. As the Loughborough study noted, this made the coverage ‘presidential’ in character. Journalists normally did not question statistics themselves, preferring to let the other side do any challenging. This also meant that the broadcasters focused on the details of the two campaigns, rather than providing the background information and independent assessment that many viewers clearly wanted. Rather than focus on their duty to inform, they played it safe by just letting the two campaigns do all the talking.

A consequence of the broadcast media largely providing a showcase for the politicians running the campaigns is the marginalisation of other groups, and in particular those who actually knew something about the issues being talked about. I’m not just talking about economics, but also law and international relations. The Remain campaign prefered to use international institutions (IMF, OECD etc) rather than local experts. The Leave campaign did use one academic, Patrick Minford (who figured in 90 of the articles examined by the King’s group), with the consequence that the academic economist that voters were most likely to have heard of during the campaign represented just 4% of the profession.

The danger of the broadcast media taking this approach is illustrated by the example of immigration and public services. The King’s study noted the following:

“The most consistent economic argument made by the Leave campaign – that immigration placed unsustainable pressure on public services – was frequently repeated in the editorials of some news outlets without being subject to the skeptical or forensic analysis applied to Remain’s economic arguments across the whole range of publications.”

Economists assume, for sound reasons, that in fact immigration benefits the public finances, which is one reason why the OBR thinks the deficit will be around £15 billion higher each year as a result of Brexit. So why did the Remain campaign not say this more loudly? The answer could well be because the campaign was headed by a government that had used immigration as a scapegoat for poor public services. This absence of a critique mattered a lot: at least one poll showed that the reason voters most often gave for limiting immigration was pressure on public services. Therefore by relying on the political campaigns, the broadcast media misled the public.

It is for this reason that I have argued that broadcasters should treat what an overwhelming majority of experts think are facts as facts, whatever politicians say. But I see no sign that broadcasters see the problem (with the exception of climate change), let alone have any inclination to deal with it. As far as economics is concerned, I fear the bodies that represent academic economists also want to avoid any fights. Which means that we are stuck with the status quo for some time.

I think this has a major implication for those like me who see Brexit as a huge mistake which people must be given the chance to reverse. The next few years are going to show that the many claims the Leave side made are completely false. The EU will ensure the UK is worse off as a result of leaving. Trade deals with other countries will not come to the rescue. There will be less, not more, money for public services and so on. The government’s response (unless May makes the most courageous U-turn ever) will be to wrap themselves in the flag and say that anyone who is critical is being unpatriotic, and with a large majority no effective opposition within the Conservative party will be possible. .

If Labour continues to support a Hard Brexit, all they can do is claim setbacks are the result of government incompetence. Here I disagree with Ian Dunt: criticism that takes Hard Brexit as given and just focuses on a claim that we could do the negotiation better will lose out to nationalist fervour. The reality is also that the LibDem voice is too weak, and will remain so even if they double their number of seats at the election. Given the way our media works, the only way you can constantly remind people that Brexit is a choice we could reverse is if Labour after the election adopts a much more critical position that involves support for a second referendum.