A scandal as newsworthy as “Dog bites postman”: the local newspapers have set their face against those delightfully, unintentionally humorous pop-up newspapers distributed by political parties at election time. The party papers, in case none has come your way, pretend to be local newspapers but consist only of plugs for their candidates. They are not exactly subtle. They may appear real to the bored and gullible, which is what all political campaigning does.
Most of them are from the Liberal Democrats, whose novel interpretation of the notions of truth and honesty in campaigning have long been a fascination for students of politics and psychiatrists. We have all loved those ‘Labour’ leaflets that, when opened out say “Labour … cannot win here”. (I mainly see those in seats where the Liberals trail a poor third.)
The LibDem fake newspapers have been joined by the other parties too though. They all give as good as they can get. Some Conservative newspapers even carry on throughout the year and provide a more useful village newsletter than the commercial papers do.
Maybe a few people are taken in. That is not the point though: these newspapers work at a subliminal level – they only need to hook you for a moment to embed the impression of their headline in your mind, and if you then realise to your horror that you are reading a political leaflet, nevertheless in that opening minute you have read it as news and it makes an impression.
I need to get hold of some more examples – they are exactly what I should be using.
The local papers, the genuine locals, are discontented. They voice fears that these pop-up party pretend papers will sap trust in the integrity of the local newspapers.
Who are they trying to fool? The local papers have done that very convincingly all by themselves. The political news is simply reprinting the political parties’ press-releases: all those pictures of a councillor standing by a new sapling or a hole in the road are no different from the pop-ups. There is no integrity nor that vaunted neutrality in journalism; that is a phrase thrown around to encourage customers, but there is no integrity in journalism beyond the appearance needed to bring in the widest range of paying customer.
I have sympathy with the newspapers as they have a hard task trying to persuade people to buyer a wad of folding paper when on-line splash stories and antisocial media dominate the attention of their key market. An irony is that they pay journalists to produce news content as a chassis to feed the adverts to their customers, which is where the real business lies, but oftentimes the newspaper is only bought for the adverts anyway.
The local newspapers long ago blazed a trail in the bringing the news. Now the young apprentice has copied the master’s work, and may excel him.
Maybe the pop-up party paper is the way forward for local journalism. There is motivation for it, and their village citizen-journalists are closer to the ground than those in the town on the other side of the tracks.
I do not see the pop-up papers in our villages though, not even from the Liberal Democrats: they are good at press-releases, so that the local commercial newspaper looks like their LibDem paper already.
See also
- Boris unleashed
- Not a sch-lur but a telling sch-lip
- Fallen riders – Auntie’s list
- Honest, Georgian elections
Books
- The Rise of Political Lying by Peter Oborne
- Local Journalism and Local Media: Making the Local News – Bob Franklin & David Murphy (eds.)
- Local Journalism in a Digital World by Kristy Hess and Lisa Walker
- The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko
- Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath
- The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (1841)
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B Peterson - Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred Years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown by John Campbell
- Political Correctness Gone Mad?, by Jordan B. Peterson, Stephen Fry, Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg
- An Utterly Impartial History of Britain by John O’Farrell
- 1000 Years of Annoying the French by Stephen Clarke
- By Thomas Hobbes in the Civil War and Restoration era:
