Comment by pasabagi
5 years ago
> None of them are the sorts of people who are anywhere even close to power or influence,
Isn't that exactly the point? Brexit happened because of a referendum where normal people got a vote.
> That is people's views drive newspaper coverage, not the other way around.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money. I'm sure there's an element of organic xenophobia that would make people sympathetic to the EU free movement idea, but I don't think that's enough to create a demand for daily updates on how 'bonkers brussels bureaucrats ban bent bannanas!' (a genuine story).
I don't think anybody ever has picked up a paper because they were dying to get the details about that particular scoop - and honestly, that was one of the most memorable ones.
I can see some grounds on which Euroscepticism was organic in england, but I also have absolutely no doubt that such an idea would never have been successful without the amount of media support it got.
I don't think anybody ever has picked up a paper because they were dying to get the details about that particular scoop - and honestly, that was one of the most memorable ones.
That was over a decade ago yet you remember it and are still talking about it. Obviously that was quite the scoop, which is exactly what newspapers love and how they make money.
A free press loves embarrassing governments by showing them doing stupid stuff. The press in Europe is a mockery of a free press because too many journalists at some point decided that the EU is a morally and ideologically pure vision of the future, so they just stopped reporting on all the bad stuff it does even when it'd make for interesting stories, whilst continuing to do such reports on their local governments. Except in the UK, where parts of the press retained their traditional role.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money.
Left wing super-pro-EU papers often don't indeed. Other papers do make money, plenty enough to justify making them. The Daily Mail made £72 million in profits in 2020 despite COVID. The Guardian bled money and announced job losses.