The real reasons the media didn’t cover Saturday’s anti-cuts march

Many have accused the BBC of 'bias' for failing to cover Saturday's anti-austerity march which took place in Central London. So are they right?

Many have accused the BBC of ‘bias’ for failing to cover an anti-austerity march. So are they right?

Many have accused the BBC of ‘bias’ for failing to cover Saturday’s anti-austerity march which took place in Central London.

So are they right? Well yes and no. Media bias is one factor, but there are also other less encouraging reasons which explain the media’s relative disinterest. Here are four:

Protests (on their own) rarely achieve anything

Protest has its place but on its own it rarely achieves a great deal. Paradoxically it tends to work better in those places in the world where it is forbidden: the heavy handedness of the authorities can often result in protests swelling to millions of people. In authoritarian states protest is also a revolutionary act. In liberal democratic Britain it isn’t.

That’s not to say that protest is pointless; but it would be naive to overestimate its possible impact. Much like the newspaper sellers who hang around these events, those who cling to the idea that peaceful marches in Central London can make a huge impact haven’t adapted to a changed world: online activism is far more effective at reaching a large audience than marching through the Capital. It’s also less tainted by any association with the strange people who sometimes hang around the fringes of protests, such as these people.

This specific argument has been lost

For better or worse, the anti-austerity argument was lost back in 2010. Since late 2013 a majority of people have also told pollsters that austerity is actually good for the economy: 42 per cent now say cuts are good for the economy while 37 per cent say they are bad.

One needn’t confer respectability on an idea simply because it is popular, but it does perhaps help to explain why the media failed to give Saturday’s protest the level of coverage the organisers believe it deserved. There is no longer a mainstream anti-austerity narrative. The Tories and the Lib Dems are making cuts, Labour are going to make cuts and no one who isn’t is going to get anywhere near power anytime soon. As far as the media is concerned the debate is over.

There comes a point when sound and fury aren’t enough

People want to know what the protesters would do instead, and they feel they aren’t getting it. ‘No cuts’, declared the banners on Saturday. But no cuts invariably mean tax increases. ‘Tax the rich,’ I can hear you say. Fine, lots of us would like the rich to pay a higher proportion of their income in taxation; but why pretend this is a panacea?

Peter Mandelson famously said that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, and left-wing critics of previous Labour governments have picked up on this quote as an example of Labour servility to the well off. What critics forget is that, in a globalised economy, it’s actually quite hard to tax the rich ‘until the pips squeak’, to use former Labour chancellor Denis Healey’s phraseology, firstly because the rich would probably leave the country, taking their businesses, tax revenue and jobs with them. You may profess not to care about such things, but whether you like it or not you still need money to pay for services and the like.

As the Laffer Curve demonstrates, increasing tax rates beyond a certain point is counter-productive for raising further tax revenue. The big challenge for the left in the 21st century will be figuring out how to tax the rich progressively transnationally, because a nation state-based approach is no longer enough.

There is some media bias at work

But this is less because of a deliberate decision to exclude anti-austerity protests, and more because of the class backgrounds of many journalists. British journalism already favours the rich, powerful and glamorous over the poor, weak and unfashionable, journalist and author Peter Oborne wrote a few years back, and having little invested in the services this government is cutting means that many journalists slip effortlessly into narratives of the cuts being “inevitable” and austerity coming as a consequence of “runaway government spending”.

This problem is being exacerbated as journalism becomes the preserve of the upper-middle classes due to unpaid internships and the collapse of many local newspapers.

So yes, there is bias, but not in the way many think.

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74 Responses to “The real reasons the media didn’t cover Saturday’s anti-cuts march”

  1. Cormac

    a very ill thought-out article. points two and four are EXACTLY the kind of bias we’ve been complaining about. yes, of course the austerity argument has won in the mainstream – but that’s exactly the point! the media are the vehicle through which such arguments are won and lost, and the class (and therefore ideological) bias of those who control the media that you yourself alluded to in point four are the REASON the anti-austerity argument has been sidelined, and this is an example of it!

    as for point one – it’s not the mainstream media’s concern to ‘help’ the protesters achieve their aims (if anything, the opposite – see point four), so why would they think ‘we would cover this demo but it’s not going to achieve anything so let’s not bother’? surely from an objective point of view such a large display of public feeling is newsworthy? the fact is that the protests achieve less the less they are covered, and that’s why they’re not covered.

    point three is just you disagreeing with the protestors (on a rather dubious basis, particularly – see the criticism of your use of the Laffer Curve by Geeb below) and isn’t an explanation as to why the media didn’t cover it. if 50,000 fascists had marched through London, people whose ideas I should hope you find just as if not more lacking in credibility than those of the protestors, the media would be all over it.

  2. GinWales

    What a dreadful article.

  3. Cormac

    indeed – written by somebody whose complete inability to think clearly has obviously led them to believe everyone else in the world (particularly those to the left of them) shares their affliction.

  4. sarntcrip

    the massive march for jobs in the 80s saw the end of the tory government the poll tax demos led to huge change demonstrations don’t work i’ve never read such rubbish on this usually excellent blog too many blairite tories

  5. sarntcrip

    without the’lower’ orders to bully & exploit capitalism would fail the rich too

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