Will the same papers do this for Tory conference too?
As the country’s right-wing press sharpens its cutlery ahead of Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference, it’s worth noticing how coverage of the event already displays bias along political lines – and to keep this handy when the Conservative party conference is covered next week.
Consider this your cut-out-and-keep guide to newspaper bias this conference season.
Here are five general trends to watch out for:
1. Prominence – while the Left-leaning Mirror and Guardian have treated the Labour conference as a national story worthy of their front page, most of the conservative press has kept the conference off page 1 (Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express), or relegated it to second or third story (Telegraph).
This is on the morning after Labour’s shadow chancellor gave a speech laying out the party’s economic policies.
One exception is the Sun, which melds its stablemate paper the Times’s splash about Mars with the conference to attack and ridicule the new Labour administration.
This is not the first time this has happened. Earlier this year the Times kept the Labour party’s general election manifesto off the front page, where the Tory manifesto was featured positively.
Will the same newspapers keep the Tory conference off of page 1 next week?
2. Hostile editorials – while the Sun’s front page story is more an opinion column than news coverage, the dedicated editorial pages of the other newspapers are already pummeling the Labour conference.
The Mail’s columns are perhaps the most robust, though supposedly more serious papers like the Telegraph are not far behind.
As ever, this partisan coverage is written with the general public’s best interest at heart…
Will the same newspapers be as critical of the Tory conference, or will they write as critical supporters of the party?
3. Irreverence and mockery – As the Sun recently proved, mockery of politicians (an important practice) is not something the press applies without prejudice. Political sketches of the Labour conference and newspaper cartoons will similarly ridicule Labour with more gusto – today’s Sun front page being a good example.
Can we expect the same treatment for the Tory conference?
4. Ideas described as out of date – Economic, social and defence policies floated by Labour are called old-fashioned and a ‘return to the 1980s/70s’, despite their being the roughly the same vintage as those of the Tories.
Will the policies of the Conservative party be characterised as a return to the past?
5. Splits and disagreements amplified – There is certainly a big gulf between different tendencies within the Labour party over its direction with Corbyn at the helm.
But as the Tory top brass jostle for position (who was the MP and Oxford contemporary who gave Lord Ashcroft the pig story…?) ahead of their own leadership election before 2020, and as splits over the European Union bubble on, threatening to cripple David Cameron’s EU referendum campaign, their conference will surely yield plenty of comparable material.
Will the papers explore (and revel in) these warring factions within the Tory party?
Now it’s over to the papers. Let’s see how their coverage of the Tory conference resolves these questions.
***
Like this story? Support our work: visit our crowdfunding page here.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
Sign up for our weekly email by clicking here.
49 Responses to “Five examples of biased press coverage of the Labour party conference”
stevep
Hardly difficult to “monster” IDS and Michael Howard.
They did a pretty good job themselves.
woolfiesmiff
Who cares what you call Tory supporters? The Labour Party most certainly does as one look at any twitter timeline will tell you. Come out from under your rock and have a look around
woolfiesmiff
Oh dear Stevie p a typical knee jerk unthinking response. I’m not right wing and there was nothing ranty about media demographics, they are just cold hard facts. Oh how out of touch and deluded are you? The BBC has 20,000 employees its own Director General told us as an INSTITUTION it was too left wing. Do you even know the meaning of the word tirade?
You didn’t have any comment on Labour party magic money tree economics?
woolfiesmiff
Totally agree Harold, so one has to wonder why current Labour Party policy is 1) To borrow even MORE? 2) To print vast amounts of money 3) Punish small employers ( you know the people who just created 1.2 million new jobs)
Do you see why ordinary people think that Corbyn is totally deluded ? All the things you rightly complain of he want to do MORE of.
woolfiesmiff
So what? This articles claims that the press don’t treat right wingers the same as left wing nut jobs. You just agreed that they do