Well, that all went horribly wrong. I mean of course my predictions on the UK General Election; far be for me to impose my own political leanings on anyone.<\/p>\n
What can the media world learn from last week\u2019s election result? Here\u2019s my take on it.<\/p>\n
Everyone assumed this was going to be a close election. As it turned out the Conservatives won an overall majority, a result that was predicted by virtually nobody, but which was the much-stated desired outcome of around 75% of the UK newspaper industry.<\/p>\n
The consensus is that newspapers can\u2019t persuade people to vote in any way other than the way they intended anyway, but it\u2019s hard to escape the conclusion that weeks and weeks of battering away at what they (or 75% of them) saw as Ed Miliband\u2019s shortcomings had some effect.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s rather more interesting is that the party strategists themselves obviously still believe in the power of newspapers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the newspapers that set the agenda, subsequently picked up in the radio and the TV coverage.<\/p>\n
I got most of my election news from the BBC. It\u2019s impressive the lengths the Corporation goes to in remaining balanced.<\/p>\n
As proof of this beyond mere observation \u2013 I have as many examples of my left wing friends working themselves up into a frenzy at the BBC\u2019s right-wing bias as I do of my Conservative friends accusing the whole organisation of pinko, liberal left-leaning sympathies.<\/p>\n
Perfectly balanced \u2013 a chip on each shoulder.<\/p>\n
I was going to write \u2018zero impact\u2019 but that seemed a trifle harsh, even if that\u2019s what much of the evidence suggests.<\/p>\n
One firm of analysts stated that \u2018Labour won Twitter\u2019. That means nothing; Twitter unlike newspapers has no editorial view, it\u2019s merely a forum for the views of those who bother to use it.<\/p>\n
The fact is that in much the same way that we select newspapers that reflect our own views, so we tend to mix online with those who, as a group tend to share our opinions.<\/p>\n
As a result our own timelines, or Twitter threads give us the mistaken impression that everyone agrees with us.<\/p>\n
In fact we\u2019re effectively filtering out those views we don\u2019t want to engage with and convincing ourselves that those we do engage with are in some way representative of a groundswell of opinion across the country as a whole. They\u2019re not.<\/p>\n
Rather, we\u2019re for the most part talking to and hearing from a close approximation of ourselves.<\/p>\n
I believe there were 91 opinion polls published over the course of the campaign. I haven\u2019t myself been through them all, but I understand 90 were wrong.<\/p>\n
There was one large exit poll, and that was spot on.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s far easier to ask people what they’ve done as opposed to what they might do.<\/p>\n
The Conservatives basically repeated two stories, over and over again.<\/p>\n
Labour dotted about all over the place, but they never satisfactorily managed to bury either of these two lies (sorry, stories). And don\u2019t let\u2019s forget they had five years to counter the first of these.<\/p>\n
As a result of being consistent, of repeating the same things over and over again, a very large number of people believed the Conservatives.<\/p>\n
So, five lessons:<\/p>\n
Well, that all went horribly wrong. I mean of course my predictions on the UK General Election; far be for me to impose my own political leanings on anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}