In the Ladybird Achievements Series book The Story of Newspapers, published in 1969, W. D. Siddle writes:
“A feature of the period from about 1900 to the beginning of the Second World War, in 1939, was the dominance exerted over the popular papers by their proprietors …. Many of the proprietors of the important popular papers received titles and became known as ‘press barons’. Among the most famous of these were Lord Northcliffe, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.”
While it may seem strange to quote from a children’s book, the simplicity of the language offers a clear idea of how British newspapers were seen by the establishment at the tail end of the post-war period. In that same section, Siddle writes confidently that:
“[Now], the owner or the Board of Directors, usually decides what the broad policy of the paper is to be and leaves it to the editor to see that the details of the policy are carried out. The early editors had much less freedom … the paper was often used to express the personal opinions of its owner, who was thus able to influence millions ….”
This second excerpt illustrates how pervasive the myth of press freedom had already become, with Siddle certain that the era of the all-powerful owner had ended and would never return. But Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch made the book anachronistic almost as soon as it was published, by acquiring the News of the World and then going on to purchase the floundering The Sun from IPC.
Murdoch defined a new era of powerful proprietors, turning both The Sun and the News of the World into punchy, prurient tabloids and using them to help shepherd the Thatcher government into power. In 1981, the government repaid the favour, aiding him in his takeover of The Times and The Sunday Times.
In 2021, Murdoch is still on the stage. And the current Lord Rothermere (great-grandson of the first Lord Rothermere and great-grand-nephew of Lord Northcliffe) is arguably his greatest rival, still ruling supreme over the Daily Mail empire that his great-grandfather began. Together with a third family — The Telegraph-owning Barclays — the Murdochs and the Rothermeres control 68% of the UK’s national newspaper circulation.
Murdoch defined a new era of powerful proprietors, turning both The Sun and the News of the World into punchy, prurient tabloids and using them to help shepherd the Thatcher government into power.
Online it’s a similar story: legacy media dominates. Publications owned by Reach, the media conglomerate formerly known as Trinity Mirror (including the Daily Express and the Mirror), have the biggest reach, followed by the BBC, Rothermere’s Daily Mail Group, Murdoch’s The Sun and the Lebedev family’s Independent and Evening Standard publications.
Besides The Sun — founded in its current form in 1969 — the other publications in that list were all founded before the Second World War. The Evening Standard was founded in 1827 as The Standard, the Daily Mail in 1896, the Daily Express in 1900, the Daily Mirror in 1903, and the BBC in 1922. The youngest title in the list is the Independent, which was founded in 1986 and went online-only in 2016. By comparison, Vice is still treated as a young online organisation despite being founded as a print title eight years later in 1994.
Dig into the ownership of Vice and you’ll find its story is not so different. Among its shareholders are The Walt Disney Company, A&E Networks (a joint venture between Disney and Hearst, another old money publishing giant) and James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son. In November 2020, BuzzFeed, once feted as the future of media just like Vice, acquired The Huffington Post, bringing job losses and consolidation. Its three largest shareholders are BuzzFeed’s founder Jonah Peretti and the media conglomerates NBCUniversal and Verizon.
When digital companies reach a level of influence that could threaten the entrenched interests, they are simply acquired. It’s no longer new media organisations that threaten tycoons like Murdoch or Rothermere, but Google and Meta, which now dominate the advertising markets.
When digital companies reach a level of influence that could threaten the entrenched interests, they are simply acquired.
In the introduction to the 1938 Penguin Special The Press, written by Wickham Steed (who edited The Times between 1919 and 1922), there is a section …
“… the Press is no longer the only medium through which information or news reaches the public … the ‘radio’ does not collect news on its own account. It spreads news gathered by regular press agencies; and if it adds comments of its own, or comment by speakers of known authority, it does but forestall or follow the work of newspapers.”
… that could be applied today with the simple substitution of Facebook, Meta’s social media platform, for the radio. The media complains about social media in the same way that it once did about radio and then television.
One of the biggest effects of social media, and other forms of independent online publishing that have almost no barrier to entry, has been to create a more complex relationship between news creators and their sources. Newspapers and news programmes covered calls for racial justice in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, not because editors were gripped by a sense of moral purpose, but because of pressure coming from outside the industry. Often, where social media reveals a story, traditional media follows. Newspapers know that they must reflect major movements that surface online and also that social media can be used as an endless source of more trivial stories. But it’s important to remember that social media is also a rival to traditional media, which it treats with suspicion.
While George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement may have made it to the pages of the British newspapers, the tone of that coverage was often extremely cynical and one-dimensional.
While George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement may have made it to the pages of the British newspapers, the tone of that coverage was often extremely cynical and one-dimensional. There is a profound lack of diversity in senior editorial roles at British newspapers and their reporting on race reflects that.
Over the course of a week in July 2020, researchers for Women In Journalism were hard at work. They read the front page of every major newspaper, watched daily prime time news shows on popular TV channels (BBC, ITV and Sky) and listened to over 100 hours of prime time radio news coverage on BBC Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, LBC and Times Radio. These researchers discovered that not one story by a Black reporter appeared on a UK newspaper front page, and only six appeared from BAME writers (two of those belonged to one journalist: Vikram Dodd of The Guardian). LBC had no Black or BAME presenter in its prime-time output and 100% of the guests on BBC 2’s Newsnight were white.
The internet has changed how media companies make money, how much money they make and the stories they tell — dissipating some of the concentrated power they retained until well into the 1990s. But the people who wield that power, how they use it and what they use it for has not changed that much in the 99 years since Northcliffe’s death.
For all the lofty rhetoric espoused about the democratisation of information via the internet, social media and blogging platforms, media power has remained concentrated among a small number of owners. Those small outlets that manage to carve out profitable niches and avoid the curse of acquisition by the media giants are still buffeted by the whims and caprices of the platform companies (Meta, Google and Twitter).
If by some feat of newspaper baron necromancy you were to bring Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail, back to life, it would not take him long to understand the news environment of today.
Changes by the platform companies can lead to huge layoffs at media giants and the total destruction of small players. Take for example the “pivot to video” — now a media euphemism for imminent redundancies — that began in 2015, when Facebook encouraged media companies to switch resources from written content to short-form video. It showed how platform companies can force real-world change through algorithmic adjustments. And when Facebook changed tack after it emerged that viewing figures were artificially inflated, media companies lost vast sums and had lost good staff in return for gains that never came. Big companies swallowed the losses while many smaller publishers went out of business.
In the UK, those that did survive were left to struggle on against the sheer size of BBC News’ online operation, which utterly dominates the space, gobbling up traffic like a huge whale takes in krill.
If by some feat of newspaper baron necromancy you were to bring Lord Northcliffe, the founder of the Daily Mail, back to life, it would not take him long to understand the news environment of today.
There are now thousands of sources that the public can draw upon, but the dominant media voices are still those owned by a handful of families and a small selection of conglomerates. Their power may be more diluted than it was in the time before Mark Zuckerberg held such sway, but it is power nonetheless.
If you were to introduce the reanimated Lord Northcliffe to Jeff Bezos, a man who made his fortune online, the two men would recognise a lot in each other. When Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, his motivations were no different to Northcliffe’s in founding a paper; newspapers remain a means of wielding cultural clout and societal power. It will take many more years and the passing of many more media moguls before that changes.
