Tribalism

I devoted a fair number of my collected 2019 posts to the question of what element of British – or rather English - identity had persuaded them to cast themselves adrift from the Continent (the posts have been gathered at pp133-196 of the collection). In my search for culprits I even looked at novelists. But one of the first places I looked was that of the British media whose role was well summarized by this comment 

We are paying the price of our media. British journalism thinks of itself as uniquely excellent. It is more illuminating to think of it as uniquely awful. Few European countries have newspapers that are as partisan, misleading and confrontational as some of the overmighty titles in this country. The possibility of Brexit could only have happened because of the British press 

And more extensively analysed in this article in a French journal. 

But it is perhaps Tabloid Britain – constructing a community through language Martin Conboy (2006) which best conveys the huge pulling power of the popular press in Britain and the role it has played in appealing to the worst in the british voter. 

Journalists are our crucial link with the world of both power and of ideas. Usually they are reporting what others want them to say – but the best of them have their own voice.

Each of us gravitates to a newspaper which tends to reflect our worldview – in that sense we are all deeply tribal. My particular poison is “The Guardian” one of whose editors (Alan Rusbridger) has produced a couple of fascinating books which I parsed in a couple of posts at the beginning of the year. “The Guardian” has a world-wide reputation – indeed its American sales outstrip those of the British market.

At the very end of the second post, I had slipped in the information that a critical appraisal of the paper had just been published with the revealing title Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian  ed D Freedman (2021) 

I hadn’t realised that this followed another book-long analysis of the even more significant global role another UK journal has played – namely the weekly Economist. Liberalism at Large – the world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin was produced in 2019 and was reviewed in the New Yorker by the inimitable Pankaj Mishra

There are two bright spots in this tale - or at least one and a half. The half is that the quality journals (certainly The Guardian and The Economist) are bucking the trend and pulling in more customers. The second  bright spot is that what we call the "gutter press" doesn't seem to be exerting the influence and power they once did - as noted in today's Mainlymacro post - losing out to the live images of social media.