If you want to work out the political allegiances of Daily Mail readers, perhaps you could have a look at the comments and the applauding/smiting system they have for comments? Any comment praising the BNP shoots up into the +100s, any attacking the BNP falls sharply into the red.

The problem is that those kinds of systems can be easily gamed by a small but organised group. Secondly, audiences are self-selecting – if the Mail do write about the BNP, you can bet that the BNP’s core online activists will be monitoring that and emailing their fellow members telling them to get on and support the party line. “BNP supporters respond in large numbers to articles about the BNP” doesn’t prove anything.

Let’s not beat around the bush: most columns in the Daily Mail are clearly in line with a certain Griffin-ite rhetoric.

The only thing is: such columns always contain a passing reference to the B * P as “vile”, “ugly”, “disgusting”, etc…almost robotically – as if they were saying “Look, we hate asylum seekers, we despite those swamping immigrants, we wish the EU dead, we think non-whites are criminals BUT we are not pro-B * P”.

To avoid trouble, perhaps? So that no-one can say to Littlejohn “but your stuff is B*P material!”. Cos if they did, then he’d turn round and reply that it can’t be, he calls the B * P vile and that’s that.

You just check the comment section on the Mail’s online edition. Pro-B * P messages are at least 50% of the total, and that’s a conservative estimate.

You’re getting a bit silly. You’re talking about qualifications that you think are important but the lack of them doesn’t make an article scaremongering. You may think there is a bias in how immigration stories are reported, I think the other side of the debate could point at a bias in other papers going the other way, but that doesn’t mean they are “helping the BNP” unless you seriously think that all public concern over immigration is necessarily illegitimate and necessarily translates into support for the BNP.

On your “newspaper sphere of inflluence” point, why exactly is the Mail influencing Sun readers so much more than its own? If media coverage is in any way the dominant factor in explaining BNP support, the fact that those with the closest proximity to the newspaper’s views (its readers) aren’t the most likely to vote BNP is a little difficult to explain. Occam’s Razor – it’s unlikely to be the newspapers’ fault.

As to the localism issue and TPA research priorities. We’ve got plenty of arguments to support the case for greater fiscal decentralisation, that flexibility is useful in all manner of contexts. I agree that this is one of them. To be honest, we’ve got a lot of work on at the moment but I’ll keep this idea in mind.

Best,
Matt

The Metro is tailored for the early-morning London audience and as such is a fairly neutral rag. The DMGT locals, especially north of the border, can sometimes be even more hysterical than Dacre’s mothership.

It’s perfectly possible for readers to disregard what they read or interpret it in ways determined by their own experience, in particular within the context of their own interpersonal relationships with people from their own peergroup and with ethnic groups. These direct experiences are more determinant than the media, which is probably why racist beliefs do not necessarily correlate with those who live in areas with high levels of immigration.

And, as we’re dealing in part with the Daily Mail, let’s not forget that it has a free sister paper, The Metro, which is widely distributed in urban areas by the simple expedient of giving away for free on public transport.

Unless they publish special ‘race hate’ editions in Burnley, Havering and Dagenham, then I’m not sure this explanation cuts it – the Metro, although pretty dire churnalism, doesn’t share the Mail’s editorial stance.

UKIP lost getting a second seat in the NW to Griffin by 1,200 votes. In Yorkshire, second seat lost to BNP by 3,000.

Pretty slim mrgins….which might just have been affected by the way in which the MSM kept saying that UKIP had “imploded”. That every damn article included Tom Wise and Ashley Mote…..and not every piece about others talked about moats and mortgages.

At one point we even had The Times saying that UKIP weren’t going to stand (asnd no, they did not agree to issue a correction).

If you’re going to take the view that the newspapers influenced votes indirectly, as you are, I rather think that the writing off of UKIP by them all was the major effect.

First, Sunny’s spot on in identifying that I’m not talking about direct correlations between newspaper coverage and the BNP’s vote but a range of indirect influences on the overall tone of the debate.

In this day and age it’s actually rather naive to think that a newspaper’s potential sphere of influence is limited by the demographics of the readers of its print edition.

For starters there’s the impact of the internet and, particularly, blogging, bulletin boards and discussion forums, all of which serve to disseminate the media’s output to a much wider audience than its traditional dead-tree editions.

Then there’s the changing conditions in the local/regional press, where cost-cutting and a decline in advertising revenues has meant an increase in the amount of copy churned from the nationals.

And, as we’re dealing in part with the Daily Mail, let’s not forget that it has a free sister paper, The Metro, which is widely distributed in urban areas by the simple expedient of giving away for free on public transport.

Mmm… I wonder how many BNP voters in places like Barnsley, or Burnley, take the bus to work every morning?

This is not about a crude quasi-Pavlovian relationship between media output and voting intentions – its nothing like that simple – but rather about the extent to which the media, and particular newspapers, contribute to the creation and propagation of certain memes that, when the reach a particular audience, prove helpful to the BNP.

As for Matthew’s point about conflating scaremongering with having a reasoned debate on immigration, I wonder if he’d like to point us all in the direction of the article, in either the Telegraph or the Mail, that discussed the distorting effect that Germany’s decision to restrict access to its labour market to citizens of A8 states has had on the European labour market or the likely consequences of those restrictions coming to an end in 2010 – i.e. a reduction in inward migration from the A8 states as other national labour markets with in the EU open up.

Or maybe he could find an article that cites the ONS stats on the number of UK residents that were born overseas that then goes on to qualify the headline figures in terms of the proportion who are now naturalised British citizens, or migrants from the US and the old Commonwealth, or even the numbers who were born overseas to ex-pats.

And where, I wonder, is the TPA’s analysis of the effect of centralised bureaucracy within the existing tax system on public services, particular in reference to internal and external migration?

I’d have thought that one would be right up the TPA’s street as it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that one of the key reasons why local authorities have faced cash shortfalls and fiscal pressures arising from inward migration is the excessive delays in matching levels of central government grants to shift in populations arising from, for example, the centralised collection and redistribution of business rates.

If you take the time to look and run just a few of the relevant numbers then you’ll very quickly find a strong argument for devolving more revenue raising powers down to a local level.

Yes, its perfectly possible to have a legitimate and nuance debate on immigration – its just not possible to find any such debate in the pages of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph is only marginally better in the sense that it at least has a couple of columnists who’ve written the occasional nuanced comment piece on the subject.

Look, everyone, I did say that this was a quick and dirty piece of research – i.e. its intended only to spark off a line of questioning that currently absent from the media’s post-mortems on the results of the European elections.

Its not a definitive analysis on the role of the media, nor was it intended to be one, it merely provides a bit of basic data as a springboard for further deliberation.

Check the owners of the Stoke-On-Trent Sentinel (from MediaUK.com) :

=============
The Sentinel

Local Newspapers
Coverage area: Stoke-on-Trent
Owner: *Daily Mail and General Trust*
=============

As I said earlier – there doesn’t have to be a strict correlation with readership and voting, as I said at #6

http://tinyurl.com/ljm83p

I am finding his arguments quite persuasive- we cannot be having runaway population growth &, while fertility levels do indeed fall over time, it will take a fair while for education & contraception to bring about a shift in behaviour, especially with the religious & other elements standing in the way of progress in this regard.

Re: ghettoisation, that is quite often caused by government policies, such as control over allocation of housing (especially for asylum seekers) rather than behaviour of immigrants themselves. That is something that wants to be looked into & that.

Not by me though, as I am going out- sorry for rushing a bit.

I’ve disagreed with plenty of your posts before, but I’ve never seen your analysis get this bad.

a) BNP voters are most likely to read the Sun and the Star, if they read a newspaper, the Mail and Express are a poor second followed by the Mirror. The Telegraph, even when lumped in with the Times and Financial Times, just gets 6 per cent:
http://www.channel4.com/news/media/2009/06/day08/yougovpoll_080609.pdf

Doesn’t that completely destroy your analysis, as BNP readership clearly doesn’t correlate with your graph at all?

b) You completely conflate “a negative view of legal immigration and its economic and social impact on the UK during this period” with scaremongering. I don’t know quite which stories you’ve included but, unless you think there is no legitimate analysis that points to any downside to legal immigration whatsoever, then it is entirely legitimate for papers to include negative views of legal immigration.

c) Given that many people feel that immigration has negative impacts on their lives, as – rightly or wrongly – they see changes in their communities that upset them, might feeling that the national media is ignoring the issue increase the strength of parties that claim to speak for latent anti-immigration feeling?

d) Why is their such a concentration of BNP successes in the old Labour heartlands if their rise can be explained by media coverage of immigration issues? The Mail and Telegraph certainly aren’t Northern papers. The BNP’s electoral success is clearly partly a result of a Labour collapse, which has nothing to do with immigration coverage in the Mail.

In the end, it isn’t that difficult to explain the rise of the BNP. There is clearly a contempt for existing elected politicians that boosts fringe parties, and a contempt for Labour among their popular grassroots, combined with longstanding concerns about immigration among the public at large (see the Mori Issues Index) that they don’t feel have been adequately addressed by the mainstream parties. You could partly blame the media for the second to last point, but that seems hard to stack up if BNP voters aren’t reading the most anti-immigrant papers.

Newspapers often rely on the ‘drip-drip’ effect to perpetuate certain editorial agendas (such as the negative impact of immigration) and these factoids are passed on, rather like viruses (if I may use a biological analogy), ultimately contributing a certain type of gestalt.

Rob Knight [7] illustrates exactly the sort of discussion we SHOULD be having on the issue that so infatuates our two infamous MEPs.

I’m assuming ‘looking at the pictures’ counts as ‘reading’.

#2, #3

BNP voters do not have to directly read those papers, do they? I guess what Unity is trying to argue here is that those papers like the Daily Mail are setting a tone. And they’ve been doing religiously for the whole of this decade at least.

If you have a bombardment of big f***off headlines about “immigrant invaders” simply looking at you from over the shelves or the dentists’ waiting room, to me, that plays a part too.

Most annoying is the right wing’s assertion that immigration in this country is allegedly a “taboo topic”! I mean, you have tabloids that sell millions EVERY DAY, constantly banging on the subject…

There’s certainly an argument to be had about immigration, which has several key points:

1) The moral justification – that immigration allows people to move freely and to live where they choose, allowing them to leave places in which they feel they are not treated well. Hardly anyone ever mentions this, except in extreme cases (refugees, genuine asylum seekers).

2) The economic justification – that immigrants either benefit the economy or, at least, do no overall harm. This is the mainstream view. I’m not an economist, but I’ve heard the views of respectable economists who say that immigration is a net benefit.

3) The management of migration. Even though point 2 stands, the short-term effects of immigration in certain areas may be negative – a sudden rise in school places needed, etc. If the government cannot demonstrate an ability to manage this, and to do so fairly and transparently, some people may conclude that the immigration itself is the problem.

4) The national identity impact. Post-WW2, a strong pro-immigration argument was that the dilution of national identities was a very good thing and to be encouraged, since nationalism had played such a role in causing both WW1 and WW2. We’ve largely forgotten this, and I doubt that many politicians now would speak up in favour of diluting national identities. I personally think that the ‘dilution’ theory was somewhat wrong-headed – losing a national identity does not mean that one simply has no identity, it means that one will adopt a new one, possibly worse than what went before. Take how the English identity has been somewhat captured by fringe elements and racists, for example. The fact that many people don’t identify with their country/nation means that the country/nation’s identity can be defined by smaller and more extreme groups. Politicians of Gordon Brown’s generation seem to have grasped that this might be a problem, but every effort to do something about it has been cack-handed in the extreme (“Britishness day”).

5) The cultural impact. I personally think that the cultural impact of immigration and the mixing of cultures is a very good thing, and few would disagree. The only minor caveat is in situations where, despite an apparent demographic mix, communities don’t actually mix between themselves very much. The creation of isolated ghettos can be a problem, and negates the cultural benefits. The cultural impact is positive when it gives people of different backgrounds more in common with each other, but it can be negative if it ends up with balkanised communities with less in common.

What I’m saying is that there are plenty of grounds for debating immigration. I think that having a negative view of immigration is a legitimate (though wrong) political viewpoint and people holding it should not be exposed to guilt by a spurious association with the BNP. Also, many negative views of immigration are merely negative views of certain aspects of immigration, many of them around the question of how that immigration is managed (such that the objections would fade if it were managed better).

But it doesn’t have to translate into direct votes. The Telegraph also influences the BBC agenda, who then also go hyperbolic over immigration and MigrationWatch, and the Telegraph influences the Daily Mail and others. It plays a part in legitimising those orgs and driving the news agenda even if its supporters remain solidly Tory/UKIP.