Every so often the old power-of-the-press refrain gets another airing. It might be because the great gods of Murdoch have visited Downing Street 10 times in a year. It might be because David Cameron made crass advances to the latest Viscount Rothermere, or because Steve Bannon (in loco Trump) calls the media his “opposition party”. In any case, there’s an assumed clash of titans and rival estates. But step back and watch the contest shrivel.
Consider just a few of the upheavals of the past few months, plus upheavals pending. Where was press “power” in the election of Trump? Nowhere. He only contrived a handful of newspaper endorsements, even from long-standing Republican editorial pages. Faithful proponents of Bush and Reagan deserted him. Maybe Fox News rallied around once Rupert Murdoch ditched Ben Carson and settled for the inevitable. But cable news as a whole – and CNN as a vital part of that whole – tried to stand straight.
Perhaps social media and fake news played a big role (though latter-day researchers are having a tough time proving it). Shock jocks inveighed as usual. But big media – big newspapers, big TV – were overwhelmingly pro-Clinton and vehemently anti-Trump. Yet the force was not with them. People, if they listened at all, still did their own thing.
And so it is in Europe too. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, the wildest card in the Italian pack, seems populist with a capital P, echoing many of Trump’s diatribes against the press. It lives, like Grillo himself, on the internet. It is self-taught and self-secured.
Did any major Austrian news provider support Norbert Hofer’s Freedom party bid for the presidency? No. Is any major French newspaper or TV channel backing Marine Le Pen to succeed François Hollande in April? No. And next month’s election in the Netherlands? Surely some battalions of media power must have propelled Geert Wilders, with his own “Freedom” party’s view on Islam and immigration, into the lead? But no, yet again (although, as in other cases, you can begin to sense the occasional rightwing paper bending in the wind: following, not leading).
Nor, of course, is the phenomenon limited to one side of the political spectrum. Spain’s Podemos burst into life without much in the way of drum rolls from the established media, and still finds its most fervent support on the web and from one TV station. The selfsame media, remember, failed to see Jeremy Corbyn coming. And you’ll inevitably recall all those Broadcasting House mouths dropping open when the first Brexit results came in. The same mouths, curiously enough, who didn’t have the time of day for Ukip when Nigel Farage began his long march.
All of which may be because self-absorbed editorial masters failed to see something coming; or because people, ordinary people more individual than ever before, now operate below the radar, joined together in ideological rebellions by laptops and smartphones. It’s the great bottom-up-not-top-down memorial lecture.
And perhaps that lecture arrives with two necessary appendices. One, alas, echoes Michael Gove’s disdain for “experts”: signal evidence that the more you think you know, the more you risk looking red-faced wrong. Appendix 2, though, stretches above and beyond. It tells every pundit over and over again that history is not dead, but live and convulsive. Maybe the media can ruin a few reputations along the way, make a few politicians dance to an accommodating tune. But power? Better ask the people.