Support by numbers – getting the message across

I looked up the circulation figures for the daily newspapers in the UK and then added up the numbers according to party affiliation. I know there is an assumption here that newspapers are not free from the taint of political bias, but recent and well attested stories about instructions from Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers about direction of support in the titles they control make their bias very obvious.

Firstly, here are the figures, derived from Wikipedia:

Title	2015[7]	2014[8]	2013[9]	2012[10]	2011[11]	2010[12][13]
The Sun	1,978,702	2,213,659	2,409,811	2,582,301	3,001,822	3,006,565
Daily Mail	1,688,727	1,780,565	1,863,151	1,945,496	2,136,568	2,120,347
Daily Mirror	992,235	992,256	1,058,488	1,102,810	1,194,097	1,218,425
Evening Standard	TBA	805,309[14]	695,645[15]	699,368[16]	704,008[17]	601,960[18]
Daily Telegraph	494,675	544,546	555,817	578,774	651,184	691,128
Daily Express	457,914	500,473	529,648	577,543	639,875	674,640
Daily Star	425,246	489,067	535,957	617,082	734,311	779,376
The Times	396,621	384,304	399,339	397,549	457,250	508,250
i	280,351	298,266	293,946	264,432	133,472	N/A
Financial Times	219,444	234,193	275,375	316,493	383,067	390,315
Daily Record	203,725	227,639	251,535	291,825	306,872	323,831
The Guardian	185,429	207,958	204,440	215,988	279,308	302,285
The Independent	61,338	66,576	76,802	105,160	185,035	185,815

In total, that makes the numbers as follows:

Conservative supporting publications are: The Sun, The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard.

The Daily Mirror is the only newspaper which openly supports Labour.

Richard Desmond set his titles, The Daily Express and The Star to support UKIP.

The Guardian was traditionally a Liberal newspaper, but takes an independent line, as do The Independent the i, and the Financial Times.

Conservative	5,358,725
Labour	992,235
UKIP	883,160
Non-aligned	746,562

In comparison, for every Mirror (Labour) reader there are 5.4 readers possibly being influenced by the Conservative press.

UKIP are only marginally behind Labour and all are ahead of the non-aligned newspapers.

The only daily newspaper that might be considered to be left of centre, The Guardian, has a circulation of just 185,429.

So, in context of left / centre / right wing:

Right	6,241,885
Centre	1,553,368
Left	185,429

There are 33.66 copies of right wing newspapers for every sale of a left-wing one. What is more the Mail, Express and Star are far more right wing than the Guardian is left wing.

If you have a problem with me including the Mirror in the centre section, go and read it, it is decidedly undecided with a very old demographic (you can tell by the small ads for climb-in baths and slippers).

A Modest Proposal

Katie Hopkins, in her “Sun” article says that the people in boats trying to cross the Mediterranean from northern Africa are “Cockroaches” and wants to send a gunboat to deter them. You are far too modest in your ambitions, Katie. If cockroaches are vermin, they need to be exterminated. So why not set up some kind of camp and exterminate these people who have so annoyed you. And it needn’t stop there. Surely these camps need to pay for themselves, so use the inmates as slave labour until they drop dead of exhaustion and recycle whatever is useful of their remains. And the younger ones could be used as a source of protein. After all, there are a million people using food-banks in this country, and we could do with some cheap protein.

No doubt you would argue for freedom of speech if anyone accused you of any moral peccadilloes. And who cares about rules about incitement to racial hatred anyway?

How ironic that the article appeared during the week of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

(Thanks, rather than apologies to Jonathan Swift for the idea).

Election thoughts

I was wondering what songs, films TV and other media would be good for the upcoming election night.

Usually we get ‘Duck Soup’, the episode of Blackadder III, where Baldrick stands in a rotten borough, and have Alice Cooper’s ‘Elected’

All good so far, but a bit predictable. I nominate Tom Wait’s rap ‘Step Right Up’, and 10 CC’s song ‘I Wanna Be A  Boss’.

I’m sure you could come up with better suggestions.

Just one other thought and then I stop. This is a slightly modified part of a spoof rant in Private Eye, supposedly by a Tory Party spokesman. A good summation of what many of us feel:

UKIP, led by Nigel Farage, are a nauseating mixture of jingoism and rabble rousing, and UKIP voters are themselves largely made up of fruitcakes, little Englanders and closet racists.

There are several online message boards dominated by self-supporting UKIP activists who scream down any contrary views or have them taken down. All this despite frequent evidence that the candidates chosen by UKIP really are the most dreadful assortment of prejudiced morons, the sort of people you would emigrate to avoid. The best comment I have seen was this:

“UKIP, the present that just keeps on giving”.

That just about sums it up.

P.s. pass this on