Clay pigeons and social engineering: it’s time to get honest about UK mainstream news’
Our predominantly right-wing news media is a destructive lens which constructs & distorts political reality; so, we must take a step back
This article is from our greatly appreciated regular contributor Claire Jones, and it’s a piece that shines a light on the large-scale, industrialised manipulation that happens in the UK’s media ecosystem.
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The UK’s mainstream legacy press is predominantly right to far-right wing. Despite reductions in all physical newspaper sales and the shift online, right-wing media (RWM) still dominates the news arena with a significantly larger reach than left and centre news publications.
This right-wing ascendancy has been further boosted by the advent of the GB News “soapbox” which, together with the usual suspects (the Express, Sun and Mail), provides a Reform mouthpiece. But there’s also been a shift further right in previously more neutral publications, notably the Telegraph and Times.
Adherence to standards of impartiality and proper scrutiny is now often token and in “power struggles over our ears and eyeballs” shared by influencers like Mr Beast.
Unsurprisingly, the UK now ranks a rather shameful 18th in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index with uncomfortable similarities to Orban’s Hungary. 80% of UK press media is owned by right-leaning wealthy oligarchs, as was Orban’s. Journalists have been censured using SLAPPS, regulatory appointments, digital surveillance and smear campaigns. And just as Hungary’s media became promotors of Orban’s party, Fidesz, so IPSO’s infamous toothlessness has hastened the corrosion of editorial neutrality, paving the way for predominantly right-leaning media to become ‘left-bashing’ Reform cheer leaders.
The heavily concentrated ownership of our news media by right-wing oligarchs is well documented. But it’s also worth considering how the RWM manipulation of social attitudes works, and how we should respond.
Construction industries
The leading social media platforms (X, Facebook and Tiktok) enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the RWM in which news is mutually amplified and mediated. But despite algorithmic tailoring, much online content still flows from what the RWM decides to headline. It’s a primary lens through which we experience our political world on a day-to-day basis. We understand politicians not so much through what they do in the raw, or through social media noise, but through how the RWM frames them.
RWM framing uses laser-guided tactics like labelling, suppression, selective exposure and normalisation, all especially powerful where we lack independent experience for comparison. Most of us are largely dependent on the media to shape our understanding of figures like Andy Burnham, Nigel Farage and Zak Polanski. With a clean slate, the RWM is essentially free to construct political reality around these figures from scratch.
Playtime
This freedom is harnessed to a destructive rationale within the dominant RWM - the gladiatorial “sport” of making or breaking politicians whose audacious profession renders them ‘fair game’.
This nihilistic modus operandi is barely conscious amongst the political commentariat. But it’s perhaps inevitable in a culture whose contributors, often from the same privileged education stables, are relegated to the side-lines. If their professional purpose is to comment rather than act, what’s left except to gameplay, exercising their tribal power over the actions of others?
This sport isn’t confined to the RWM, but the effects are proportional to its considerably greater reach, and its influence is pernicious across the RWM spectrum from the more subtle Times to the explicitly rage-baiting Daily Mail.
Display stand politics
The RWM is viscerally contemptuous of Polanski. Predictably, as a leader who threatens the right-wing status quo, there’s a gaping contrast between how he’s portrayed and the indulgent treatment of Farage. The RWM quickly wrapped Polanski in insinuating labels, deploying ‘hypnotist’ as an early identifier. This formed the basis of further understanding, solidifying into beliefs about ‘untrustworthiness and inauthenticity’ through repetition and familiarity, and attracting other consonant labels which together formed a consistent mental ‘Polanski’ map.
Related high frequency descriptors the RWM flogged were: ‘actor, tax dodger, antisemite, drug legaliser, ‘narcissist’. This spicy wordplay assembled a mesh of attributes that lodged itself within social discourse, further shaping ‘Polanski’ as a faulty political type. Even as a debate, seeds were successfully planted. Splashed daily across supermarket and garage forecourt display stands, these labels are the only prompts for some on how to vote.
With Polanski thus sculpted, counter-information can’t then land. Humanitarian concerns about Gaza or wealth inequality can legitimately be discussed by bodies like the UN. But out of Polanski’s mouth they are dangerous rantings. He’s a ‘press clay pigeon’, a brittle flyer projected high into the political arena, to be shot down.
Artistry
Other key tactics are information suppression and reinterpretation. Dismissing Farage’s antisemitic behaviour and dodgy donations as ‘boyhood japes’ and ‘innocent gifts’ presents him as a blameless victim hounded by the left.
Meanwhile, behind the staggering level of voter ignorance about Reform’s ‘‘Great Repeal Bill’ is the RWM’s wilful determination not to spell out its implications for worker’s and women’s rights.
The RWM’s interpretive dance around Raynor downing pints was a reminder that ‘she’s unfit for office’; conversely, Farage and Johnson downing pints shows they are ‘solid, relatable men of the people’.
Similarly, the Times and others present the self-confessed ‘sexism’ of Robert Kenyan, not as the outright disqualification for becoming an MP it should be, but as showing he’s the ‘kind of normal bloke we need in politics’.
Portrayals like these are the core brush strokes via which our understanding of key politicians is drip fed and fleshed out.
A good kicking in the name of scrutiny
Polanksi’s popularity, like Burnham’s, is a RWM red rag. It’s an excuse to set both up as resilient and able to ‘take the hit’. Hence it affords a licence to discredit them under the guise of ‘extra hard-hitting scrutiny’, i.e. Trevor Phillips style ‘rottweiler attacks minus balance’.
Such grillings, delivered to a public who know little about either man, create impressions, piece by suspect piece, strongly predisposing them to negative evaluations. The Times’ strenuous efforts to portray Burnham as an unprincipled shapeshifter, for example, minimally sows doubt amongst voters whose beliefs about him are less than rock solid.
Some consequences
The RWM feasted on Raynor’s minor tax issue for months whilst their response to Farage’s £5mn donation from Christopher Harborne was sluggish.
As Luke Tryl notes, Raynor’s “tax scandal” caused a “tangible fall” in her popularity. Despite her being found not guilty, the damage was done - the media assault worked.
Similarly, even if repeatedly kicking someone in the head is police protocol, Polanski’s response, though politically hasty, was probably natural, humane concern about brain-damage. But the RWM skipped this justification, instead briskly spinning it as ‘anti-police’ and, by initially omitting the third Muslim victim, absurdly, also as ‘antisemitic’. They spotted a pre-election attack fissure in the left and leapt in with the zest of piranhas.
Again, it worked. The ‘antisemite’ and ‘anti-police’ tags caused Polanski’s approval rating to plummet 14 points, shifting from positive into the red overnight.
The RWM can’t seriously be said to mirror political reality since it constructs chunks of the content in the first place that it then claims to ‘reflect’. Much of the doorstep Corbyn hostility it ‘found’, for example, was its own regurgitated narrative.
Starmer has, in reality, made serious mistakes that aren’t simply conjured from press manoeuvres. But the RWM sets the ‘success and failure’ agenda. Starmer’s sticky ‘lame duck’ persona was consolidated by prioritising negative labels (weak, indecisive) and amplified by pointed failures to highlight positive achievements: knife crime down 10% in the last year, the stock market outperforming the US, NHS waiting lists lowest in 3.5 yrs, GDP up every quarter since 2024, the new Renters Rights Act, 30 hours weekly of funded childcare.
This RWM silence is why, when asked, voters famously ‘stare blankly, struggling to find a good word for Labour’.
Doorstep antipathy is also because Starmer can’t relate to voters, is no storyteller (and should go). But ruthless RWM manipulation of success and failure narratives have massively intensified voter contempt. Labour’s 2026 local election performance would have been poor anyway. But media puppeteering turbo-charged the preposterous fall of Starmer’s popularity below Trump’s, and the catastrophic election results.
Weaving social understanding
Starmer is just another in the latest round of left-winged clay pigeons. This isn’t a Starmer endorsement, just an observation that our media could have played it very differently.
Starmer’s opponents, Johnson and Farage, are notorious censure escapologists. But it was the RWM that carefully curated the unscrutinized, charming, Teflon personalities we’re familiar with, and who orchestrated their success by cultivating fear narratives that shoved immigration to the top of the social issue league table.
The key point is that the portrayals of all these political characters by our dominant RWM have not only penetrated our social consciousness but are working supremely well in furthering Reform’s trajectory as the new preferred political tribe.
These portrayals don’t just consolidate the views of the already converted. They create political reality for others and sow doubt amongst the undecided. Our RWM, like Orban’s, constructs political understanding by omitting, redefining, insinuating and quietly eviscerating whatever it wants to obliterate.
This isn’t information delivery, or even ‘mildly politically biased’ news. It’s social engineering – on a massive scale, with deeply dysfunctional consequences.
Stop the sane washing
Yet we continue excusing our media because we cling to the idea that it must somehow be working in our interest. Consequently, we despair when it keeps failing, as it does, every day.
It took Hungary 16 years to remove Orban, a process greatly assisted by their independent media. For UK politics to function, we must turn away from our right-wing dominated mainstream press towards independent political journalism.
This largely Impress-regulated ecosystem, though economically fragile, speaks truth to power with integrity, producing responsible, exacting investigation and analysis. We must start fostering this vital independent voice because it belongs to us, not oligarchs, and has our human rights and our democracy as its lode stars.
For more on how citizen journalism plays a role in the media ecosystem, I have previously published the piece in Byline Times below.
Thank you. Conversely LibDems on the doorstep are told that nobody ever hears about us. Is it any wonder why? We don’t attract sensationalist media because we tend not to be sensationalist. We are just getting on with small workaday things that make local people’s lives a bit better. Yet when our leader tries harmless stunts in order to try and garner some media attention, he’s berated for that. 🤷🏽♀️
Great analysis - essentially the RWM is slowly moulding society for its own ends. Look up Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of Habitus.