Ignored by the Media: Why the Lib Dems and Greens Can’t Get a Look-In

Reform Dominates the Front Pages with Outrage. Is It Time for New Media to Rebalance the Debate?

There are some days where I find it incredibly bizarre that people take me seriously. Honestly.

When it comes down to the facts, I am by no means a journalist. I’m not in possession of a shiny press card. I don’t (always) spend my evenings digging through select committee reports or sitting in smoky Westminster pubs, having semi-illicit conversations with rogue MPs about the comings and goings in the halls of power (this in my mind is exactly how I see Beth Rigby and

Lewis Goodall

spend their evenings by the way).

I’m a guy who works for the NHS who happens to write political commentary - usually from the upper deck of a bus (front seat, I like to feel like I’m driving), or in the corner of a tube carriage while someone eats crisps too noisily close by.

You can just about make me out with my trusty second hand Macbook - Photo by chan lee on Unsplash

And yet, here I find myself, publishing pieces that get read pretty widely, running a substack that has somehow grown to thousands of subscribers, watching as people respond to what I’ve shouted that day like I know what I’m talking about.¹

But, lately, I’ve been finding myself becoming circumspect about the role I, and people like me, have to play in what has become known as “new media”.

And by “new media” I don’t mean TikTok dances about politics (though, of course, those exist too). I mean the growing, sometimes very weird ecosystem that has started to run alongside (and sometimes even replace) traditional formats. Podcasts that are rapidly devouring radio. Substacks and newsletters that easily sit alongside newspaper columns. Independent commentators that don’t quite fit into the category of journalist, campaigner or activist, but somehow manage to (awkwardly at times) straddle all three. And, of course, social media platforms, which, love them or hate them, now shape the political weather in the way that the evening news once did.

The specific question I keep coming back to is: what is our responsibility?

Reform and the Old Media Problem

If you’re reading this piece, you’ll know that there has been no shortage of commentary about the way in which traditional media outlets have handled Reform UK, though “handled” may be too generous a word - “relentlessly amplified” is probably more accurate. Turn on the BBC, open any broadsheet, scroll past GB News and you’d think that Reform UK was the official opposition, despite the fact that their full cohort of MPs could comfortably fit into a single Addison Lee, assuming no was suspended that week.

Yesterday, after the announcement of “Operation Restoring Justice”, it was absolutely wall to wall coverage - every single news outlet, every single commentator (including me) had jumped on the absolute shambles that had been rolled out by Farage and his merry band of grievance merchants. I know I shouldn’t be jumping so constantly on it, and I’m pretty sure editors are aware of this as well.

And yet, it keeps happening. The disproportionate coverage persists. Why?

Because, as we’ve already established, Reform’s whole political raison d’etre is relying on moral outrage as curreny. They chuck rhetorical grenades into the crowd and legacy media outlets - particularly those hardwired for clicks and ratings - duly spread them across all their coverage.

What’s concerning about this is not necessarily just the amplification itself, but the political distortion it creates. While Reform’s five (give or take) MPs get constant national attention, the LibDems - the actual third largest party in the House of Commons - are barely remembered. They’re literally left off opinion polls. The Greens, with the same number of MPs as Reform, receive barely a fraction of the attention and I’m amazed that Carla Denyer hasn’t taken to doing Ed Davey style shenanigans for attention.

If politics is truly meant to reflect the democratic balance of power and public opinion, traditional media is failing spectacularly on both counts because it is actively choosing to elevate the people who shout the loudest, most crass utterances while sidelining those with actual seats, votes and, importantly, workable policy platforms.

So, Is It Up To Us?

This all leads me to an uncomfortable question - is it up to the new media to fix this imbalance?

Do we, the Substack and Wordpress writers, the podcasters, the freelance analysts, tip-tapping away in our stolen moments, need to redirect our attention towards elevating the parties that are so blatantly ignored? Should we be the ones to deliberately platform the Greens or LibDems in a way that the BBC and other outlets won’t?

On a certain level, that feels like a natural response - if the traditional media leaves such a glaring gap, the it’s up to us to fill it. That’s how journalism to a very large extent has always evolved - pamphleteers in the 17th century, partisan newspapers in the 19th, pirate radio in the 20th. Today’s newsletter writers are just the latest incarnation of this evolution.

And some people really are already doing this brilliantly -

Emma Monk

’s forensic analysis on a range of topics is required reading,

Sam Bright

’s investigative journalism,

Marina Purkiss

razor sharp insights and organisations like

Bylines Network

and publications like

Byline Supplement

are building the independent media infrastructure that we so desperately need, proving that a different model is eminently possible.

Citizen Journalism and the New Ecosystem of Truth-Telling

And then on another level, I wonder whether that’s realistic, because the new media to a very large extent also thrives on attention - and Reform are, very annoyingly, good at generating it. Writing an in-depth analysis of Farage’s latest dog-whistle will always travel further than a careful and thoughtful analysis of Liberal Democrat local government reform, because on will get shared angrily across X while the other might get a polite nod from a party press officer.

And so I’m very regularly caught between two instincts:

1. Keep doing the forensic scrutiny of Reform, because it’s necessary and, frankly, fun.

2. Shift more attention towards undercovered parties, because no one is doing so and someone has to.

Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer.

I Sometimes Make a Journalism By Accident

A big part of the conflict is that this isn’t my career. I don’t sit in an office at 10 in the morning thinking about angles for the next day’s story. I’m dashing away between actual work meetings, solving healthcare nightmares and then - somewhere on the Picadilly or Central Line - firing up my notes app to start writing a thousand words on the threat of the right wing to life as we know it.

And yet, people read it. They share it, quote it, and sometimes, quite scarily, even act on it. Which means that despite all my self-effacement about being “just a bloke on a bus”, I can’t escape the thought that I am playing an active role in shaping political discourse.

This accidental role brings both opportunity (yay) and responsibility (boo). Opportunity because new media voices are by their very nature less constrained by editorial lines (I bet you no one has ever called JRM a Crotchgoblin in a Guardian op-ed) and commercial pressures. Responsibility, because filling this space without accountability or direction also risks the exact distortions that I spent three hundred words criticising traditional media outlets for.

It’s very easy for me to sit here and sneer at the BBC for platforming Reform disproportionately, but, if I spend 80% of my own output critiquing Reform, am I not doing something similar, albeit in reverse? Am I also responsible for skewing the picture?

The Bigger Picture

All of this sits in the bigger picture within a much bigger story - the fragmentation of political communication. There is no single outlet that dominates anymore. What we have instead is a bit of a mosaic of micro-publics. Some people get most of their politics from LBC podcasts, while other rely on YouTube explainers. A big proportion now rely on Substack, while others are happy with whatever the algorithm serves up on X, TikTok or Facebook.

All of this makes it that much harder to maintain a shared narrative, and makes it much easier for fringe movements to appear far larger than they are. Reform has completely mastered this game - with X still being one of the largest social media platforms that people rely on, and Farage having a TikTok account with millions of subscribers, what is a four-or-five person ragtag group of angry men (and one woman) look far larger than they really are.

There’s also another side to this equation - what’s the responsibility of the overlooked parties themselves? The Greens and LibDems can’t just bemoan their lack of coverage while keeping themselves inaccessible to the new and independent voices trying to fill the gaps. If new media is supposed to platform the underrepresented, these parties need to actually show up - and not just with press releases, but with actual, genuine engagement, interesting policy discussions and the kind of authentic access that makes good coverage possible.

The challenge for those of us inhabiting this new media ecosphere and who care about democratic pluralism is how to compete. Do we fight fire with fire, leaning more and more into outrage as fuel? Or do we stubbornly insist on a different model, one that prioritises depth over noise?

A Tentative Answer

I don’t have a particularly neat conclusion - if I did, I’d be making a fortunate on the think tank circuit - but, here’s my thinking:

1. We need to still scrutinise Reform - but not obsess. They deserve all the pushback we can muster, but, not the wall-to-wall attention we’re currently seeing.

2. We need to platform the overlooked. Even if the clicks aren’t as high, giving visibility to LibDem and Green policies will help to build the pluralist ecosystem we want.

3. Push the parties to be better. Engage more robustly with the forgotten parties to ensure they know we’re here and ready.

4. Be honest about our limits. I can’t fix the media landscape on my own from a tube carriage with bad wi-fi, but, collectively, we can start shifting the balance.

5. Coordinate, coordinate, coordinate. What could we achieve if we as new media voices came together and started working together?

6. Stay self-aware. A big part of resisting the distortion in the media we’re seeing is acknowledging our own role within it - and where we ourselves fall short.

A last point is that the support of independent voices is becoming that much more important. The collective power of the new media depends largely on readers who recognise that independent analysis requires independent support. On platforms like X and Facebook, where you’re getting the content for free, you’re not the customer - you’re the product being sold to advertisers who profit from your outrage and engagement. Supporting independent voices directly means supporting the kind of media system you want to see, rather than just consuming whatever keeps you scrolling and clicking.

Ultimately, the question is more than just whether the new media should step up - it’s whether we as a cohort are willing to resist the easy path - scurrying after Reform down every rabbit hole - in order to build something better and more representative.

Maybe that’s a bit idealistic from my side. Maybe it’s even a bit naive. But I can’t help but feel if enough of us do it, we have an opportunity to create a media ecosystem that reflects reality a little bit more faithfully and isn’t filled with wall to wall coverage of four MPs and a Nigel.

And if not? Well, at least I’ll have distracted myself long enough not to hear the crisps being eaten too loudly next to me.

1. Jokes on them - half the time I’m trying to remember what I initially set out to write.