The Guardian has asked readers and staff for their views on which party (if any) the paper should support in the 2010 general election. Editor Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger on Twitter) posed the question of Friday in the wake of the second leaders' debate.
I was impressed by the paper's attempt to engage with readers. But the initiative underlines the bizarre and frankly disreputable tradition in British newspapers of telling readers who to vote for. Why should a paper tell readers who to vote for - even if they've asked their views first?
The Guardian is far from the worst offender. The Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph are the media wings of the Conservative Party, and lose no opportunity to distort the news to encourage readers to vote Tory. But, as I posted in May 2008, the Guardian published a clumsy piece of propaganda urging readers to support Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral election. (Not that it helped Ken: he lost to Boris Johnson.) The Guardian even tried to influence the 2004 US presidential election with a similarly ill-judged operation to persuade voters in Ohio's Clark county to reject George W Bush.)
It is simply grotesque that the media and politicians take any notice of The Sun's decision who to back in an election. Yet last week's decision of James Murdoch to invade The Independent's offices to protest at that paper's innocuous headline, 'Rupert Murdoch won't decide this election. You will.', shows how high the stakes are. The Murdoch clan really do think they have the right to influence an election. Their attempt to bully a newspaper that barely sells 100,000 copies a day shows concern that that this election could, just, be the one that breaks the political power of the media.
The response of the Mail and Telegraph to the rise of Cleggmania following the first leaders' debate was instructive. They both resorted to smears about the Liberal Democrat leader. As I posted last week, social media helped blunt the impact of the smear campaign with the clever #nickcleggsfault campaign. If the papers had been interested in genuine examination, why didn't they pursue the question why the Lib Dems hadn't returned donations from crooked donor Michael Brown? That would have been genuine journalism rather than political propaganda.
Let's hope the people vote without being bamboozled by the media on 6 May.
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