The signal and the noise

How media fragmentation is changing politics and what governments need to do to adapt

Blaming “comms” for an organisation’s struggles is always a misdiagnosis. It’s impossible to resolve fundamental contradictions in strategy, or cover up the inadequacy of a product, by writing a better press release. The same is true of government. Keir Starmer isn’t in trouble because he can’t find the right Director of Communications but because he isn’t clear on what he wants to do or why.

But even when the government does have something to say it can’t get anyone to pay attention. Many of their policies, from a higher minimum wage to improved employee rights and rail nationalisation, poll well individually but few voters give the government any credit for doing them, if they’ve noticed at all.

When one pollster asked people to name a Labour achievement last year by far the most common answer was “nothing”. Scrapping (and then partially restoring) the winter fuel allowance is still the thing that comes up most in focus groups when you ask for something the government has done. There’s a direct correlation between how unpopular a policy is and how many have heard of it.

This is not a new phenomenon. Dislike of a party tends to overpower the popularity of their ideas. Polling shows that when a policy is associated with Labour it becomes less attractive to voters all other things being equal (something we saw in practice with digital ID cards). But the same was true of the Tories in the 1990s. There was enormous frustration in the final years of John Major’s government that they were getting no credit for a fast-improving economy.

Bad vibes have always been hard to overcome. The problem has been exacerbated, though, by the rapid fracturing of the media environment. Traditional routes for communications have become increasingly irrelevant yet parties are still heavily reliant on them. Newspaper reach has collapsed. Physical papers are barely read by anyone of working age (Daily Mail circulation peaked in 2003 at 2.5 million and is now 600k), and their websites are also receiving fewer visits, thanks to Facebook algorithm changes and rising reliance on AI.

In 2018, 51% of people said they got some news from newspapers, either in print or online, last year that was 34%. Broadcast is falling away too. In 2019, 58% got some news from BBC1, last year it was 41%, and this is heavily skewed towards older viewers. Even more established social media platforms like X are seeing a fall-off in use for news. YouTube and TikTok are the only platforms growing.

So how are politicians supposed to get their message across? The obvious answer is set up a TikTok account and talk direct to the people. And they are trying. Starmer now has an account and a few weeks ago made the first ever policy announcement (on capping ground rents) on the platform. But this has its limits too. TikTok’s reach is still relatively small and focused on younger age groups. It’s also incredibly hard to say anything meaningful on a platform where you have, at most, three seconds to grab the viewers attention before they swipe on. Even the most popular politicians on the platform, like Nigel Farage, rarely get more than a few hundred thousand views for a post.

Simply doing a few videos alongside the standard press releases and TV interviews misses the point of how media fragmentation is changing the nature of politics. So in the rest of this piece I’ll explore the three most important adjustments politicians need to make.