11/05/2017
Sunday saw a very strange story in the
Observer, described by
Lost Leonardo in a masterful put-down as "Carole Cadwalladr's strange fever dream". Cadwalladr's thesis is that Britain's vote to leave the EU was not a legitimate expression of the popular will - a culmination of years of condescension and neglect from an increasingly discredited political class.
It was instead the result of a right-wing plot peopled by billionaires and "data scientists" to target and subtly coerce a small but significant number of credulous Facebook users to shuffle to the voting booths on 23 June and mark the box labelled "Leave the European Union" with an "X".
That, wrote
Lost Leonardo, "may sound like the backstory for one of the lesser Bond films (maybe something from the Pierce Brosnan era), but Cadwalladr would have us believe (I'm sure that she believes) that 'it were the big data wot won it'".
This one is going to run and run, but just to prove that a stopped clock is occasionally right, we have the
Telegraph traducing the effects of social media. It can generate a lot of heat and light, the paper says. "But it does not uncover any new information, move the story on, and it rarely influences anyone beyond a small group of hardcore activists".
Our own experiences of using social media during the referendum campaign, where we did our own social media advertising to test the waters. The experiment was not a success. And, as a codicil, when we recently stopped promoting EUReferendum.com posts on Twitter, we experienced a substantial increase in the hit rate.
Nothing of this is conclusive, but the Cummings claims that "big data" won the referendum need to be taken with a pinch of salt of a size that would match the annual output
of Cheshire.
And also casting doubt on the "big data" thesis are researchers from
King's College, London in the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power. They have done an analysis of legacy media coverage during the official campaign, concluding that it was the UK's most divisive, hostile, negative and fear-provoking of the 21st century.
This, they say, was partly due to the rhetoric and approaches of the campaigns themselves, but was encouraged and enflamed by a highly partisan national media.
Remain set the campaign agenda early on â focusing on the potential damaging economic consequences of Brexit, seeking and publicising endorsements of staying in the EU from domestic and international politicians and institutions. Leave, however, successfully undermined the economic warnings of Remain by questioning the campaign leaders' honesty, their expertise, their motivation, and by presenting the whole economic narrative as a cynical strategy to frighten people into voting for the
status quo.
As a consequence, they say, Remain lost many of the benefits normally associated with agenda-setting. Indeed, by the latter part of the referendum campaign Leave had managed to turn Remain's ability to set the agenda into a liability, by characterising the authoritative figures and institutions that supported Remain as self-interested, dishonest and unpatriotic.
What the researchers do recognise, though, is that national media coverage represented only one factor influencing people's decision to vote in the referendum.
Many people, they say, would have made up their mind before the campaign began. Others were undoubtedly guided by the views of their family, friends and colleagues. Others were swayed by digital communications sent directly to their email inbox or to their social media feed.
All these things must be true and it surely must be the case that the leave campaign started in 1975 when the "no" side failed to win. It intensified when John Major foisted Maastricht on us, creating a movement which gave rise to Ukip. The attempts by Blair to take the UK into the euro further motivated the resistance and James Goldsmith with his Referendum Party put the idea of a referendum on the map.
What then set the seal on the issue was the establishment's contempt for democracy in its handling of the European Constitution and the cynical pretence that the Lisbon Treaty was simply a "tidying up exercise". The response inexorably forced David Cameron into promising a referendum in his 2015 manifesto and, by then, the die was cast. The referendum was there to win, or lose.
However, the parasitic
Dominic Cummings and his partner in crime, Matthew Elliott, decided that direct digital communication was the way forward. With resources furnished by their billionaire sponsors, their official Vote Leave campaign spent millions on buying up "nearly a billion targeted digital adverts", accounting for approximately 98 percent of their spend â with minimal popular support.
As Joshua Carrington pointed out in the
New Statesman, however, the Vote Leave campaign wasn't nearly as clever as it thinks it was. Their techniques were nothing special â just expensive and unproven.
Nor was Vote Leave on its own. Digital communication was equally important to Stronger In, which employed Tom Edmonds, joint director of the Conservatives' 2015 digital election campaign, and Jim Messina, who was campaign manager for Barack Obama in 2012. Both sides were playing the same tunes.
In terms of performance, both sides were lacklustre. On balance, Stronger In was more inept, which probably saved the day. Despite Cummings's best attempts to lose us the game, "Leave" managed to prevail.
According to King's College, the legacy media, including broadcast outlets, played at least three crucial roles: directly influencing the public, indirectly influencing the public, and influencing the campaigns themselves.
In terms of direct influence, mainstream media still reached almost the entire UK population on a regular basis. In fact, during the campaign itself, most national print circulations and online readership rose.
It is likely, the Kings researchers think, that the legacy media generated much of the news that was "liked" and "shared" on social networks â indirectly influencing people through sharing and via online discussion. Moreover, the media strongly influenced politicians and campaigners who, in turn, fed into the campaign.
In all, therefore, there were multiple influences in place and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any thesis that puts one technique or group above another. The official campaigns were messy, scrappy, ill-focused and both reliant on lies and misinformation. Either or both could have lost it and, in our view, Vote Leave very nearly did.
The Kings researchers write that the rancorous, bitter way in which the referendum campaign was fought (by the official campaigns) was both reflected in, and enhanced by, the media coverage. The majority of media organisations that could take sides â i.e., excluding public service broadcasters - did so, often uncompromisingly.
Their partisanship was then played out in much of their coverage â both in their selection and framing of news and in their editorials, leader columns and their choice of front-page stories. Eventually the campaign became framed as us-versus-them, pro-establishment versus anti-establishment, pro-immigration versus anti-immigration, nationalist versus internationalist.
In reality, it always was an anti-establishment vote. Only latterly did Vote Leave wake up to that, and too late to marshal sentiment that had been building for decades. The campaign was a mirror, not a megaphone, with the self-congratulation that came afterwards entirely unwarranted.
Thus the Kings researchers remark that much of the acrimony, partiality and suspicions of dishonesty that characterised the campaign has remained. The consequences of the campaign are still being played out, and will continue to be throughout the period that Britain negotiates its departure from the EU and beyond.
They conclude that the implications of a divisive, antagonistic and hyper-partisan campaign â by the campaigners themselves as much as by many national media outlets â is likely to shape British politics for the foreseeable future. And, with that, we could not possibly disagree.
