The UK: loss of trust in the media and politics

The Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdown parties in Downing Street and the ensuing changes of government have dominated the headlines in the UK in recent years. The Partygate scandal undermined the British public's trust in politics, but the non-stop, polarising coverage has also alienated many media consumers.

The entrance to the BBC headquarters in London. (© picture alliance / empics / Ian West)

According to a 2022 survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 46 percent of respondents said they now avoid news “sometimes or often” – a figure almost twice as high as in 2016. Respondents cited “too much news about politics and Covid-19” as reasons for their news fatigue.

The highly polarised debates surrounding Brexit and its consequences have also undermined trust in the media, which has fallen by a further 16 percent since the 2016 referendum. In addition, Britain's traditionally conservative, high-circulation tabloids – most notably The Sun, followed by the Daily Mail and Daily Express – remain as hostile as ever towards the EU.

Brexit also changed the relationship between the media and the political class. In the run-up to the December 2019 general election, the anti-EU Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his team boycotted television and radio stations whose reporting they didn't like. After the Tories won the election the pressure increased, with only selected journalists initially being allowed to attend government press briefings.

Tories take aim at the BBC
The country's leading broadcaster, the BBC, is under major pressure to reform and cut costs. The Conservative government froze the mandatory licence fee in January 2022, which further increased the financial pressure on the BBC.

In addition, the government left open the question of whether it would support the continuation of licence fee funding when the BBC broadcasting contract comes up for renewal in 2027. In response, the BBC announced that it would discontinue a number of services and merge several news channels. Critics accused the Tories of trying to weaken and silence the BBC.

More and more British dailies are now keeping their print circulation figures private. The Guardian justified its decision to take this step saying that focusing on a metric such as steadily declining print circulations instead of on the growing diversity of journalistic models created a negative narrative.

British daily newspapers are compensating for declining readership figures and advertising revenues in the print sector by expanding their business models. They now increasingly rely on registration, paywalls, subscriptions or, like The Guardian, donations. The left-liberal Independent switched to an online-only model in March 2016, the Daily Telegraph has more than 585,000 digital subscribers, and the Financial Times more than one million, over half of whom live outside the UK.

The practices of British tabloids continue to make waves. In 2010, it was revealed that journalists from the News of the World had been hacking the phones of celebrities, politicians and victims of crime for years. Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have repeatedly denounced the behaviour of the British press. Legal proceedings are underway over defamation, invasion of privacy and intercepted conversations.

Whistleblowers under pressure
In 2013, the British media sector was rocked by the affair surrounding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The centre-left paper The Guardian had helped to uncover the surveillance activities of Western intelligence services and was praised for its role by other countries. But in Britain, the government and most media organisations accused the paper of supporting terrorists. In November 2016 the House of Commons passed the controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, which among other things gave authorities the power to put journalists under surveillance without their knowledge. This legislation is one reason why the UK is listed as “one of the worst-performing countries in Western Europe” in Reporters Without Borders' Press Freedom Index. Another reason for the UK's poor ranking is the Julian Assange case. The British government authorised the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder to the US in June 2022, but Assange's defence lawyers appealed the High Court's ruling, and eventually he reached a plea deal with the US, after which he was released from prison and returned to his family in Australia.

In Northern Ireland, journalists reporting on paramilitary activities and organised crime are considered to be at risk. They often complain about a lack of support and action on the part of the police. The case of the Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot dead in Derry in 2019, still hasn't been solved. New arrests were made in 2021, but a judgement is still pending.

World Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Borders): Rank 26 (2023)

Last updated: May 2024

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