The forces against the media make 2025 a year to stand up and be counted
Opinion
Never have we seen such damaging constellations of forces coming together to undermine not just the democratic process, but ultimately the social democratic consensus.
It is time, if there ever was a time, for the traditional, established media to stand up and be counted.
Call them what you will; we all know what we are talking about. It is nothing less than those journalists, and the media outlets that they work for, who devote their time trying to differentiate fact from fiction, balance from bias and inform their readers, listeners and viewers in an increasingly hostile world.
In 2025, those who aspire to such a task face unprecedented challenges as never seen before — at least not in their current multi-headed, malign form.
Never have we seen such damaging constellations of forces coming together to undermine not just the democratic process, but ultimately the social democratic consensus — at least in Europe, if not always in the US.
Powerful forces
We are in uncharted territory.
The forces against the media include increasingly unstable and irrational tech billionaires and those other billionaires, only slightly less toxic, who will do or say anything to add more piles of gold to their wealth — many of them now, alas, media owners.
Then there are politicians such as Donald Trump, who lied and lied to get re-elected, not least by claiming that he would cut prices and end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. The “promises”, along with too many others to mention, have already been abandoned well before inauguration day.
To make matters much worse, there are hostile players such as Russia and China trying to undermine not just democratic electoral systems but world communications infrastructures — down to damaging seabed cables with deliberately trailing anchors.
Then, at the granular level, as consultants like to say, traditional media outlets on the right of the political spectrum are displaying levels of bias that would have horrified their own journalists of a previous generation.
Political meddling
At this moment, the apex of the pyramid of threats facing journalism and conventional democratic society is occupied, temporarily at least, by Elon Musk. Not just because of his closeness (for now) to Trump, but because of his control of X, his enormous megaphone or “Trumpet”.
In recent days, Musk has for unexplained reasons interfered in German elections by supporting the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany, called for new elections in the UK and widely defamed UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.
Musk has accused Starmer of being “deeply complicit in mass rapes in exchange for votes. That’s what the inquiry would show”, before going on to say that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.
The X owner has also called Jess Phillips, safeguarding minister in the Home Office, a “rape genocide apologist” who should be jailed.
Naturally, such incendiary comments have been extensively covered by the media, not always critically and not all have pointed out that there has already been a detailed inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the north of England that was completed in 2022 and made 20 recommendations for reform.
It was the Financial Times that pointed out Starmer, in his final year as director of the Crown Prosecution Service, initiated the first prosecutions against the grooming gangs and subsequently overhauled the way the organisation dealt with such cases.
More than Musk
Musk is the most extreme of the tech billionaires. But Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, not only stopped the paper supporting Kamala Harris for US president but — irony of ironies — the title also pulled a cartoon showing billionaires, including Bezos, laying bags of money at Trump’s feet.
The Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes has now resigned.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scarcely any better. After donating $1m to the Trump inauguration fund, he has now replaced Sir Nick Clegg, who once suspended Trump from Facebook, with Clegg’s Republican-leaning deputy Joel Kaplan. And on Tuesday Meta scrapped its moderation programme in favour of a Community Notes feature.
Difficult to see anything other than Zuckerberg trying to curry favour with Trump — a man he once called “a badass”.
Rise of populism
The other great threat comes from the rise of populism across Europe — a movement that is being normalised by sections of the media daily, up to and including the BBC.
Populism as a concept should not be confused with “popular”. The hallmarks of the “ism” lie in the reduction of complex issues — often without easy or quick solutions — to simple, often irrational, slogans or single-issue platforms usually involving the scapegoating of minorities.
In the UK, the figure of Nigel Farage — leader of the Reform party or, to be more precise, the Reform company, in which Farage owns the shares and therefore cannot be replaced — looms large.
The media — and here the BBC is particularly culpable — gives Farage endless, often uncritical, coverage.
It has been widely noted that Farage has been on Question Time at least 38 times, most of which when he was not even an MP.
And why was it Farage, leader of a party with just five MPs, who was given the opening New Year appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s show? If Starmer was not available, why was Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Lib Dems with 76 MPs, not preferred?
Along the way, Farage is allowed to get away with claiming that the UK is poor, diminished and broken, without being challenged on one of the main reasons why it could be so — the Brexit he campaigned for.
Sea of troubles
Then there is the increasingly troublesome issue of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.
Sunday’s paper splashed on a poll alleging: “Starmer will be out of No 10 in a year.”
You have to go into the text to find out that “nearly a third” of those interviewed believe Starmer will be out in a year. This, of course, means more than two-thirds believe he will not. A new low for The Mail on Sunday.
Against such a sea of troubles, is there any hope for the media, for us?
It’s not easy, but the only hope is for consumers to support responsible media and reward them not just with attention but financial support.
There is an equal responsibility for the commercial side of the industry and that is to support media that are not trying to undermine our democracy.
Above all, this is a year when choices have to be made.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.