Expressly Unbalanced

I was reading an online version of a Daily Express story the other day (I was bored, OK) which left me despairing as to the current state of British journalism.  I should have known better, but I clicked on the clickbait title along the lines of 'Biden sent ahock warning that Trump will still win' and a story synopsis along the limes of 'latest polls show Biden ahead in Presidential race, but top pollster says he will end up disappointed'.  It all seemed so contradictory that I assumed there must be some kind of typo involved, so I looked at the story itself.  Which turned out to be just as confusing and contradictory as the headline and teaser.  The only factual part of it was that another poll, carried out by an Italian polling organisation, (presumably on behalf of Italian news media), confirmed Biden's lead over Trump.  It then went on to quote someone involved with the polling organisation, who seemed to contradict this, saying that Trump was still likely to win. His evidence for this?  Well, he didn't offer any.  It just seemed that he was some kind of far right Italian Trump fan, disgruntled that his organisation's polling had delivered a result he didn't like. A non-story, in fact.  But one which is becoming all too typical for Britain's right-wing press: a sensationalist headline backed up only by quotes from some random they've found.  There's no qualification of the reliability of the source, what their credentials or authority are, of course. It doesn't matter to these papers, they just want that headline.  But it is poor 'journalism' - where are the facts?  - designed solely to play to the prejudices of their own readers.

When it comes to Trump, though, papers like the Express and the Mail find themselves in a quandary.  They are well aware that Trump is incredibly unpopular in the UK, but at the same time, he represents the kind of far right authoritarian political movement that they actually admire and, indeed, that a lot of their readership admires and wants.  Moreover, their websites generally get a lot of traffic from the US, from the sort of readers who do support Trump.  So, what are they to do?  They can't actually endorse Trump, for fear of alienating domestic readers who, while right-wing, don't like the man, but don't want to appear too anti-Trump for fear of offending those US crackpots.  So, instead, they run 'stories' like the one I read, which, while reporting the (to them) unpalatable facts about the current polls, tries to negate and bury them through the focus on a completely random 'source' spouting uninformed opinion in the guise of expert comment.  I suppose that the Express would defend it as representing 'balance'.  Except, of course, that when you are presenting facts, they don't need to be balanced by opinion.  But, to be fair to the likes of the Express, it seems to be widespread in the British media that this should be the case.  Even the BBC seems to think this by wheeling on the climate change denying cranks and crackpots to provide 'balance' whenever they report facts on the subject - facts representing the consensus of the scientific community.  You see it with the pandemic, as well: every ill-informed past it 'celebrity' is allowed to spout their idiotic opinions on the subject of Covid-19, as if they have equal validity as the overwhelming scientific consensus on how to deal with the virus.  It really is a sorry state of affairs - the continual subverting of facts in order to churn out misinformation to the public could, ultimately, have serious consequences.