“Who does the British Media even speak for? It’s not Young People.”

I am sick of the British media. To be honest, I think I have earned the right to be cynical. Flicking from the performative impartiality of Laura Kuensberg’s BBC panels to the incessant whinings of Dan Wootton on GB News feels like I am being endlessly gaslighted by a manipulative partner – and all I can do is sit there and take it.

“The British Media openly facilitates the binarity of UK Politics”

The media does little to challenge the notion that there is no room for new ideas; in fact, it openly welcomed and facilitated the two-party binary of UK politics. As Aaron Bastani from Novara Media put it, it seems that “ideas no longer matter or, if they do, our political class is incapable of acting on them”. 

Perhaps this has more to do with the state of British politics than anything else. Since the 2019 election, it feels as though we have reached a stalemate. The voices of the two thirds of those aged 18 to 24 who voted for “leftist, anti-austerity and cosmopolitan parties” went largely unheard and had little to show for themselves. British politics had officially abandoned the radical and embraced the same record of moderate ideas that it had been playing on loop for the past decade. 

Anyway, why would the British media embrace anything new when the corporate interests it is awash with benefit from the maintenance of the status quo? Just this week, senior Tories have raised concerns about a potential Abu Dhabi-backed bid for ownership of The Telegraph and the weekly Spectator, fearful that it would give a “foreign power” undue influence over the British media landscape. Simultaneously, the BBC were forced to replace its boss – and former Goldman Sachs banker – Richard Sharp after he failed to declare his connection to an £800,000 loan made to Boris Johnson. The ownership of British media is a highly politicised thing, and elite interests will continue to package up and sell their own perspectives as the truth.

The media establishment consensus is a slap in the face to the hopes of young people for a better future: it convinces us that ‘things will not get better’ and that we should just accept this as a fact. How are we supposed to imagine progress when we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us that change isn’t possible?

The Israel-Hamas Conflict highlights the Disconnect between British Media and Young People

The ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict and Palestinian genocide is an issue that has uniquely politicised people in the UK, and one that has revealed how out of touch the media can be. Witnessing BBC newscasters incorrectly label London’s protests in support of Palestine as ‘pro-Hamas’ was shocking to say the least. Right to the camera. On two different occasions. Many young people have simply turned off the news channels altogether and, somewhat surprisingly, turned to platforms like TikTok and X in search of journalism from those on the ground in Gaza. Indeed, during the first few days of the offensive, X was flooded with over 50 million related posts. 

I don’t think I am alone in this feeling either. Speaking to friends about the media coverage of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, revealed to me the sense that young people are turning away from the mainstream. Without getting into the politics of ‘impartiality’ or the age-old debate around which political ideology the BBC is biased against, we were left jarred by such bare-faced lies, cloaked in the veil of legitimacy. 

We can’t consume the mainstream media if they’re failing to educate and inform us. 

There’s a wider, more fundamental disconnect between the mainstream media and the issues young people care about. I find myself asking who it is that the British media speaks for, and with each year I realise that it certainly is not young people. 

The generational divide in media consumption is evident. A 2022 Reuters Institute study found that young people are the age category with the lowest levels of trust in traditional news outlets, with only 37% of both 18–24 year olds and 25–34 year olds saying they trust most news most of the time, compared with 47% of those 55 and older. 

While commentators are always looking for new angles to analyse how and why youth apathy and distrust in politics is on the rise, the media, ironically, never addresses its role in the issue. This is the fact that there is a fundamental lack of accessible political information young people are exposed to by the media or in our education system. 

Young people are failed at every institutional level in the UK; whether that be through the media or the education system. How are we expected to develop political literacy as a country when the most exposure students get to politics is a couple PSHE lessons on how many MPs sit in Parliament? 

Even when young people do make the active choice to educate themselves, the news often does not take seriously the matters that young people care more about than previous generations – from the housing crisis to climate breakdown – and when it does, issues are cloaked in inaccessible political jargon designed to signal who does and does not have the right to speak. 

There is an Audre Lorde quote that floats into my head when apathy strikes: “your silence will not protect you”. I hope these are words for the next wave of journalists to live by. I think it is more important than ever before that we support local newspapers and grassroots journalism, while refining and amplifying the new wave of online outlets as an alternative to a media establishment who is convinced that progress is impossible. 

We must remind ourselves that nothing in politics is ‘natural’, despite what the news may make it feel like, and that we always have the power to change the narrative.

Images from Flickr. Cover Image shows BBC London Headquarters soaked in red paint (Oct 2023).