The revolution might not be televised

DID BREXIT BREAK THE MEDIA? The struggle to leave the EU consumed British politics much more fundamentally, and with greater intensity for longer, than the campaign that took the UK into the old Common Market. It broke leaders, parties and some of the conventions of Westminster politics. From a partisan Speaker to the Supreme Court overruling the Queen for agreeing to parliament’s prorogation, everything was in turmoil.

It is tempting to see these destabilising tumults as the progenitor to what is now classified as the wider “culture war”. But long before the 2016 referendum, British journalism was already in a seemingly irreversible decline. Viewers and readers had been steadily falling away, and already unprofitable platforms were becoming even weaker.

But does the partisan way that the old media reported Brexit point towards a new journalistic landscape? Are overtly opinionated entrants such as GB News — for all its birth pangs — a foretaste of the future?

Small acorns, big nuts

IN NOVEMBER 2010, become the first national newspaper to back the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Instigating this shift was the paper’s chief political commentator, Patrick O’Flynn. “Fellow hacks in Fleet Street and lobby laughed at him,” remembers the ConservativeHome (and later BrexitCentral) journalist, Jonathan Isaby, “and thought he was out of his mind for suggesting what — within six years — actually happened.”