It’s no great secret that UK media fail to deliver for most people.
This is true whether we examine high-quality reporting and investigative work or cultural and political commentary.
Wright aims to explain this distressing state of affairs.
Progressives might know him from a PoliticsJOE episode in which he debated Matthew Goodwin on his thesis that the UK is run by a “woke elite”.
The once-liberal academic argued that the country is dominated culturally and politically by the left.
Wright responded that he had never had a taste of “delicious left wing” in his lifetime.
This quip reinforced the difference in their appearances.
Wright was the outsider journalist wearing an amusing t-shirt, while Goodwin looked the part of an insider with the right connections, wearing a dark suit funded by the cash-rich think tanks that fund him.
Although this contrast aligns with their ideological positions, it is somewhat deceptive.
Wright is a long-time journalist himself.
His work combines the benefits of insider knowledge with the freedom to say what he really thinks about the news industry. That makes his critique of UK media craft-based rather than moralistic.
Breaking could have easily been another book about fake news and the gutter press. Instead, it’s sharp enough to cut straight through the tabloids to the respectable broadsheets and the BBC itself.
The book isn’t a self-aggrandising memoir. Although some chapters are personal, they are counterbalanced by historical ones.
Breaking is neither academic nor theoretical. And it avoids nostalgia for the old days of Fleet Street.
That makes it a perfect guide to UK media.
Breaking distils the work Wright has done for Conquest of the Useless, which has been described as “the most feared newsletter in British journalism”.
By Wright’s own admission, the book is less “spicy” than the blog. But his scathing wit and snarky style still shine.
Although a book like this will inevitably draw the eye of fellow journalists, Breaking is targeted at the general reader who doesn’t know the media inside out.
Wright paints an unflattering picture of the British media, its culture and its history. He argues convincingly that most journalists prefer a cosy relationship with the rich and powerful rather than speaking truth to power, despite their fantasies of crusading against power and injustice.
The Usual Villains
Breaking opens with a dedication to Lyra McKee, a Northern Irish journalist shot dead at the age of 29 while reporting on a story.
But this isn’t a book about good journalists like Lyra. Wright’s is focusing squarely on villains. And, my goodness, is there a surfeit of villains in British journalism.
Naturally, Wright zeros in on Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch. He also digs deeper and rolls out Alfred Harmsworth, better known as Lord Northcliffe.
Breaking explores the role of Lord Northcliffe, in many ways the father of modern tabloid journalism, as well as the rest of the Harmsworth clan, in building the media we know today. Although Murdoch’s name is synonymous with tabloids, it’s not just about him.
Nor does the book devote too much attention to notorious fraudster Robert Maxwell, who is easy to criticise now that he is in the grave and his crimes have been exposed.
Smaller-scale press barons don’t escape Wright’s scrutiny either. Both Richard Desmond, who owned The Daily Express for many years, and Evgeny Lebedev, who bought The Evening Standard, do make the cut.
Up-and-coming media tycoons such as Paul Marshall, who we can partly thank for GB News, also get a mention.
Breaking is wise to avoid many of the liberal cliches of press criticism. It’s not just a matter of better regulation after the phone hacking scandal or debunking fake news. Nor does it downplay underlying structural problems within the industry by concentrating on obvious bad guys.
The book shows what is wrong with the ownership and the commercial models, while also singling out practices such as the “death knock”, contacting the relatives of the recently deceased for a story.
Wright’s approach to journalism centres on the issue of class. His map of British media nepo-babies has provoked outrage from the usual quarters. Notably, it includes liberal and leftist journalists, as well as the usual centrists and rightwing journalists.
The map draws attention to the Milnes and the Rusbridgers as well as the Newton-Dunns and the Rifkinds. It provides compelling visual evidence of an intensely stratified media industry in which many prominent editors, columnists and broadcasters are connected to politicians.
In the aftermath of the map’s publication, leftist journalist Owen Jones called Wright “the piss-boiler in chief”, an apt description.
Breaking fleshes the map out with more facts, figures and class history, the sort that can’t be reduced to an infographic.
Wright is unusually self-aware for a journalist.
When I interviewed him for The Battleground, he made sure to confess his own advantages.
“I realise that I’m a part of the problem,” Wright declared. “I mean, both of my parents come from working-class backgrounds, but I’m middle class.”
“I went to private school,” he continued. “I was the first person in my family to go to university, but I did go to university, and the university I went to was Cambridge. So that’s a huge issue.”
This admission is more than journalists with far greater privilege will risk. As Wright points out, even though Oxbridge graduates are massively overrepresented in the columnist class, it’s rare to hear anybody talk about this.
You’re more likely to read that class isn’t relevant anymore or that the working class is devoted to bashing migrants and trans people. It depends which newspaper you pick up. Beyond the words on the page, however, the reality of class is always there.
Making Hope Possible
Everyone knows that the media can’t be trusted. Everyone knows the newspapers are full of shit and that most hacks belong to the lowest ranks of badger-gasses. Yet this widespread antipathy to the mainstream media often lacks a critical lens.
People who dismiss the mainstream media may turn to alternative media or the world of conspiracy theories and far-right content.
Defenders of the mainstream underscore the dangers of such post-truth content. But that doesn’t justify their own corruption.
As Wright points out, the liberal press—small and beleaguered as it may be—is still part of the same nexus of class and power as the worst rightwing tabloids. BBC Verify won’t save us either.
It’s necessary to go after the Murdoch press. But doing so only to pretend Reach plc is a better alternative or that the Scott Trust is the answer is not going to help matters.
Although Wright paints a disturbing portrait of UK media, he discerns opportunity in the pace of change.
“I try not to give in to my baser, bleaker instincts all the time,” he told me. “We have to make hope possible.”
National newspapers that have dominated the UK media landscape may disappear in the near future. For example, Wright is convinced the Murdoch empire may end up selling off its British papers to focus on the US market.
“I think Lachlan Murdoch will put The Sun out to pasture as a print product as soon as his father dies, but not before,” Wright said. “I think he’s just too connected to it, and he has too much of a love for it as his demonic child.”
“I constantly have visions of him being reduced to a head in a jar, Futurama-style, continuing on forever.”
While the end of the Murdoch era will initially create an opportunity for other press barons, their investment in legacy media makes them vulnerable.
As the national press shrinks and declines, independent media, non-profits and cooperatives could take advantage of the unstable conditions.
Breaking reminds us that we need good journalism and that good journalism needs us.
Making hope possible is the most difficult task for the left today, but also the one we cannot afford to abandon.
Mic Wright’s work demonstrates that savage critique can inspire us, instead of leaving us hopelessly depressed.
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Photograph courtesy of Adam Bowie. Published under a Creative Commons license.
