Old media hacks: stop scapegoating the young

Angela Haggerty Social media

YOUNG people don’t care much for politicians, ne wsp a - pers or being told what to think,” wrote former News of the World editor Andy Coulson in GQ the day after the General Election, without a hint of irony.

Still, it was nice to see the one-time spin-man of David Cameron – who was convicted in 2014 for phone-hacking offences – smartening up to the fact that young people don’t have much faith in his former industry.

Does it ever occur to Coulson and his ilk that the fact his byline on the article advertises his new PR agency but fails to mention his jail time is the kind of thing people in this country are sick to the back teeth of?

Since the election, a plethora of threatened commentators have taken full advantage of the media platforms they’ve enjoyed for years to kick down at young people for daring to go out and vote. It’s just a flirtation, said a dismissive Coulson, while Melanie Phillips of The Times took to Radio Four’s Moral Maze to whine about the “anger and division” of the youth voting against their elders. Another Times writer, Clare Foges, wondered whether the country had come to respect “the youngers and their opinions too much”. You might think political commentators should take some time to contemplate how the country has come to be rocked by a political earthquake that no-one expected before starting the blame game – but hey, it’s easy to scapegoat the young, so why not just churn out several thousand words on that and hope all this hoo-ha blows over? It’s no surprise that a few noses are out of joint. Jeremy Corbyn was never supposed to do this well. There are obvious parallels to be drawn here between the Corbyn effect and indyref, and readers of this newspaper will know only too well how the Yes movement was often treated with derision from commentators who seemed to furiously resist any political shift that challenged

the view of the world they’ve hedged their bets on.

So with Corbyn, the rise in left-wing politics in the UK is all the fault of the young. The stupid, naive, idealistic young. The dreamers. The inexperienced. The kids who don’t really know what life’s all about.

THESE are the same kids, presumably, who, in England, took to the streets in 2010 to protest against tuition fees. They weren’t listened to. The same kids who have felt the brunt of austerity strangling their opportunities and stealing their dreams. The same kids who can’t even contemplate the prospect of buying a home, and who are exploited by private landlords demanding the earth in rent money. The same kids who walked out of schools back in 2003 to protest against the Iraq war and who have never forgotten – just like Jeremy Corbyn – how easily the public were swept aside by a bunch of suits.

The problem for these commentators is that the youth couldn’t care less what they think. As traditional media columnists carry on writing in a shrinking bubble of influence, young people are getting their information elsewhere. It’s not that they don’t consume traditional media, it’s that their perception of it is different.

Indeed, the Sun and Daily Mail, which boast some of the highest circulations both in print and online, embarked on crazed anti-Corbyn coverage in the days before the election (more so than usual), but it had little effect on the Facebook and Snapchat generations. Their outrageous editorials may garner exposure, but their influence is coming into question.

The same was true of indyref: voters didn’t behave in the way they were expected to, and the result was an irreversible change throughout a nation, fuelled by a landscape of inequality that has become unbearable for too many. Smarter elements of the media saw it coming, but often struggled to be heard among the noise of a multibillion pound media echo chamber.

Singer Lily Allen – who hasn’t been frightened to dip her toes into the political commentary scene over the years and has herself been ridiculed among the commentariat – summed it up nicely on Twitter in the early hours of June 9, saying simply: “Respect Your Youngers.”

Indeed. It’s time the commentariat – which has consistently called politics wrong in recent times – accepts its naivety, admits it doesn’t know what’s going on and acknowledges its belligerently idealistic approach to the fabric of UK politics has been shattered.

Oh, how the tables have turned.