Rupert Murdoch is possibly the most powerful propagandist in the world. Every UK Prime Minister since 1979 has prostrated themselves at his feet in the hope of approval in his mass circulation propaganda rags.
Perhaps some of our leaders have been more willing than others to push the Murdoch approved right-wing economic agenda of privatisation of public property, financial sector deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich and attacks on the labour rights of the poor and ordinary, but they've all adopted Murdoch approved right-wing economics and sucked up to him for the approval they think they need in order to achieve political power.
It's already absolutely clear that despite Ed Miliband's feeble efforts to suck up to Rupert Murdoch by doing a spot of free advertising for the S*n, Murdoch absolutely loathes him and wants to see David Cameron back in power. In fact Murdoch despises Ed Miliband so much that he has berated his S*n employees on several occasions for not doing enough to ensure that David Cameron and the Tories win the 2015 General Election.
This pressure from above has led to ever more extreme hatchet jobs and outlandishly biased election coverage in the Murdoch press. The odd thing is that since Murdoch began putting the pressure on his employees to attack Ed Miliband as much as possible, Miliband's approval ratings have improved dramatically from unbelievably appalling (between minus 40 and minus 56) for the last 6 months to just plain bad (minus 18 in April 2015).The problem for Murdoch is that years of anti-Labour propaganda must have already convinced almost all of the people who are credulous enough to rote learn their opinions from the S*n into thinking they need to go and vote for the party of wealth and privilege in order to keep Ed Miliband from borrowing too much money (even though the party of wealth and privilege has actually created more new public debt in just five years than every Labour government in history combined), so it doesn't really matter how much his employees up the anti-Miliband propaganda now; the gullible will have already been convinced, and anyone who is reasonably fair minded and capable of using a little critical judgement on what they read must be pretty unimpressed with the extraordinarily biased political coverage they're seeing in the S*n these days.
Perhaps Ed Miliband's personal approval recovery has less to do with the extreme bias of the Murdoch press and more to do with his own half-decent performances in the pre-election debates and the fact that David Cameron has exposed himself as a coward who is terrified of open debate whose only retort to any kind of question is a red-faced temper tantrum of angry rhetoric? I don't suppose that it's possible to know for sure whether the egregiousness of the bias in Murdoch's rags is contributing to Miliband's approval rating recovery, it just makes an interesting reverse correlation.
You don't have to be a Labour Party supporter (I'm certainly not a fan of right-wing economics hidden behind pseudo-socialist window dressing) to see that Ed Miliband is the lesser of two evils when it comes to who the next Prime Minister might be, and that the more extreme the political bias in the S*n, the more fair-minded people are likely to conclude that if Rupert Murdoch and his cronies hate Ed Miliband so much, there must be something half-decent about him after all.
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ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
The decline in political participation and the rise of the non-traditional parties
The terrifying scale of political illiteracy in the UK
The myth of right-wing patriotism
How George Osborne has created more debt than every Labour government in history combined
Recommended reading - heterodox economics
Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
12 things you should know about the 2014 European elections
The Tory PCC election farce
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