Quote ="lefty goldblatt"Again, spot on.
I'm getting pretty sick and tired of the British media DESPERATE to get the Premier League started again, so they can can get one of their "darling" teams a title/cup/qualification
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Some of the viewpoints we are seeing recently in the media are being motivated by commercial concerns.
Sales of newspapers have plummeted during the lockdown and although website hits have increased which increases advertising revenue, they are struggling to generate enough digital revenue to cover the losses. It especially hits the ones whose business model involves a paywall as they are reliant on getting new subscribers and the free sites like Guardian and BBC are hoovering up the clicks.
The Sunday Times has traditionally been very pro-Conservative but they have broken with protocol in becoming the publication that has been most critical of Boris and the Conservative government with its big investigation - they are trying to generate interest that will encourage people to subscribe because they need the revenue.
The ST editorial team is also trying to change the demographic that they appeal to. A lot of the right wing newspapers have based their approach on the 'culture war', they are appealing to working class 'white van man' and wealthy pensioners and making an enemy of millennials and latte-drinking metropolitan professionals. The problem is if you want to make money off digital subscriptions to the people who sit reading their tablets in coffee shops and trains, its the millennials and latte-drinkers who you need to target. While lockdown is on, white van man isn't buying the papers, and the ST are also spooked by the fact their wealthy pensioner base will be dwindling in coming years (especially if covid hangs around in the long term). So the ST's change in politics is a business decision.
The Telegraph and the tabloids are doubling down on the culture war but they desperately need lockdown to be ended soon so they can recover their print newspaper sales. The longer people are staying home, the more their audience is being exposed to the free right wing blog sources which are being shared around social media and becoming an alternative to clicking on the tabloid websites (which aren't reader friendly - the nature of tabloid journalism works better in print than online). Hence you're seeing all these articles now saying that we need to "end this madness", and their sudden concern for issues such as mental health, loneliness and domestic violence during lockdown, whereas they used to see these as snowflake issues.
