The Daily Mail has backed Brexit on the eve of the referendum on EU membership in a decision underlining the fact that the poll has split the UK’s Conservative newspaper groups as well as its governing party.
The Mail’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, has made his paper’s support for Brexit clear in recent weeks, with an emphasis on anti-immigration stories, while the Mail on Sunday came out for continued membership of the EU last week.
The difference of opinion – the last time the two titles disagreed was in 1983 when the Mail on Sunday shocked its sister title by backing the Social Democrats – echoes the blue-on-blue nature of the battle for the UK’s future in Europe. It also confirms that the country’s most powerful media owners are happy to have a horse in both races.
Wednesday's @DailyMailUK #MailFrontPages pic.twitter.com/RGgtIfR9Wo
— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) June 21, 2016
The owner of the Mail, Lord Rothermere, is believed to be pro-EU, but its readers are not. The readers of the Times are largely pro-remain, but the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, is no fan of Brussels.
With his daily tabloid title, The Sun, the first of the main national titles to come out in support of Brexit, Murdoch can have it both ways in a poll which is still too close to call.
The closeness of the two-way race has provoked some of the most criticised reporting in recent elections as papers try ever harder to win the argument. Both the Mail and the Sunday Express have corrected stories on immigration, while surveys suggest that the public have felt surprisingly uninformed about the EU despite a barrage of news.
The decision of the Mail on Sunday’s editor, Geordie Greig, to back remain was understood to have received a frosty response from Dacre, but Rothermere, a resident of France, and his wife are understood to be pro-EU and friends of the prime minister. Greig reports to both men.
The tone of the two papers’ coverage over recent weeks could not have been more different. While the Mail on Sunday ran a series of pro-EU stories, including last week’s splash on the archbishop of Canterbury warning of cuts in the event of Brexit, the Daily Mail’s focus on fears over immigration has prompted complaints from the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants among others.
A petition calling for Rothermere to sack his long-serving editor-in-chief over the EU referendum coverage has attracted thousands of signatures.
The split among the two main groups does not hide the fact that British newspapers have been overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit. The Telegraph, the Express, the Sun and the Star, as well as the Mail, account for about 4.7 million daily readers on average, nearly four times the average for the neutral or pro-remain papers – the Financial Times, the Guardian, the i and the Daily Mirror, according to the latest audited figures.
Research carried out by the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University found that the ratio of stories backing leave versus those backing remain was 80:20 when circulation figures were taken into account.
Other information sources, from the BBC to social media such as Facebook and Twitter, dwarf these daily newspaper figures, but researchers believe that newspapers continue to dominate the news agenda.
After the personalities behind the two campaigns, the most prominent issues in both the press and on television since the start of the election proper on 6 May have been immigration and the economy. A fifth of all newspaper articles up to 8 June covered the economy and about 13% immigration. The percentages were echoed in television coverage.
Anecdotal evidence suggests a link between the predominance of anti-immigration stories and the weeks in which the Brexit campaign surged in the polls, but it is not possible to make any direct link yet.
Dominic Wring, a professor of political communication at Loughborough, said: “Leave did well to get immigration, a concern central to the Brexit case, as the most prominent subject in the news three weeks ago. The issue temporarily replaced the economy as the major theme in coverage of the referendum but this has since re-asserted itself at the top of the media agenda.
“The economy and immigration have dominated while substantive issues such as health, defence and especially the environment have been marginal to the debate.”
He described the lack of coverage of agricultural issues such as farming subsidies as breathtaking.
The continued dominance of a waning industry – newspapers have lost millions of readers in the past decade – has led to some head-scratching.
After last year’s general election, 62% of people told researchers at Panelbase that TV coverage had been most influential in helping them form their opinion, 25% cited newspapers, 17% websites and 14% radio. The least influential were social media and magazines, with Facebook at 7%, Twitter 4% and magazines 2%.
Such statistics have not deterred either side in the EU referendum spending considerable amounts on social media advertising. In the 2015 general election, the Conservatives spent £1.2m on Facebook ads alone.
The influence of newspapers is not always quantifiable. The columnist Anthony Hilton wrote in the Standard earlier this year: “I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’”