Tuesday 1st April

We very rarely get un-politically biased reporting, since they were first popularized Newspapers have held and espoused political opinions, usually extremely right –wing.  Why else would you pour money into an enterprise where very few have actually made money?  But I can remember the launch of the Independent, I bought the very first edition and kept it for a few years.  It was my paper of choice for years and I still read it on-line most days (or bit of it).  It has always had a policy of un-biased political reporting, while inviting a wide variety of opinion to write their comments columns, even lately giving a platform to Nigel Farage.  They tended to favour the Lib-Dems rather than one of the larger parties, though since in Coalition they too have come in for censure.  But generally they leave the reader to make their own mind up.

Not so, City A.M., a free London newspaper which unremittingly espouses a right-wing Capitalist view of the world.  And their reporting is unbelievably biased.  There were local elections in France at the weekend and as usual the ruling party suffered losses but if you didn’t know better you would think that poor M. Hollande had been taken into the Place Concorde and publicly thrashed.  They even talk of defeat and the unstoppable rise of the far-right.  The facts are somewhat different.  M. Hollande’s party did lose some votes and now commands a mere 42% of the vote.  Let me just repeat that figure – 42%.  That was how much Tony Blair got in the landslide election of 1997.  Since then no party has got even 40%.   At the last election Cameron got just under 36%.   The NF in France got just 10%, quite a bit lower than our own UKIP is expected to receive in this years elections.  And yet this result is painted as the French electorate’s rejection of Socialism.  When Cameron loses a few more seats in the coming local elections as he most probably will, (they were last fought in 2010 when Labour lost the General election) I fully expect the editor of City A.M. to declare a great victory for a mid-term party to have held onto as many seats as they have.

Another factor of course in the French elections was the continuing low turnout, which is happening here too.   This is a far more worrying result than who actually voted for whom.