Several UK newspapers have spent the past few weeks gossiping about, insinuating or outright accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being a Soviet spy.

In a more sensible world, the sheer absurdity of that story would mean it never made the front pages.

A raft of Tories, including the Prime Minister, decided to jump in on the rumour mongering — more an indictment of the Conservative Party than anything else — but that doesn’t excuse The Sun et al. spreading clear bullshit without a care in the world.

British people have sort of gotten used to it. As Martin Conboy, Professor of Journalism History at the University of Sheffield, discussed in this week’s episode, British tabloids have been infamous for decades. Celebrity obsessed, sensationalist and prone to attacks on marginalised communities — British tabloids are held up internationally as windows into the dark hearts of Britons.

A lot of people will say tabloids are the way they are because of the political leaning of their editors. Fleet Street has traditionally been dominated by monsters like Paul Dacre and Kelvin MacKenzie, loudmouthed bullies who run their domains with absolute certainty. They have always been right leaning, but that isn’t what makes them so powerful.

Their success has been built on a laser-like focus on pleasing their readers, a mass of barely literate bigots. MacKenzie in particular has serious contempt for his audience, as you can tell from his description of them:

“You just don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff [serious news].”

There is a line of much celebrated leftist thought that suggests tabloids and their broadcast equivalents like Fox News push the population to the right. The creators steadily drip feed reactionary takes on every topic going until the reader imagines himself (and it is usually men) to be living in modern hellscape, a million miles for the halcyon days when men were men and people knew where they stood.

It’s called the Propaganda Model and it imagines nefarious elites manipulating the masses. It’s a comforting thesis and it was co-written by everyone’s favourite leftist thinker Noam Chomsky — I think that has helped it rise to such prominence.

However, much like the story about Corbyn being a spy, it struggles when you give it a closer look.

First of all, claiming outsized influence of the media on the general population is dubious. The mass media era (roughly the latter half of the 20th century) is over. There are tens of thousands of TV channels, newspaper circulation has been collapsing for years and most people get their news from their peers on social media platforms. The impact of any one outlet on the political opinions of the entire population is minimal.

Even during the height of mass media, when there was only one channel and a handful of newspapers in each country, the most thorough studies found that political opinion was largely shaped by opinion leaders in the community. Mass media was most influential when it reached community leaders, priests or charismatic pub landlords — there was a two step flow even back then.

Second — and perhaps most pertinently — the idea that tabloids or cable news channels are primarily driven by ideology is patently false. They are businesses. They are driven by their bottom line. The reason they write stories about demonic immigrants or immoral single mothers is because it sells more papers. It’s the same reason international news is being cut and editorial oversight being pared back, even in prestige newspapers.

The newspaper business is suffering. The fall in circulation was offset by rises in advertising revenue, until the internet came along. Local newspapers, in particular, have been gutted. In the UK alone, 198 newspapers have closed for good since 2005. Facebook and Google launched in 2004, Youtube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. The digital revolution exploded the newspaper industry.

Anybody who can help mitigate the effects of this upheaval is going to be celebrated, no matter how they do it. Think of the famous tabloid headlines as an earlier form of clickbait, they make people pick up the issue and buy it out of curiosity or confusion or anger. People buy the paper despite themselves.

Those obnoxious tabloid editors have stayed in their jobs because of their ability to keep the business open, not because they’re successfully spreading a right-wing viewpoint to the masses. That isn’t how you run a business.

The good news is that even they cannot fight the inevitable. Circulation continues to fall and people are becoming much more tolerant. Their audiences are dwindling. Tabloids are dying — it just might not feel fast enough.

You know the drill:

Follow us on FB – www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/

– www.facebook.com/connectedanddisaffected/ Follow us on Twitter – twitter.com/CandDPodcast

– twitter.com/CandDPodcast Subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes – itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/