Getty The British press has lost it The UK elections may not be remembered as much for the outcome as the way the media covered it

LONDON — Fasten your seatbelt: it’s going to be a bumpy ride. With the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, neck and neck in the polls; and two new insurrectionary forces, UKIP and the Scottish National Party, set to disrupt the two-and-a-half party system that’s dominated British politics for 40 years, Thursday’s election night is going to be fought constituency by constituency, sometimes recount by recount. There will be unexpected triumphs, unforeseen disasters (“Were you up for the moment when so-and-so lost their seat?”).

Only one thing is for sure. This is the election during which Britain’s press ‘lost it.'

The press just haven’t reflected reality, let alone the views of their readers. For months polls have put Conservatives and Labour close with about third of the vote each, and smaller parties destined to hold some balance of power. But there has been no balance in the papers. Tracked by Election Unspun, the coverage has been unremittingly hostile to Ed Miliband, the Labour challenger, with national newspapers backing the Conservative incumbent, David Cameron over Labour by a ratio of five to one.

Veteran US campaign manager David Axelrod finds this politicization of the print media one of the most salient differences with the US. “I’ve worked in aggressive media environments before,” he told POLITICO, “but not this partisan.” Axelrod may have ax to grind as he advises the Labour Party, but even a conservative commentator and long-serving lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch has been shocked. “Tomorrow's front pages show British press at partisan worst,” Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times rued. “All pretense of separation between news and opinion gone, even in ‘qualities.'"

And that’s the difference. The whole newspaper industry seems to be affected by the tabloid tendentiousness trade-marked by Murdoch’s best-selling the Sun when it roared, in 1992, “It’s the Sun Wot Won It.” The Daily Mail specializes in political character assassination and the ‘Red Ed’ tag was predictable. But when the paper went on from attacking Miliband’s dead father to a hit-job on his wife’s appearance, the politics of personal destruction sank from gutter to sewer.

In this precipitous race to the bottom, perhaps the Daily Telegraph had the steepest fall. Known as a bastion of the Tory thinking, it had long been respected for separating fact from comment. During this election cycle is was caught sourcing its front pages direct from Conservative Campaign HQ, seeming to confirm the parting words of its senior political commentator, Peter Oborne, that it was intent on committing “a fraud on its readership.”

The paper of record, The Times, fared a little better, in that there has been two vaguely positive front pages about Miliband — compared to 18 for Cameron.

Meanwhile, the publication that arose in rebellion to Murdoch’s acquisition of the Times in the 80s, The Independent, shocked most its staff and readership by backing a continued Lib Dem/Tory Coalition. Reports said the endorsement was a ‘diktat’ from the wealthy Russian-born owner, Evgeny Lebedev, causing many to mock its original ad slogan “The Independent: It’s Not. Are You?” or renaming it ‘The Dependent’.

Even the sober, tight-lipped Financial Times, which once supported Blair and endorsed Obama, lost credibility. The paper said it backed another Conservative-led coalition because Ed Miliband was too “preoccupied with inequality.” But that magisterial tone was undermined when it emerged the leader writer, Jonathan Ford, was pictured in the notorious 1987 photo of Oxford’s elite hard drinking Bullingdon Club next to the Tory mayor Boris Johnson and just below David Cameron. (The FT disputes the attribution of the endorsement editorial to Ford: See their Letter to the Editor, March 11.)

Therein lies the problem, and an indication the newspaper world is a microcosm of a wider malaise. The Conservative politician John Biffen once said “whenever you find a senior politician and a powerful media owner in private conclave, you can be certain that the aims of healthy, plural democracy are not being well-served.” This election that conclave looks like an exclusive club.

Rarely have the economic interests of the handful of wealthy men who own most the press (nine men own 90 percent of all national and regional titles) appeared so brutally transparent. Most of the conservatives among them don’t like Cameron’s modernizing project, or the fact he looks set to fail to get a majority for a second time. But they fear Miliband with a passion because he threatens their power in several ways.

Hardly a left-wing firebrand, the Labour leader has tried to carve out a Theodore Roosevelt ‘trust busting’ identity by taking on monopolies and cartels in the energy industry and banking. This might have won over some proprietors at first, but then the reality began to dawn.

One of Milband’s opening announcements of the election campaign was to promise to abolish the country’s anomalous ‘non dom’ tax status. Unique to Britain, and a hangover from our imperial past, ‘non domiciled for tax purposes’ has been a lucrative avoidance scheme for wealthy individuals with offshore connections. The Rothermere family who own the Mail, and the Barclay brothers who own the Telegraph, avail themselves of this ‘non dom’ boondoggle.

There’s even more antipathy between Miliband and Rupert Murdoch, who still owns Britain’s biggest publisher, News UK, and has a controlling share in its biggest broadcaster in revenue terms, BSkyB. The bad blood goes back to the phone hacking scandal that erupted in 2011. Miliband was the first to call for the resignation of Murdoch’s British CEO, Rebekah Brooks, and for News Corp’s billion dollar bid for the remaining shares in BSkyB to be withdrawn. (The Labour leader still uses this moment as proof he’s capable of taking on powerful vested interests who have cowed politicians in the past.)

The hacking scandal led to criminal trials and the eight month long Leveson Inquiry into the press which concluded the complaints system was broken, and recommended a tougher independent regulator. The legislation had support from all three main political parties, but the press felt victimised and muzzled. Another reason to hate Miliband is that he has committed himself to implementing the system in full.

Americans, with their first amendment principle, often find discussion of press ‘regulation’ disturbing, but actually the US has many more laws than the UK controlling foreign media control and cross ownership (That’s the reason Rupert Murdoch is a US citizen). For the first time since the early 90s, Labour have said they will re-examine at the ownership issue, and this is really where the animus bites; it’s a direct existential threat to News Corp’s commercial holdings in the UK. For that reason, Murdoch was reported to have berated his staff at the Sun for not doing more to stop Labour a few months ago.

You can’t say they haven’t tried. Rehiring their notorious 90s editor Kelvin MacKenzie, Britain’s best-selling tabloid has engaged in weeks of knocking copy and unflattering front page splashes of Ed Miliband. This week the Sun were even caught using an agency offering £100 to readers for pro-Tory stories. But the paper has half the readership it did under MacKenzie’s heyday. Social media has made it a laughing stock, even among conservatives. More importantly, the polls haven’t budged. Miliband’s personal ratings have risen because, as Axelrod points out, TV exposure have shown he is better than the cartoon caricatures in the press. The attempt by wealthy foreigner media owners and ‘non doms’ to influence the election has become an election issue in itself.

That’s the ultimate catastrophe for Fleet Street: it gambled its credibility on a risky political calculation but hasn’t delivered to the Conservatives. If anything, it’s embarrassed the party it so raucously backed. Whatever happens tonight, the papers have lost the respect of their readers and the fear of our political leaders. It will be a long repentant road back to any kind of relevance.

Peter Jukes has written for Newsweek, the New Republic, the New Statesman, and the Independent. His book about the phone hacking scandal and media monopolies was published by Unbound in 2012. His account of live tweeting the entire phone hacking trial, Beyond Contempt, was published by Canbury Press in 2014. He is a writer and adviser to a new crowdfunded journalism platform, Byline. Follow him on Twitter @peterjukes.

This article was updated May 11 to include a reference to "Letter to the Editor: 'The FT has never had a firm allegiance to any one party'."

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