Over the past few days, Britain has been treated to a fresh media spectacle, marking a new low in the slow decline of an autonomous press. The Daily Telegraph, which has employed Boris Johnson off and on for over 30 years, and currently pays him £275,000 a year as a columnist, has put its full editorial and journalistic resource behind his bid to become leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister.

Beside the constant trickle of op-eds praising his character and political judgement, the paper published an opinion poll on the morning of his leadership campaign launch, predicting he would win a majority of 140 in a general election (since trashed by polling experts), and has converted its front page into a type of campaign leaflet, full of flattering photos and slogans.

At best, this is distasteful and creepy. But is it dangerous? On its own, it is not substantially different from the way the newspapers fell behind Tony Blair in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or The Daily Mail briefly worked for Theresa May between 2016-17. But its broader context points to something more worrying than those precedents, with immediate echoes of what’s taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. The sound of journalists being booed at Johnson’s launch event should be enough to raise concerns of something Trumpian going on.

The rise and fall of ‘spin’

The rising intimacy between party machinery and the press (and hence, declining public trust in both) is often blamed on New Labour, and Alastair Campbell particularly. Winning Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour was viewed as a strategic triumph for Campbell and Blair, and an act of cynical deference by their critics. But it’s worth remembering that these doyens of ‘spin’ only placed so much emphasis on pleasing the press because they’d been so bruised by Murdoch et al in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.

Spin, as we came to know it, was born under duress. New Labour might be accused of cynicism and superficiality in their fixation on headlines, but only because the press was deemed to be so dangerous. Blair, it is often forgotten, dedicated one of his last speeches to lambasting the “feral beasts” of the media. The relationship between Downing Street and Fleet Street was, at best, one of détente (Blair’s growing personal camaraderie with Murdoch did nothing to help Gordon Brown).

The past decade has seen the Conservative Party develop a far closer relationship to the press that goes well beyond image management and spin. While Blair appointed a former journalist as his spin doctor, David Cameron put a former Times journalist (Michael Gove) and former Telegraph journalist (Johnson) in his Cabinet, and a Times columnist and leader writer (Danny Finkelstein) in the House of Lords. Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, was also a Times columnist until 2013.

The relationship between Cameronism and journalism worked both ways, as demonstrated when George Osborne was appointed Editor of The Evening Standard despite no journalistic experience whatsoever. Johnson had to abandon his Telegraph column during his woeful tenure as Foreign Secretary, but continued to use the newspaper to outline his views on Brexit and other matters, who reported them gushingly as ‘exclusives’.

Johnson’s impending Premiership has to be understood in this context, one in which journalists become politicians, and politicians become journalists. Rather than policies being developed and then ‘spun’ for media consumption, power becomes held by the story-tellers themselves. But this is only one part of the story of how we reached the nadir, of journalists being booed for failing to endorse a political candidate. The other part concerns technology.

Bi-passing journalism

As is now well-understood, digital platforms have transformed the possibilities for political communication, bi-passing traditional channels, and allowing political campaigns to target and address potential voters, without the mediation of journalists, editors or broadcasting regulations. The democratic shocks of 2016 have been partly credited to Facebook’s power to connect campaigns (and carefully tailored campaign messages) directly with individuals, without any broader public awareness. This turns all campaigning into a form of ‘dog-whistling’, in which political messages circumvent the traditional, analogue public sphere.

One consequence of this is that the public (and even rival campaigns) don’t know what messages are being used or who they’re being aimed at. Targeted messaging appears to produce particular volatility where it is used to persuade non-voters to vote for the first time, as occurred with the EU referendum. But another consequence is that channels now exist to observe, criticise and dismiss journalists and the ‘mainstream media’. Trump famously uses Twitter to attack CNN, The New York Times and any other news agencies that report things he doesn’t like. Far-right activists and conspiracy theorists use YouTube and Facebook to accuse particular news channels of conspiring to cover up the truth. The claim that journalists are ‘enemies of the people’ can now be distributed as easily as news itself.