Jon Bright (London, OK): You probably spotted the Sun's entertaining EU referendum call yesterday. Describing the reform treaty as the "greatest threat since WWII", they photoshopped Brown's face onto Winston Churchill's body (mixing their metaphor slightly - surely he should have been Chamberlain?) and swivel round his talismanic V sign, pasting him over this glorious Dad's Army homage (I particularly like the EU president single handedly attacking through Denmark):
The Telegraph have been running their own campaign for a while now and, as Clive blogged for dLiberation yesterday, these two represent only part of a very Eurosceptic UK media:
...is it possible to have a valid referendum, based on the facts, in a country with such a single-minded media? I did the maths a couple of weeks ago, and this is what I reckoned:
Of the national daily papers, it’s really only the barely-read (and increasingly unreadable) Guardian (c.311,000 sales per issue) and Independent (c.190,000 sales per issue) who are in favour of the European Union.
The Times (c.595,000) and Sun (c.2,916,000) follow their owner Rupert Murdoch’s eurosceptic lead. The Telegraph (c.833,000) and Mail (c.2,205,000) play to the middle-England, vaguely xenophobic gallery. The People (c.667,000) is also instinctively anti-EU in most of its approaches, most of the time. The Express (c.735,000) does what the Mail does, only with less panache. If you count the similarly unthinking Star (c.667,000) and Sport (c.93,000) as newspapers, they’re also primarily anti-EU on the rare occasions they bother to mention it.
Then there’s the effectively EU-neutral Mirror (c.1,425,000) - which will run anti-EU pieces quite happily, but also take on pro-EU government propaganda just to be different to the Sun - and largely impartial Financial Times (c.130,000).
So, daily - according to those ABC figures - that makes 13,055,000 anti-EU newspaper sales and 1,555,000 EU-neutral sales, compared to just 501,000 pro-EU newspaper sales.
With over three times as many readers as the Telegraph, the Sun is positioned to make a significant impact. Meanwhile, as Direct Democracy report, the SNP have begun to make their own noises over the treaty, in opposition to the entrenchment of the Common Fisheries Policy. Will Brown stick to his red lines now?
