Don’t go into a newsagent today. Don’t even go near one, unless you suddenly find yourself desperately in need of some Polos. No good can possibly come of it.
It’s the front pages, you see. They’re all operating at such a hysterically shrill frequency that even being in the same building as them will ruin your blood pressure. So much as glance at any of them today and your aqueous humour will begin to bubble and spit inside your skull. Right now, in fact, I’m in a double-glazed room half a mile away from the nearest WH Smith’s, and yet I’m pretty sure the front pages have managed to give me the first sproutings of a brain tumour.
Almost without exception, they are a tsunami of partisan delirium. The Sun has yanked out that old photo of Ed Miliband and the sandwich, screaming a fiery-eyed warning to readers about the repercussions of letting the country be run by someone who’ll intermittently allow themselves to be strung up by mischievous picture editors. The Telegraph has gone with “Nightmare on Downing Street” alongside a picture of everyone’s most profound nightmare – a woman and some children looking quite happy together.
The front page of The Express, whose owner recently gave Ukip a million quid, wails WHY YOU MUST VOTE FOR UKIP. The Mirror’s front page is just a photo of David Cameron looking like he breathed in a fart, the Mail’s front page is just a naked plea for everyone to keep Labour out and even the Guardian’s front page has done its best to make Boris Johnson look like the Judderman. These aren’t front pages, they’re interpretive illustrations of tinnitus.
What they all have in common, evidently, is blind panic. But it isn’t panic about the election. Sure, at first sight, all the papers appear to be terrified of a government they don’t want. But on closer inspection, it seems fairly clear that they’re actually just terrified of being ignored. This is the first election where newspapers don’t matter, and what we’re watching is an industry-wide tantrum.
The days of old, where a newspaper would make a pre-election splash by announcing its political endorsement, are long gone. With the possible exception of the Independent – whose endorsement of the current coalition managed to take even its own journalists by surprise – the wider public couldn’t give a stuff which parties newspapers endorse, because they’re endorsing them via a hugely weakened medium. Endorsing a political party to people who still buy newspapers is like endorsing a political party exclusively to people who still wear monocles and powdered wigs.
History will mark the 2015 election as the moment that newspapers succumbed to impotency. If they held any position of power whatsoever, given that the bulk of them far and away endorse the right, this election should have been a Conservative landslide. Instead it’s a stalemate. The papers can make as much noise as they like, but they’re changing nothing. What today’s front pages really show are a clutch of waning organisations screaming for relevancy.
Plus, when they’re acting like this, it’s hard to see what they’re for. Today’s front pages are just a procession of endless, needy, high-pitched partisan wailing, trapped deep inside an impossible circlejerk of negative feedback. And, guys, we’ve got Twitter for that now. Find a new niche.
If you can bear it, I’d recommend getting hold of each of today’s papers and keeping them in a box. Then, a few decades from now, you can show them to your grandchildren. They’ll be amazed. Not by all the frothy-mouthed lunacy on display, but the fact that newspapers even existed.