In response to Andrew Cadman: Advertising explains why social conservatism has died out in the Mail and Telegraph, ScaryBiscuits wrote:
I have another theory for the decline of conservativism in the newspapers. It is entryism. My aunt was Woman’s Editor for the Mail 20 years ago and I think I was the only Conservative she knew. Think about that, she was working for a supposedly solidly right-wing paper but she didn’t know a single right-wing person professionally. She certainly had never heard conservative arguments.
This entryism also explains why the right wing papers often sound a bit hollow or shrill. They are writing what they think nasty, right-wing people want to hear. But as they do this from the head rather than the heart their insincerity often comes through, despite their best efforts.
Once they’ve taken over, left-wing group-think dominates and becomes more important than listening to their customers, whose concerns are rationalised away, as are declining sales. Thus the internet is an excuse for the decline of newspapers, not the primary reason. It is for me at least. It’s not the cost that stops me buying a subscription to the Telegraph but the principle of not subsidising socialists. I had a subscription for The Times as well for a while but cancelled it when I felt they really didn’t share my values.
Unfortunately, it’s not at all easy for upstarts like The Conservative Woman. As soon as they become successful, they too suffer the entryists.
Running a media organisation without narcissistic liberals is about as easy as running a German railway in 1946 without recruiting Nazis.
You don’t even need to be that big to suffer. Look at Guido Fawkes’s site. Although that was never socially conservative, it was viscerally anarchistic under its founder Paul Staines. His young writers like Alex Wickham and Harry Cole really just want to be part of the Establishment. For them, the populist outlaw is a pretence, just like a conservative comment is a pretence for most journalists in the right-wing legacy press.
