I find it actually quite an interesting exercise to compare all their politics headlines [0] with the fact that apparently Kier Starmer is polling numbers like 73% feeling he is doing "badly" [1] and there is some obscure group called "RFM" who have popped onto the scene and are polling well compared to everyone else (with a strong showing by the Greens) [2].

I mean I'd probably say this for any cat story in politics; but this really does seem like a moment where the British media should be making serious attempts at facilitating a national discourse. The stats suggest something is going wrong in the political system that needs to be talked out. Just eyeballing the politics headlines I'm not convinced the Guardian has their finger on that pulse.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/keir-starmer-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

Originally, newspapers were very profitable, because they were the only mass media other than books. As representative democracy emerged in the UK, they became very politically significant, and so politicians were eager to hand out viscountcies to anyone who owned a paper in order to curry editorial favour. The legacy of this is that there are now too many national newspapers in the UK, and so they all - even the supposedly sober broadsheets - feel a need to sensationalise their reporting to attract and hold paying readers.

I’d wager most people would rather avoid the hard questions.

Much easier to stay calm and carry on;)

Eh, traditional newspapers will always contain fluff, because the factual current affairs reporting is always so relentlessly negative.

Ain’t nobody reporting on a road that doesn’t have a pothole.

Nothing unusual about putting in some comics, a crossword, a travel section, a cooking section, a sports section, and the occasional article about a cat.