Opinion Journalism Is Now Mostly Liberal Hand-Wringing and Racist Dog-Whistles

Comment journalism is everywhere in 2025, and it’s harder than ever to tell if it’s relevant, let alone influential. As has always been the case, some is knowingly inconsequential, providing light amusement or just filling column inches. Some comment journalism attempts to make a social issue of a writer’s personal experiences (a tactic I’ve used, not always successfully) or shares them to enlighten others. Some offers political analysis, usually partisan, though it should be remembered that nobody is as ideological as someone who claims not to be (such as those people can currently be found writing hand-wringing op-eds saying, ‘This isn’t what I wanted’ or ‘Why is Starmer’s Labour so rightwing?’). Some strives to push a specific agenda, trying to stretch their publication’s limits, and the wider Overton window, beyond where their editors, or mainstream politicians, are currently willing to go.

Two of the best recent books analysing British media – Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, published in 2008, and Mic Wright’s Breaking, published in June this year – posit the rise of opinion journalism as a result of cost-cutting, as the internet ate into legacy newspapers’ profit margins and raison d’être. That was true in the 2000s and 2010s, as papers grappled with the apparent democratisation that the internet brought. Editing the Guardian opinion section between 2001 and 2007, Seumas Milne sought to use below-the-line comments as a means of narrowing the gap between writer and reader. Not all columnists welcomed this development: you can find some complaining about “mob rule online” as early as 2008. It meant extra work: as well as drafting and editing a column, writers were now encouraged to spend the rest of the day of publication sitting at the computer while (mostly) anonymous people hurled abuse at them. It also meant a headache for moderators: newspapers were legally responsible for any pre-moderated comments that appeared, so they had to let everything through and then decide what to delete, leading to endless accusations of institutional bias and censorship.

In the 2010s, these interactions migrated to social media, especially X/Twitter, where journalists would come into sustained contact with the public. Amidst the fallout from the financial crash, as austerity polarised people, some of those who had begun their careers before the internet, unused to the cut and thrust of forums, struggled to cope with constant criticism. Rather than log off from platforms designed to feed negative, addictive emotions, many – particularly those who saw themselves as politically unaligned – became radicalised, notably over Brexit, Corbyn’s Labour and trans people, moving both centrist and conservative pundits and politics further to the right. Consequently, the environment for political commentary has become far more extreme: the biggest difference between Flat Earth News and Breaking is that Davies attributes the majority of the industry’s problems to lack of funds, while Wright, though recognising the internet’s deleterious effect on funding models, shows how the right has always used the media for its own ends, but has realised (more by accident than design) how to harness that media, and especially the op-ed form, to pull the country rightwards.

For a moment in the late 2000s, opinion journalism seemed – at least to me – a genuinely dynamic form. It offered an opportunity for younger voices from Laurie Penny to Richard Seymour to move from the (febrile) blog scene into the mainstream, bringing different perspectives to a media dominated by people who had been around for decades, and were disproportionately privately educated. It seemed perfectly suited to emergent social media, with Facebook allowing for wide-ranging discussion of articles, and X/Twitter allowing pieces to reach potentially infinite audiences in an instant. Editors of centre-left publications such as The Guardian and New Statesman seemed enthusiastic about platforming new writers – until they realised it meant people speaking out against Anglo-American foreign policy, austerity, transphobia, the Thatcherite settlement, the privileges that the established media class had enjoyed thanks to the post-war consensus, and the need for economic redistribution.

By 2025, most of the millennial writers who emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s could no longer be found in legacy media, exhausted by the low pay and constant pressure to mine their own lives for material, or alienated by editorial lines taken on the 2019 election, Palestine or trans rights. Milne ended up being Corbyn’s director of communications; his colleagues at the Guardian, fiercely opposed to the Labour left, gradually removed its supportive voices from the opinion section: Seymour and Owen Hatherley stopped appearing regularly, while Dawn Foster was released after writing a column that pointed out, as anyone who paid attention could see, that deputy leader Tom Watson did not seem to have the Labour party’s best interests at heart. Owen Jones is the only one of that generation to remain, though the Guardian stopped his video work; older columnists such as Gaby Hinsliff are permitted to publish thinly veiled attacks on him; and there are rumours that he had been prevented from writing about Gaza for a time after the current genocide began. Jones is consistently at odds with the rest of the industry, a fact that became starkly apparent when he laid into it for four minutes straight when accepting the Amnesty Media Awards people’s choice award. Jones has remained an outlier in part because he was so vocal about how prone the media is to groupthink and external pressure in the wake of the 2017 general election, which the majority of commentators called incorrectly.

Meanwhile, most of the online platforms where younger, less expensively educated writers might hope to establish themselves have disappeared or are greatly diminished. Gal-dem has closed; Vice has been bought out; BuzzFeed’s venture capital-fuelled attempt to turn itself into a serious news outlet failed. Few of the older columnists left their posts for honourable reasons, even if most weren’t as disgraced as plagiarist and fabulist Johann Hari or drunken alleged sex pest Nick Cohen: Peter Oborne’s resignation from the Daily Telegraph after it spiked his investigation into HSBC, one of the paper’s most lucrative advertisers, and his subsequent reflections on the nature of 21st-century journalism (mostly for Middle East Eye, where he has a column), remain the exception, rather than the rule. The likes of Hadley Freeman and Suzanne Moore have shifted to the right, often starting by becoming “gender-critical” (which, as Judith Butler pointed out, runs on exterminationist logic), becoming a cause celebre for free speech grifters, adopting ultra-conservative positions on immigration in well-paying outlets, whether established ones like the Times or Telegraph or newer ones like UnHerd.

These neo-con free speech pioneers are, unfortunately, the ones who are thriving in 2025, even if they still claim to have been silenced. Fluff and filler are still there, especially for writers on plum contracts. Nobody better embodies this tendency than Guardian columnist Adrian Chiles, husband of his boss Kath Viner, who has become the surprise champion of inane, overcompensated opinion journalism, with his mixture of silliness, sweetness and the surreal, which his editors excel at condensing into striking headlines (this type of journalism will likely survive any amount of fascism, maybe even nuclear war). The personal essay has declined, partly due to writers realising that the working conditions are inhospitable, but also because by now, it makes no impact. No one gets outraged by them like they used to, meaning they no longer generate clicks for advertising revenue; more seriously, they have suffered in a climate where the anti-woke movement has sought to delegitimise lived experience as a valid form of social criticism. Many political analysts have been discredited by their failure to anticipate that Sir Keir Starmer would prove so historically unpopular, or that his brand of managerialist centrism would be unable to restore normality. They could work with Labour MPs, Blairite grandees and the party’s internal bureaucracy to bring down Corbynism, but could not build anything to replace it – not without a coordinated campaign of lying to the public, who soon realised they’d been conned, even if they did not grasp exactly how or why.

The best thing legacy media can do, having reasserted its supremacy after the decline of blogs and online-only publications, is put its larger budgets into work that smaller operations lack the resources to do: serious investigative journalism. Building on reporting by Declassified and others, Wright details how the Guardian developed a closer relationship with GCHQ after it published Edward Snowden’s files on mass surveillance of citizens and, as a result, GCHQ sent representatives to oversee the destruction of the paper’s computers and data. This, Wright argues, tamed an investigative unit that had done good work on phone hacking and the spycops scandal, but more recent examinations of the tax affairs of international elites have scarcely made a dent – the main consequence of the Panama Papers story was that Daphne Caruana Galizia, who worked on it, was assassinated. The Guardian recently published unsurprising material about Boris Johnson’s corruption, only to be gazumped by the even less surprising revelations about former US ambassador Peter Mandelson’s entanglement with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – which, like Johnson’s corruption, were well-known but largely ignored or downplayed for as long as those figures were expedient in getting right of the Labour left. Right now, it’s hard not to feel like investigative journalism, no matter how good, only matters if the target has a sense of shame – and the far right’s libidinal appeal is that it frees its supporters from shame.

Last month, the far right got more than 100,000 people out in London for a demonstration, thanks in no small part to years of comment pieces denying that English nationalists intend to intimidate anyone they don’t like the look of. Like a Greek tragedy in which the protagonist gets their desire on the worst imaginable terms, Milne’s aim of reducing the gulf between journalists and readers has been realised, but with large swathes of both being radicalised into the far right. For several years, hosts of the leftist podcast Podcasting is Praxis played a game called “comment or commentariat”, in which participants were asked to guess whether an absurdly stupid piece of analysis had appeared above or below the line; it has largely stopped because, as one of the podcast’s hosts put it, “everyone’s fascist now”.

According to current polling, it looks like rightwing columnists will get what they want: Nigel Farage as prime minister, on a Trumpian programme of stamping on minorities, universities, trade unions and the left, while further enriching the wealthy in a society already horrendously unequal. Everything else these columnists have wanted in this century – the Iraq war, austerity, Brexit, every prime minister from David Cameron to Keir Starmer – has been a disaster, and obviously this will be too, but of course they won’t admit any culpability, let alone retire from public life. There is no mechanism to get rid of any of them, and they largely don’t even see themselves as political actors. Even if there were, billionaire owners and their appointed editors will find other people just as unprincipled, or reactionary, to replace them, in a desperate attempt to maintain their supremacy, in the understanding that their readership is growing ever older.

What is to be done? The first thing is for journalists who are passionate about social justice and equality to keep going and fight for control of media spaces. I understand why people don’t want to contribute to certain publications, and have boycotted plenty myself, but vacating the terrain hasn’t proved an effective strategy. This will require superhuman levels of tenacity, and op-ed writers are easily removed, so building up independent left platforms that can support investigative reporting alongside opinion and analysis remains vital. Building up public levels of media literacy is a big but important project. It’s hard to counter Steve Bannon’s strategy, long since adopted by the British right, of flooding the zone with shit, but refusing to accept the right’s self-serving insistence that the media is unworthy of study would be a good start. Gaza has attuned many people to how comment journalism attempts to impose a version of reality that is wildly at odds with what’s actually happening – as evidenced by the videos of atrocities that they constantly see online – and that the interchanging political-media class that serves to stop domestic or foreign policy from ever getting better needs to be dislodged. It is going to take lots of organising, writing and talking to get new, dissenting voices into it and fundamentally change its character – as the late American poet Diane di Prima put it, no one way works, so we need to fight on every front.