The day before the mayoral election, aggrieved Bristol Post reporter, Tristan Cork, took to Twitter:
"The irony of a mayoral candidate paying to have a wraparound website ad & advertorial Q&As with nice questions, while being too scared to do a single 121 interview with a Bristol Post journalist for the past 18 months, is not lost on reporters... The most recent excuse given, after the 5th or 6th time a sit down interview was agreed...then cancelled at short notice, was that the general coverage of the election was too biased against the candidate."
A couple of hours later, the Tweet was deleted. It was a tiny glimpse into the perennial fight between impartiality and advertising spend in the media.
With Marvin Rees being re-elected as mayor of Bristol, surely we have to ask: was it the ads in the Bristol Post that won it? Are they now Bristol’s king makers?
First of all, how much did Labour pay?
The biggest advertising contract with Reach Plc was for £31,267 (inc. VAT) for ‘Run of the Network’ advertising in Reach and TM (Trinity Mirror), which means that an ad can get placed anywhere on their network. Reach owns nine national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, and more than 110 regional titles, including the Bristol Post.
Secondly, how much coverage did that much money buy the mayor?
I don’t have a comprehensive list of times and places but the following are typical of what was seen. There were ads as expected in the newspaper itself and on the online version BristolLive.
There were also ads in the Liverpool online news site owned by Reach.
The Daily Mirror ran a lengthy feature about Rees’s first documentary The Mayor’s Race, alongside an interview with him and his sister, on March 11, 2021, at the beginning of his mayoral campaign. Rees was introduced as follows:
“The first directly elected black mayor in Europe, Marvin Rees today launches a campaign for a second term in Bristol. Here he and his sister Dionne tell Ros Wynne-Jones about being raised by a single white mum in a city where race and class differences were - and are - never off the table.”
This article was published over two weeks before the pre-election period began on March 29, 2021.
Thirdly, why was the mayor allowed to spend that much money? aren’t there limits?
Much of the advertising spend was signed off much earlier than the pre-election period, which meant the mayor stayed within his £19,023.32 limit . As Rees’s electoral returns state:
REACH digital advertising (66% allocated to advertising before regulated period and national spend. The remaining 33% divided by Metro Mayor, Bristol Mayor and PCC). £3474.13]
£12,000 was spent on advertising on Global billboards, and £8000 on buses. Again, much was spent before the limited period and a small percentage was split with other candidates.
The money spent so far was by the Labour Party Group and was not public funding. However, that’s not true of all coverage in the Bristol Post.
In December 2020, the mayor’s office paid (at council payer cost) £4907 for Rees’s Christmas Message to be published in the local newspaper and online. This was unusual because the previous year, his Christmas message was run without any payment at all (or at least none recorded in council spending). The Post often take what he has published on his mayoral blog, in fact, and publish it simply because it’s newsworthy.
There didn’t appear to be any payments to Bristol Cable in the electoral returns but £1362 was paid to Bristol24/7* for digital advertising.
So far, over £56,500 has been identified as spent on prominent local and national advertising, including the £36,000 on Reach.
Part of it was said to be divided between the PCC candidate, the WECA candidate Dan Norris, and the Bristol mayor.
It’s worth thinking about whether the results of the mayoral election in 2021 would have been the same if the Labour Party Group didn’t have such deep pockets.
I don’t consider that the Bristol Post have done anything unusual in accepting that much money for advertising while not pointing out in clear and visible ways the lack of non-paid-for editorial content. That’s the nature of newspapers.
As long as we know that they do this, then we can question it and assess it appropriately.
I have lodged a complaint with Bristol City Council’s external auditors, however, about the £4907 the council paid for the mayor’s Christmas message. It is up to them now to decide whether that was an acceptable use of public funds or not. It is my right as a resident to do this.
Disclosure: I am married to Bristol247’s editor, Martin Booth. You can make your own minds up about what that means in relation to what I’ve written here.
Excellent article, Joanna, thankyou.
Well researched, well written and very factful, and the kind of disclosure at the end we should see a lot more of.
Bringing this murky nexus of journalism and advertising to public attention is an important job. It's just a pity there are so few independent local journalists like you to do it, as Reach, Newsquest, JPI Media, Archant, Tindle and Iliffe has snaffled 9 in every 10 local title into their corporate maws.
As you observe, there may well be nothing illegal about everything you describe, but that doesn't mean many ordinary people would be quite shocked, or at least surprised, by the detail.
Reach will be delighted at your article, though. Any impression that paying them a lot of ad fees confers king-maker status on them is very good for business. Cambridge Analytica lapped up similar attention too, until their criminality caught up with them.
Unfortunately, Reach, along with the other 5 media conglomerates who now own around 90% of every surviving British local newspaper title, is probably not doing anything criminal.
Journalists like us may deplore the way they're traducing journalism's name by claiming to do local journalism when they're actually cogs in a global advertising platform, but it's likely only metaphorically, rather than legally, 'criminal'.
Having said that, if anyone had deep enough pockets to fund a lawsuit accusing Reach, Newsquest et al of 'passing off' as newspapers, the public viewing gallery would be packed, and disclosure might turn up some very interesting evidence.
For the moment, all we can do it what you've done so meticulously here. Point, shout and holler, using facts, in the hope that enough of their dwindling readership will come across articles like yours on social media platforms like Substack that have been eroding their business model over the last 20 years.
But all is not lost. New non-profit, open source social media network See Through News (full disclosure - I founded it) has a scheme called The See Through Newspaper Review Project. It is a public media literacy campaign, designed precisely to bring fake journalism, robot-written content with human bylines, and advertising-in-disguise to public attention.
I've recently unveiled details of it on a Facebook Group of the same name, and also on this very platform. The long-fuse bombshell comes at the end of a 4-part series. Part 1 starts as a book review of Roger Lytollis's 'Panic As Man Burns Crumpets: The Vanishing World of The Local Journalist, but ends somewhere more positive, and intriguing. It will probably require ex-corporate editors and reporters to post in it to make it work at scale, but we're pretty sure most will be happy to do so one they clock what we're up to.
If you're into spoilers, just type the name of your local conglomerate-owned newspaper into the search bar on Facebook, and filter for Groups...
https://robertstern.substack.com/p/crisis-in-local-news
And thanks again for this public service, Joanna.