The Times has welcomed in 2025 with an Editorial praising Elon Musk who it claims knows exactly how to sort out the UK economy while Keir Starmer doesn’t. Leaving aside the possibility that Rupert Murdoch is after a sub from the self styled world’s richest man, it is possible to understand that neither option is correct but the Musk one disastrously not so.
To back this up the paper has commissioned YouGov to do some polling on Labour’s performance in the first five months of it being in Office. Apparently 56% of whoever it was YouGov asked think the Government has been ‘unsuccessful’. The question of what was thought of Elon Musk does not appear to have been asked.
It is an exercise not in assessing opinion but rather trying to shape it. E P Thompson as long ago as 1959 called it Ephology
A psephologist is a man employed by the mass media to research into what people think the mass media has told them to think. An ephologist is a man employed by the ‘Observer’ or BBC to interpret the results of psephology and who makes an ephing good thing out of it
New Reasoner, Autumn 1959
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