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Why the mainstream media continues to go after vegans

Alex Lockwood

The mainstream media revels in the militant vegan versus farmer headlines, but is there more to it? Academic and author Dr Alex Lockwood explains why media bias is very real.

It will raise either goosebumps or hackles depending on your memory of it: the moment when Mr Broccoli pulled out his banana-phone live on Good Morning Britain to the ire of Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.

We’d been invited on, after Mr Broccoli’s arrest at the Oxford Street fruit salad disco went viral exactly a year ago this weekend during the October Rebellion. We asked the programme producers if he could be accompanied by a scientist, but they refused: ‘no, just Mr Broccoli. And in costume.’

We knew we were being set up: if Piers can make the spokesperson look a fool, it risks making the whole movement look foolish. After having their spokesperson ripped into, Extinction Rebellion begged us not to go on. But we were not going to swallow the format. We planned to pull back the curtain on ‘Peas’ to reveal his devious aims. Some people got our strategy: it wasn’t a media interview, but a stunt. Some didn’t (and told us on Facebook after). But that’s okay. Every action for animals is a risk. We probably need to take more than we do.

I was backstage watching it unfold as Mr Broccoli refused to play Pier’s wicked game. It was exciting and painful. We knew the minute we got drawn into a ‘debate’, Piers would close us down: you don’t know the science? (‘But we asked to bring on a scientist!’) You’re a climate activist who owns a TV? Then you’re a hypocrite. Even when he asks a question, he doesn’t let you answer.

The swindle of this kind of ‘journalism’ is that it’s set up to look like an interview, but it’s actually their job to not let you answer, for fear you sound sensible (even dressed up as a Broccoli). Their job is to stoke negativity, to make a fool of you so the audience, who want to dismiss your ideas, can do so. That’s (Good Morning) TV, folks.

Not journalism, but entertainment

The key is to understand Pier’s job not as journalism, but entertainment. He is there to make his audience keep tuning in. They’ll do that if they feel the hit; if they are goaded by their irritation and indignation by challenges to their comfortable status quo.

We know that animal activism and climate rebellion are challenges to the status quo. And that’s why Piers—and other presenters who go after vegans, such as Dan Wootton, Julia Hartley-Brewer, and Philip Schofield—do what they do. Meat eaters are the majority, the ‘norm’. Vegans challenge that norm. For our troubles, we are rounded on, mocked, attacked.

As Cara McInnes and Gordon Hodson found in their research, negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is common. Omnivores think worse of vegans than other groups who are often the target of prejudice, and these biases are particularly heightened among the right-wing, who see veganism as a threat. Vegans are thought of more negatively than other ‘nutritional outgroups (e.g., gluten intolerants)’. And woe betide the vegan who has made the choice motivated animal rights or environmental concerns. They are considered worst of all.

The mainstream social ‘in group’ (normal, white, straight, ‘common sense’ people) feel these biases against ‘benign yet social norm-challenging others’ such as vegans because we challenge the power that comes with being the dominant group in society. Life is easier for them. They don’t have to ask for the ‘carnist menu’ or check every label. They don’t want this dominance or ease to change.

Mainstream society is served by mainstream media. It’s highest profile ‘journalists’ and presenters will always target the norm-challenging non-dominant groups, such as vegans, and favour the dominant groups. It’s their job to feed and manufacture the bias. Whether it’s mocking vegan sausage rolls, eviscerating Extinction Rebellion, or barracking Meghan Markle, their job is to keep the mainstream tuning in. The everyday person gets their dopamine hit of feeling righteously normal at the expense of the outgroup, ‘those damn vegans’. It works: ‘normal’ meat eaters don’t trust animal activists or vegans. And, rubbing their hands, media companies make their money from their advertisers.

That’s why the ‘farmers vs. vegans’ narrative has become so powerful, and popular.

Do farmers and vegans really hate each other?

Let’s rephrase that: do all farmers and all vegans hate each other? Do a handful of animal activists troll farmers and spew aggression? Yes. Do a handful of farmers and food industry commentators needle vegans and mock our ethical choices? Yes. But how much is a handful? One per cent? 0.1%? Is that a majority? Is it even a story?

So do all ‘farmers’ and ‘vegans’ really hate each other? No. It’s a myth spun by media bias to capture audience attention to sell to advertisers, lubricated by the norms of journalism. They do this by:

  • Hiding behind ‘objectivity’ to create conflict, usually by finding two extremes of any group and pitting them together in a ‘debate’. We know what terrible journalism (PDF) this is around climate science. Why do we then accept it when we’re talking about the future of food, animal ethics, and human sustenance? The media gets away with it because they tell us it’s ‘objective’. It’s not. It’s manufactured to keep your attention;

  • Selling negativity. This is neurological and evolutionary. The media industry’s always known this. Negative stories sell better than positive stories. Political scientist Stuart Soroka suggests this is because “humans may neurologically or physiologically predisposed towards focusing on negative information because the potential costs of negative information far outweigh the potential benefits of positive information.” We look for what might scare, injure or kill us. Anything that threatens us we’re predisposed to give our attention to.

After two years interviewing vegans, I’ve spent the last twelve months talking to farmers. Understanding their hopes, fears and stresses, and what they think about animals, and vegans. It has sometimes been horrible, such as when I met the day old calves about to be shot, surplus to the dairy industry’s needs. I know many fellow advocates for animals who have taken similar approaches to building bridges, despite the hard path it leads us over. But it can work. In July, Animal Rebellion joined farmers in protesting the Agriculture Bill outside Parliament.

Though there will be many things that animal farmers and animal activists never agree upon—the exploitation of animals—there are others we can agree on, such as that a UK food system needs to be fairer, sustainable, sovereign and secure. All beings need to eat. So fellow vegan activists, it’s important to say: if you really want a UK plant-based food system that no longer exploits animals, then farmers and vegans cannot be enemies. Unless we are all going to grow all our own food. No? Then stop letting the media tell you we are at war with farmers (even animal farmers). Because this is what the mainstream media manipulators want.

The media created ‘vegaphobia’ because it suits their profitability

Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan coined the term ‘vegaphobia’ (PDF) after analysing the bias against vegans in British newspapers, when they found the overwhelming coverage (74.3%) of vegans and veganism to be negative:

Those findings were reproduced and confirmed in research that looked at the Australian media. And even while some sections of the established, mainstream media now discuss veganism more positively, vegans are still considered to be ‘fair game’ for attacks. As Josh Cullimore wrote recently for Plant Based News, “the [2020] BBC article How a vegan diet could affect your intelligence is the most sensationalist, inaccurate and biased piece of journalism I have read in some time.” The BBC allowed it to be published despite the author, Zaria Gorvett, admitting there was no evidence for the headline, other than it made ‘intuitive sense’ to her.

(Strangely, a few months later the same journalist wrote a piece about ‘The Hidden Biases that Drive Anti-Vegan Hatred’, perhaps feeling guilty for her earlier piece and, generously, examining her own biases, and those of her employer.)

But what else do we expect, when the mainstream media continues to be dominated by profit oriented goals, and right-wing meat eating, climate denying billionaire owners?

As Tristan Harris, co-founder of Humane Technology, reminded us about the way most of the media works in the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, when he said, “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.”

Remember this above all: the media sells you and your attention to advertisers. Social media just amplifies and perfects the sales job with its algorithms and data. The sections of the media who stoke bias against any group—immigrants, the obese, social workers, vegans—do so because their currency is indignation. Their job is to make the mainstream feel under attack. That gets the audience hooked, and when they’re hooked, they come back for their next hit. They need to know: who’s attacking me? Who’s threatening my secure norms?

The easiest emotions to stoke are the fiery ones you hold against others. Much easier than having to question your feelings about your own actions. And because the mainstream media serves the mainstream, and because they know negativity sells, and because they know vegans challenge the norm, and because most journalists remain entrenched in their own unconscious biases against animals, then journalists, presenters, entertainers, and the media remains biased against vegans.

So what can we do?

If you’re a spokesperson or media figure, such as former XR-spokesperson Rupert Read, you could boycott the media (and especially the Murdoch Media). But for the rest of us:

  • Remain vigilant that the mainstream media want vegans to be an enemy; they manufacture the debate to pit us against those with whom we actually need to work; when you see a media story, ask yourself: who does this story benefit? And why. It often isn’t the satisfied reader (the meat eater), who are as manipulated as you are offended. It is benefiting the media owner, the profiteer, the advertiser;

Finally, ask yourself if you can contribute to structural change as well as individual behaviour, and what that structural change might look like to benefit the animals. I would argue it does not look like a ‘war’ between vegans and farmers. More likely, it looks like farmers and vegans sitting at the same table and working out what we can agree on, as well as what we don’t, while taking the steps to achieve the milestones on our path to animal liberation.

The mainstream media will only ever serve the mainstream—the dominant practices of how people generally live, the ‘common sense’ that people believe and act upon. Bias against vegans will only end when veganism is the ‘common sense’ option. So let’s not give our attention to the media. Let’s save it for making real change.

Dr Alex Lockwood is an academic and author of the vegan memoir The Pig in Thin Air, that makes the connection between climate change and the food we eat. He is writing a report for The Vegan Society on the policy we need for a UK plant based food system.