And others (Sven, for example) will tell us the whole business is about selling advertising space. So here we have the editor doing advertising for what is not in the article, so the readership figures stay up (as far as possible) and the newspaper can get advertising income.

These two explanations can be seen as concordant. But I don't think it's that simple, because it doesn't take into account the role of the media in dynamising and augmenting an existing tendency in public opinion. How many Brits were Eurosceptic/phobic in the 1970s compared to now? How many are more so than they were then? Whatever the failings of Brussels (and they are many), how much and how often have British newspapers played on the Thatcher theme of nothing good ever coming out of continental Europe? In other words, how responsible are those newspapers for creating and sustaining an appetite for Europhobic red meat in their readership, and not (for example, and I would not wish them to do this) for anti-American red meat? Or anti-something else?

And why, if newspapers are gradually failing businesses that time and technology will sweep away, are wealthy businessmen interested in owning them? Not for the profits they can pull out of them. But also not because newspapers are without influence. No doubt their capacity to spread propaganda still offers a good bang for the buck.