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JUNE 11 Aside from the political ramifications of this weeks UK General Election, the results also lead to another significant conclusion: large chunks of the mainstream media are increasingly out of touch with popular opinion.

For decade upon decade, it has been widely taken as a simple truth that the media possesses two important powers: the ability to know what the general public is thinking about any given matter, and the ability to influence or even control those opinions and beliefs.

Major newspapers, television networks and radio stations have always been portrayed often self-portrayed as a great, sprawling, pernicious and all-knowing entity, granted with almost sinister powers to manipulate the minds of normal people.

Whatever the media said, the nave masses would lap it up. And precisely because people would believe anything they read, saw and heard, the medias owners, editors and prominent journalists were able to more or less tell people what to think.

In British politics, these magic powers reached their peak in the 1992 General Election, when Labour party candidate Neil Kinnock was expected to win and end 13 years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major.

But on the morning of the vote, the countrys top-selling and staunchly Conservative newspaper, The Sun, lambasted Kinnocks plans to increase taxes by publishing a front page which dramatically stated: If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.

Suddenly, the tide turned in Majors favour and he claimed an unexpected majority, with millions of voters apparently induced to change their minds by The Suns impactful headline to the extent that the newspaper subsequently claimed sole responsibility for the outcome with another grammatically challenged headline: Its The Sun Wot Won It.

Twenty-five years later, recent elections suggest the power of the media to predict and control political events appears to have evaporated.

Britains Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party Theresa May returns to 10 Downing Street in central London on June 9, 2017 after making a statement following the as results of a snap general election. Newspapers like The Sun supported her campaign and predicted wrongly as it turns out that she would win by a landslide. Picture by AFPThat became very evident this time last year, when the UKs European Union referendum shocked absolutely everybody by resulting in a victory for Brexit, leaving the entire range of the British media and opinion poll companies scratching their heads and wondering how they had got it so wrong.

This week has been similar, albeit less dramatic, as bungling Prime Minister Theresa May suffered the humiliation of losing her majority in an election she had been tipped to win very easily.

The media certainly tried to help her. Both The Sun and the countrys second-biggest selling newspaper, The Daily Mail, both strongly supported May during the build-up to the election and also launched a series of smear attacks against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been dismissed as a no-hoper even by many members of his own party.

But Corbyn confounded expectations by gaining more votes than any Labour leader since Tony Blair in 1997, increasing his partys share of the vote by 9.8 per cent their biggest increase from one election to the next in more than 70 years.

And so The Daily Mail, which greeted Theresa Mays call for the election by predicting a whitewash with the boisterous headline Crush The Saboteurs, was forced to meet this weeks results with an almost apologetic back-track, admitting the election was Mays Gamble That Backfired.

Once again, the UKs two top-selling newspapers got it horribly wrong. Whats going on? Why has the medias power dissipated?

The answer is social media. Until recently, traditional media provided the only widely-available means of finding out about the wider world. If you wanted to know what was happening outside your immediate environment, you had to read a newspaper, watch television or listen to the radio.

In the last 15 years, however, those methods for the dissemination of information have been utterly dismantled and replaced by personalised channels such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter and the result is communicative chaos.

Now, nobody knows what the people think because the people can think whatever they like and share those thoughts with whoever they like, and it all takes place completely under the radar of mainstream media, who have quite simply lost control.

Last year it was revealed that Facebook and WhatsApp process more than 60 BILLION messages per day. Thats an impossible amount of data to keep track of, never mind to attempt to control or influence.

Concurrently, media sales are dropping through the floor. Many local newspapers have been forced out of business, and even long-established national titles are fighting for survival: The Sun, for example, has seen its sales nearly halved from more than 3 million daily copies to 1.6 million in just seven years.

The industry is having to evolve rapidly, but even the biggest and best media organisations are struggling to keep up. Earlier this year, Americas top-selling paper, The New York Times, addressed its own crisis by publishing an extensive report into its plans for surviving the digital revolution, admitting: We must change the way we work.

Despite the transformation, there is still a place for quality journalism because the greatest strength of social media the fact that anyone can say anything is also its greatest weakness.

Facebook et al are tremendously democratising methods of communication, giving a voice to people who previously did not have one.

But they also provide so much content it is just impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff: with so many opinions and analyses and predictions out there in cyberspace, how do we know which are well-informed and reliable, and which should be ignored?

This is where traditional media can take the lead, but not simply by pushing any narrative and expecting the public to buy it.

As this weeks UK elections again showed, the media world has changed. And unless agenda-driven newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail change with it, they probably dont have any future at all.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.

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UK media misses highlight changing world - Malay Mail Online