Last time I looked John there were no - zero - "leftist" mass circulation newspapers in Britain.
The Daily Record tends towards the Labour Party, but not as much as at one time; the Guardian is sometimes pro-Labour and sometimes pro-LibDem but publishes a number of right-wing commentators as well; the Indy is 'indy' and sometimes backs Labour; and in Scotland The National supports the SNP; and er.... that's it.
That leaves firmly in the Tory column - The Times, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express, the Star, the Metro, the London Evening Standard and the main Scottish papers (The Herald, Scotsman, Glasgow Evening Times), the main regional papers such as the Yorkshire Post, Western Morning News, Aberdeen Press and Journal etc. plus all the Sundays, - the Sunday Times, The Observer (though occasionally critical is more Tory than not), The Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Mail, Sunday Express, the Sun on Sunday (son of the unlamented News of the World) and Scotland on Sunday with the sole exception of The Sunday Herald (broadly pro-SNP). The list isn't exhaustive but the point is clear. If the latest figures from the industry on readership (print and web-based) are consulted the figures for the Tory leaning press are more than 350% of all the rest combined - and that is without taking into account the lesser regional and local papers.
The Tories do dominate the mass-media in the UK.... and Matt is also, academically, perfectly correct about the BBC. Only Channel 4 News comes anywhere near a 'balance'. Of course, how all this looks through Kentish lenses I couldn't say.
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