Actually, I think we can measure this more objectively.

At the last UK election, the readership of Sunday papers that advised their readers to vote Tory was 19M. The readership of the Daily papers that advised their readers to vote Tory was about the same. Now some people buy two newspapers on the same day, but to counter that, some people don't buy both Daily and Sunday papers. Overall, we can say that the media advised approx 19M different to vote Tory, compared to about 3M for Labour and 1M for the Lib Dems.

However, this media advice ratio of 19 : 3 : 1 compares to a UK Election voting ratio of 10.7 : 8.6 : 6.8. So we can safely say that the UK media is far to the right of the electorate, and that a viewpoint that which is neutral with respect to the electorate will look left-wing compared to most media.

What we can't say from this data is how more left wing the electorate would be if the media didn't attempt to pull the electorate to the right.

Now, being less objective, this bias really ought to have been obvious, since most of the UK media is owned by extreme far-right tax-dodging billionaires who are not representative of the ordinary electorate.

I got readership figures from: http://www.nrs.co.uk/toplinereadership.html

Eh? The Transfomers DVD went straight to movie without commercials? Fantastic!
Or perhaps that's because the entire movie is a product commercial. Perhaps you're the perfect consumer!

Perfect. (I wish you weren't AC.) It's worth quoting Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, when he was told that it was only easy for a dictatorship to push an unwilling population towards war: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Without this enemy, we'd have had to invent another.

A great way to invent new threats is to torture someone until they invent a new plot to please their interrogators - that's how the 'Dirty Bomb' - useless in practice, was invented.

I suspect we'll get some equally bogus threats to instill popular fear through this new exercise.