Last weekend Britain's best selling paper, the Sun, finally told the truth about the British general election. Urging its favoured candidate for prime minister to steel himself against adverse polls and a torrid week of coverage, the Sun Says column retweeted by the tabloid's political editor Tom Newton Dunn, told David Cameron to ignore “left wing social media.”

Sun editorials regularly rail against 'Twitter mobs' while its new SunNation blog, taken out of the company paywall, seems to have failed to pick up any online momentum, and gets a sad handful of retweets, mainly from fellow employees of News UK.

But why does the newspaper which has consistently backed the winning prime minister for the last 36 years sound so panicked? Is it the threat of a tougher complaints system under a threatened Miliband government? Or something deeper in the system of the modern media?

The newspapers are fighting a war on three fronts. They are still trying to prove, in this the closest of elections, that they can sway the swing voter, and determine the course of the country for the next five years. They are also trying to ensure that whoever runs the country after the election is more friendly to their interests, and more tolerant of what they call the “robustness” of a raucous free press. But they’re also trying, Canute-like, to defend themselves against a growing tide of social media, in which ‘free speech’ is seen to be a dialogue, rather than the one way megaphone of the mass media.