- Loughborough University report on media election coverage Archived Message
Posted by Ian M
on December 27, 2019, 5:28 pm
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Dunno if already posted... https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/general-election/report-5/ 'Executive summary This campaign was widely trailed as ‘the Brexit election’. Our results show that, in media terms, it was, then it wasn’t, then it was again. Between weeks 1 to 4 Brexit became less and less focal in news coverage, only for it to resurge in the last week. For all this prominence, our findings show that fiscal analysis of Brexit was scant, particularly when compared with evaluations of other party manifesto spending commitments and tax pledges. The final week of the campaign saw the highest levels of newspaper negativity towards the Labour party. Negativity also increased towards other opposition parties, whereas the Conservatives’ position improved on that of the penultimate week. This level of negativity towards Labour was far from ‘business as usual’. Press hostility to Labour in 2019 was more than double the levels identified in 2017. By the same measure, negative coverage of the Conservatives halved. Our analysis of the most widely reported politicians confirms how presidentialised the campaign has been. The party leaders were particularly prominent in television coverage of the last week and Boris Johnson dominated Conservative coverage in the press. In contrast, press coverage focused far less on Jeremy Corbyn in the last week of the campaign. The coverage of other Labour politicians was far from dispersed. Our analysis of the most prominently reported Labour politicians shows that most of the candidates now being touted as potential new Labour leaders were marginalised across all media. We have analysed the official tweets of the parties and leaders to provide a basis for comparison with mainstream reporting. The analysis shows that presidentialisation was less evident in Twitter activity with party tweets exceeding leader tweets. However, there was something of a two-party squeeze: Conservative and Labour twitter activity far exceeded those of the other parties. In contrast to much media reporting, particularly the press, positive rather than negative messages were dominant. In terms of subject matter, it was clear that the parties were promoting radically different agendas. Brexit was the top issue for the Conservatives, the Brexit Party, and the Liberal Democrats, whereas Labour neglected Brexit and focused on health, the environment, and business. This report has 5 sections: The key issues of the 2019 media campaign Newspaper evaluations of the parties Most prominent politicians in the media campaign Coverage of the main parties Campaign communication of parties on Twitter The results in this report are drawn from a detailed content analysis of election coverage produced on the weekdays (i.e. Monday to Friday inclusive) between 7th November and 4th December. The media sampled were: Television: Channel 4 News (7pm), Channel 5 News (6.30pm), BBC1 News at 10, ITV1 News at 10, Sky News (10-10.30pm). Press: The Guardian, The I, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Mirror, The Sun, The Star All election-related news items in the television programmes were analysed. For the press, all election news found on the front page, the first two pages of the domestic news section, the first two pages of any specialist election section and the page containing and facing the papers’ leader editorials were coded. For more details on the methodology of the study see https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/general-election/. Intercoder reliability tests were conducted on all key variables and are ongoing.' [continues at link...] Check out this graph of positive vs negative newspaper coverage:  (Caption: 'Figure 2.2: Overall newspaper evaluations weeks 1 - 5 (weighted by circulation)') Tells a story, don't it? I |
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