Abstract
This study provides a comprehensive assessment of the issues and personalities that defined an election dominated by the two major parties and particularly their leaders. Coverage of the so-called ‘electoral process’ was not as prominent in this campaign, with a boost in the reporting of policy reflecting the impact of Labour’s leaked manifesto together with the Conservative’s ‘dementia tax’ problems. The government’s social care plans even led some normally supportive newspapers to briefly switch from attacking Labour to criticizing the Conservatives. Despite the recent experience of the EU referendum, and the related controversy over immigration, this topic was not as dominant as some predicted it would be at the beginning of the campaign. This reflected the way other issues, such as security in the aftermath of the atrocities, asserted themselves on the news agenda.
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Notes
- 1.
More information on methodology is available at http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/crcc/methodology-2/. Thanks go to the coding team: Shani Burke , Gennaro Errichiello , Simon Huxtable , Jack Joyce , Herminder Kaur , Jade Markham , Nathan Ritchie , Lukas Stepanek , Ian Taylor , Rosie Tinker and Lou Tompkins . Intercoder reliability tests were conducted on all key variables:
A reliability test using a random sample of 11 newspaper stories was conducted early on in the coding process with 10 coders. It is customary to provide an inter-coder reliability measure for each variable on a coding sheet. We have focused here on the more subjective variables that require coder judgement and the scores below are for these variables on the coding sheet.
Two measures are used, average pairwise percent agreement (APPA) and Krippendorff’s Alpha. Given the number of coders and the amount of training time ahead of this snap election our confidence level was set at 70% for APPA and 60% for Krippendorff’s Alpha.
The identity of actors in the news: APPA 78.324%; Krippendorff’s Alpha, 0.733776976662.
Disposition of actors in the news: APPA, 72.9761904762%; Krippendorff’s Alpha, 0.633986079743.
The themes of news items: APPA, 76.2962962963%; Krippendorff’s Alpha, 0.684490950537.
Overall story evaluation: APPA, 86.7824074074%; Krippendorff’s Alpha, 0.644939179375.
- 2.
Sample days for the respective weeks were the weekdays between: 5–11 May (week 1), 12–18 May (week 2), 19–25 May (week 3), 26 May–1 June (week 4), and 2–7 June (week 5).
- 3.
This is not solely a measure of overt support or criticism by a journalist of a party (although these instances would be included in the count). Rather it is a broader measure of the extent to which newspapers report on issues/comments/developments that have positive or negative implications for parties. We only coded these instances where these were overtly referred to in the piece. In term of scoring If an item mainly or solely focused on positive matters for a party, it was given a value of +1. If it was mainly/solely focused on negative matters for a party, it was assigned a value of −1. Items where there was no clear evaluation or they contained positive and negative issues in broadly equal measure were coded as zero. Items where no reference was made to the party were excluded from the calculation. The scores in Figs. 10–12 are calculated by subtracting the total number of negative stories from the total of positive stories.
References
Blumler, J. G., & McQuail, D. (1968). Television in politics: Its uses and influences. London: Faber and Faber.
Deacon, D., Downey, J., Stanyer, J., & Wring, D. (2017). The media campaign: The issues and personalities who defined the election. In D. Wring, R. Mortimore, & S. Atkinson (Eds.), Political communication in Britain: Polling, campaigning and media in the 2017 general election. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miller, W. L., Clarke, H., Harrop, M., LeDuc, L., & Whiteley, P. (1990). How voters change: The 1987 British election campaign in perspective. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Deacon, D., Downey, J., Smith, D., Stanyer, J., Wring, D. (2019). A Tale of Two Parties: Press and Television Coverage of the Campaign. In: Wring, D., Mortimore, R., Atkinson, S. (eds) Political Communication in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00822-2_2
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