Abstract
If this was an election where the campaign made a difference, then the media—and especially broadcasters—played a critical role. On television, still the most influential medium for the majority of voters, broadcasters challenged the parties’ approach as politicians discovered that their robotic soundbites and stage-management could backfire. Like politicians, journalists found that social media was now a vital factor in helping shape what became an unexpectedly dynamic broadcast campaign. The result challenged the conventional wisdom of many Westminster journalists, and prompted new questions about the role, relevance and authority of the mainstream media during election campaigns.
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Notes
- 1.
‘New Poll Unpacks Social Media and GE2017’, Weber Shandwick, 31 May 2017, http://webershandwick.co.uk/social-media-ge2017.
- 2.
Stephen Cushion, The Democratic Value of News: Why Public Service Media Matter. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- 3.
Stephen Cushion and Richard Thomas, ‘From Quantitative Precision to Qualitative Judgements: Professional Perspectives about the Impartiality of Television News during the 2015 UK General Election’, Journalism, 23 January 2017, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1464884916685909.
- 4.
Jasper Jackson ‘ITV’s The Nightly Show Pulls Almost 3m Viewers But News at Ten Suffers’, The Guardian, 28 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/28/itvs-nightly-show-pulls-3m-viewers-news-at-ten-suffers.
- 5.
See Ofcom, ‘Licensing of Channel 3 and Channel 5’, 2012, http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/tv-ops/c3_c5_licensing.pdf.
- 6.
Stephen Cushion, who carried out the content analysis part of the study, would like to acknowledge the excellent support of his research assistants. They were funded, in part, by an ESRC project ‘Television News and Impartiality: Reporting the 2017 UK General Election Campaign’, which was supported through the ESRC Cardiff University Impact Acceleration Account (ES/M500422/1). This included Marina Morani, Harriet Lloyd, Sophie Puet, Stephanie Frost and Rob Callaghan. The content analysis examined 2222 news items and 840 election items between 30 April and 7 June 2017 (the timeframe was selected so that the same number of days were examined as in the 2015 election campaign). An intercoder reliability test was carried on all variables, with 10% of the sample recoded. Overall, the level of agreement for each variable was between 81.9% and 99.5%, while Kripendorff Alpha scores were between 0.73 and 0.99. Percentage totals may not add up to 100% due to rounding up.
- 7.
Stephen Cushion and Richard Thomas, Reporting Elections: Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage. Polity, 2018.
- 8.
See the full speech by James Harding at the VLV Conference on 2 June 2015 at: www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2015/james-harding-speech-vlv-2-june-2015.
- 9.
Some interviewees have asked to remain anonymous.
- 10.
Steve Hawkes, The Sun, 19 May 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3602557/last-nights-tv-election-debate-drew-smaller-audience-than-a-documentary-about-a-vet.
- 11.
Freddy Mayhew, ‘May vs Corbyn Live Q&A Attracts Combined Audience of 3.3m Viewers across Channel 4 and Sky News’, Press Gazette, 30 May 2017, www.pressgazette.co.uk/may-vs-corbyn-live-qa-attracts-combined-audience-of-3-3m-viewers-across-channel-4-and-sky-news.
- 12.
‘Theresa May vs Jeremy Corbyn: Who Won? Our Writers Give Their Verdict’, The Telegraph, 30 May 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/29/theresa-may-vs-jeremy-corbyn-won-writers-give-verdict/#premiumConfirmationComponent.
- 13.
J. Blumler, S. Coleman, and C. Birchall, Debating the TV Debates: How Voters saw the Question Time Special. Electoral Reform Society, 2017.
- 14.
Roger Mosey, ‘The Manchester Attack Will Define This Election: Broadcasters Have a Careful Line to Tread’, New Statesman, 25 May 2017, www.newstatesman.com/2017/05/manchester-attack-will-define-election-broadcasters-have-careful-line-tread.
- 15.
Stephen Cushion, ‘Amid the Fallout from Manchester, the Tories Dominated News Coverage’, New Statesman, 1 June 2017, www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2017/06/amid-fallout-manchester-tories-dominated-news-coverage-0.
- 16.
Justin Schlosberg, ‘Should He Stay or Should He Go? Television and Online News Coverage of the Labour Party in Crisis’, Media Reform Coalition, 2016, www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Corbynresearch.pdf.
- 17.
Stephen Cushion and Justin Lewis, ‘Equal Time Helped Labour Defy Predictions, But Election Coverage Could Have Been More Balanced and Impartial’ in J. Mair et al. (eds), Brexit, Trump and the Media. Abramis, pp. 378–85.
- 18.
Party leaders in Northern Ireland made few appearances on UK TV news reports, so they have been excluded from Table 13.9.
- 19.
Cushion and Thomas, Reporting Elections.
- 20.
Matthew Smith, ‘What People Recall about the Tory and Labour Election Campaigns’, YouGov, 12 July 2017, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/07/12/what-were-britons-main-memories-conservative-and-l.
- 21.
Stephen Cushion, ‘Using public opinion to serve journalistic narratives: Rethinking vox pops and live two-way reporting in five UK election campaigns (2009–2017)’, European Journal of Communication, Ifirst (2018).
- 22.
Sky News’s Faisal Islam made reference to growing Labour support: https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/887087104072855552?refsrc=email&s=11.
- 23.
Roger Mosey, ‘Does the Media’s Herd Instinct Risk Them Missing the Real Story Yet Again?’, New Statesman, 23 May 2017, www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/05/does-medias-herd-instinct-risk-them-missing-real-story-yet-again.
- 24.
Stephen Cushion et al., ‘Interpreting the Media Logic behind Editorial Decisions: Television News Coverage of the 2015 UK General Election Campaign’, International Journal of Press Politics, 21(4) (2016): 472–89.
- 25.
Jim Waterson, ‘The Rise of the Alt-Left British Media’, BuzzFeed News, 6 May 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/the-rise-of-the-alt-left?utm_term=.iyVbkee0rX#.qdrYZkkDg9.
- 26.
Stephen Cushion et al., ‘Newspapers, Impartiality and Television News: Intermedia Agenda-Setting during the 2015 UK General Election Campaign’, Journalism Studies (2016), https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1171163.
- 27.
Cushion, ‘Using public opinion to serve journalistic narrative’.
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Cushion, S., Beckett, C. (2018). Campaign Coverage and Editorial Judgements: Broadcasting. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_13
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