Abstract
Like Theresa May, many in the print media will want to forget the 2017 general election. The outcome of the campaign came as a particular shock to those newspapers that have long prided themselves on being able to understand and represent the public mood. Even as recently as the 2015 election and the 2016 referendum, there was much commentary on the supposed ability of the press to make a critical intervention in major votes. But 2017 has challenged this and many other assumptions about electoral politics in Britain. The ‘Tory press’, which is the overwhelming majority of titles, did still contribute to a pro-Conservative effort that saw the party achieve its largest vote share in any election since 1983 and it is plausible that these newspapers helped reinforce, if not necessarily change, their readers’ opinions during a campaign in which they relentlessly attacked and in some cases vilified Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. What very few commentators appeared to realise at the outset of this election was the extent to which, in the words of Peter Hitchens, ‘[p]olitics in this country are a good deal less solid and stable than they seem’ (Mail on Sunday, 23 April).
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Notes
- 1.
All newspapers cited in this chapter refer to hardcopy editions published in 2017.
- 2.
Half of those aged 65 or over regularly read a printed newspaper compared to just 14% of 16–24 year olds (Ofcom, News Consumption in the UK: 2016, 27 June 2017, p. 9, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/103625/news-consumption-uk-2016.pdf).
- 3.
David Deacon and Dominic Wring, ‘Still Life in the Old Attack Dogs: The Press’ in Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave, 2016, pp. 314–21.
- 4.
In 2015 and 2017, the Loughborough Communication and Culture Research Centre studies coded all election-related news items that appeared on the front page, the first two pages of the domestic news section, the first two pages of any specialist section assigned to the coverage of the campaign and the pages containing and facing papers’ leader editorials.
- 5.
‘General Elections’, Loughborough University Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/crcc/general-election.
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Wring, D., Deacon, D. (2018). A Bad Press: Newspapers. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_14
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