Report 4: 30 May – 26 June 2024

David Deacon, Jilly Kay, Brendan Lawson, Nathan Ritchie, David Smith, Dominic Wring.

Dr David Smith is Lecturer in Media and Communications, University of Leicester.

Key Findings

• During the campaign so far the two main parties have received similar levels of coverage. The Conservatives are featured in slightly more TV news items (+4%) than Labour. The presence of both parties in newspaper coverage is nearly identical in percentage terms. 
• Similarly, the two leaders have received comparable coverage, with Conservative leader Rishi Sunak appearing in slightly more TV coverage (+1 %) and Keir Starmer in slightly more newspaper coverage (+1 %)Both leaders account for a similar amount of coverage relative to their parties.
• Reform UK has received similar levels of coverage in newspapers (8%) and TV (9%). The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, accounts for the majority of Reform UK’s coverage. However, there is a slight decrease in Reform UK’s TV presence (-2%) indicating lower levels of presence in week 4.
• The Liberal Democrats have been present in 7% of TV news, making them the fourth largest party overall in terms of coverage. This level of TV presence has remained relatively fixed throughout the campaign.
• Smaller parties have received limited newspaper coverage, similar to previous weeks. The Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru have negligible press coverage overall. Collectively, their press coverage, along with the Lib Dems, is less than that of Reform UK. 

Key Findings

• As with party presence, the Conservative and Labour have had the majority of speaking time during the campaign.
• The Conservatives have widened the gap over Labour in terms of TV speaking time since week three. They account for 37% (+2%) of all speaking time, compared to Labour’s 29% (-2%). This difference is due to the increased access of Conservative sources, which has risen by 3% since week three.
• In press coverage, the gap remains similar to last week, with the Conservatives ahead by a modest margin (+6%). The incumbent party accounts for 45% of all coverage, compared to 39% for the opposition. Both leaders have similar quotation space, but Rishi Sunak constitutes a smaller portion of his party’s overall print coverage.
• The two party squeeze in quotation time is most evident in newspaper reporting. Collectively, the smaller parties account for just over a third of all TV speaking time and a significantly lower 16% of quotation space in newspapers.
• For the first time during the campaign, the Liberal Democrats have overtaken Reform UK in TV speaking time. The Lib Dems have had 8% of all TV speaking time, compared to Reform UK’s 6%. The fledgling party led by Nigel Farage has received a similar level of TV news access as the SNP, the third-largest party in parliament prior to the dissolution of parliament.
• However, Reform UK has received 10% of overall press quotation space during the campaign, compared to the Liberal Democrats just over 2%. Other smaller parties have struggled to gain print access, with the Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru collectively accounting for less than 1% of quotation time.
• In a continuing trend, the access granted to smaller parties is dominated by their leaders. This is particularly evident in the speaking time in TV coverage ll John Swinney (87% of SNP quotation), Ed Davey (84% of Lib Dem quotation), Rhun ap lorweth (93% of Plaid Cymru quotation), Carla Denyer/Adrian Ramsey (87% of Green Party quotation) and Nigel Farage (87% of Reform quotation). In contrast, access is granted to a wider range of candidates in the two main parties, with Rishi Sunak (30%) and Keir Starmer (36%) accounting for a significantly smaller portion of their party’s overall access.

Key Findings

• Nigel Farage confirms his position as the clear alternative voice to the two main contenders for the premiership. Farage has remained in third place throughout the campaign and has been the politician who has consistently attracted more attention than any other after Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak.
• Farage’s ranking (3^rd) is a considerable feat for a politician who was not a leader nor even a candidate when the election was called. Some of this attention has been critical, particularly over the last week in which the Reform UK leader has face greater scrutiny following his comments about Ukraine.
• Starmer and Sunak aside, the news attention afforded Farage is way ahead of any of any other leader in this election including Ed Davey. Davey, who is perceived to have had a good campaign, achieves his highest ranking in this week’s Top 20. Even though he has closed the gap on his Reform UK rival, the LibDem leader still only received just over half the news attention that Farage has generated.
• Just under a third of the Top 20 are women, slightly up on last week. One of these is JK Rowling, the first non-politician to make the Top 10 in this campaign. The writer’s prominence follows her intervention in the debate over gender recognition last weekend. Kemi Badenoch returns to the Top 20 following her contribution to this debate.
• Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, makes his debut appearance in the Top 20 on account of him being drawn into the controversy over electoral gambling. The scandal surrounds various allegations involving various candidates and officials, but Jack is the only Cabinet member known to have placed a bet on the date of the election. Many others in the Top 20 have, however, contributed their views on a major topic of debate over the last week.

Key Findings

• Standards, corruption, scandals and sleaze has usurped Taxation as the second most covered issue in week 4. The betting scandal that has engulfed the Conservative Party (and to a lesser extent the Labour Party) has driven the coverage. TV has covered this issue much more than the press.
• This week’s coverage of Standards, corruption, scandals and sleaze has propelled the issue up the overall campaign rankings. It now ranks 3rd, ahead key policy themes, such as Economy/business/trade and Immigration.
• Minority groups (6th) has broken into the top 10 this week. Press coverage of the Labour Party’s position on trans rights and JK Rowling’s criticism of the party has driven this rise. Consequently, Culture Wars also rose in the rankings from 25th to 17th.
• Electoral process issues continue to dominate coverage. But this week has witnessed a drop in its coverage to 30%. However, when added to Standards, corruption, scandals and sleaze, these categories account for 45 percent of issue coverage overall, sidelining substantive policy content further than in previous weeks.
• Outside the top 10, Northern Ireland and Irish Unification has risen to 15th from 26th.

Key Findings

• As noted above, this week saw an increased visibility of so-called ‘identity politics’, after relatively little media coverage since the beginning of the campaign.
• While in 2019, antisemitism was the most prominent ‘minority groups’ issue in media coverage, issues around sex, gender and sexuality are now the most pronounced. Around 1 in every 25 of all issues in coverage this week featured some discussion of sex, gender and sexuality.
• These issues have been covered more prominently in the press (4% ‘minority groups’ theme, 1% ‘culture wars’ theme) than on TV (2% minority groups, 0.3% culture wars) across the campaign so far.
• The Express has been at the forefront in covering these issues, with ‘minority groups’ ranked 3rd (9% of all issues) amongst the newspaper's overall issues coverage. ‘Culture wars’ is ranked 9th at 3%.
• Among other outlets, ‘minority groups’ has also featured in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Times and the Sun at around 5-6% of issues coverage. Meanwhile, the Financial Times (0%), Star (1%), Channel 5 News (1%) and BBC1 News at Ten (1%) have each barely covered these issues.
• The author JK Rowling was the most prominent non-politician figure in election coverage this week. Rowling’s visibility followed her authoring a Times newspaper piece which claimed that ‘Labour has turned its back on women’. In a league table of all individuals (politician and non-politician), Rowling would rank 20th in the campaign so far, jumping up to 6th in this week’s coverage.
• The Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, has ranked 12th overall this week, owed in large part to a public dispute with the actor David Tennant about LGBTQ+ rights.
• The visibility of Bridget Phillipson, the second highest placed of all women politicians, is in part due to reporting on her comments on trans women, and an apparent divergence from Starmer’s position in this regard.
• Perhaps surprisingly, the term ‘woke’ has been invoked very rarely in election coverage. Despite the term’s potency in political discourse in recent years, ‘woke’ has been specifically mentioned in only 3 press headlines in the campaign so far.
• The term has been invoked a total of 25 times by journalists in our sample (90% of which has been with a pejorative orientation) compared with only 8 instances of its use by quoted sources. The term has been used by journalists in the Express (9 times), the Daily Mail (4 times), the Daily Telegraph (3 times) and the Sun (7 times).
• The terms appearance on one occasion each in the Guardian and the I came in the form of ironic usage, compared with the pejorative form found in other outlets.

Key Findings

• Labour’s apparent dominance in terms of party references is to some degree a measure of the varied names used to label the Conservative party. The term ‘Labour’ featured 7 percent more frequently than the combined references to either ‘Tory’, ‘Tories’, or ‘Conservatives’ (287 appearances versus 271)
• The ‘Reform’ party had 69 headline references, compared with 17 for the ‘Lib Dems’/ ‘Liberal Democrats’, 10 for ‘the Greens’/ ’Green party’, 6 for the ‘SNP’, and none for ‘Plaid Cymru’.
• ‘Starmer’ references exceeded those to ‘Sunak’ by 33 percent (171 appearances versus 129). Mentions of the first name of the Labour leader (‘Keir’) exceeded references to the first name of Conservative leader (‘Rishi’) by 38 percent (80 appearances to 58 appearances).
• References to ‘Farage’ (95 appearances) considerably exceeded the surname of the other parties’ leaders (Davey [Lib Dem] =13, ‘Swinney’ [SNP]=2, ‘Denyer’/ ‘Ramsay’ [Greens]= 0).
• ‘Tax’ is the policy term referenced most frequently in headlines to date (139 references). The next most frequently headlined policy terms are ‘Brexit’ (22 appearances) and ‘NHS’ (22 appearances).

Note: Five ‘false positive’ references were removed (e.g., ‘child benefit reforms’)

Key Findings

• CRCC analysis of the 2019 media campaign found extremely high levels of press negativity towards the Labour party and its leadership throughout (CRCC, 2019). In this coverage, ‘Labour’ headline references exceeded those for ‘Tories’/ ‘Tory’/ ‘Conservative’ by a third (239 versus 180).
• Policy keywords were also more prominent in 2019 Headlines compared with 2024 (‘Brexit’ = 95 appearances, ‘NHS’ = 89, ‘Tax’ = 63).

Key Findings

• ‘Rishi’ doesn’t have the same resonance that ‘Boris’ did in 2019. ‘First name only’ references to the Conservative leader have reduced considerably in 2024.
• As a corollary, ‘surname only’ references to the Conservative leader have increased in the most recent campaign.
• In 2019, the Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was almost exclusively referred to by his surname (94 percent of appearances). So far for 2024, Keir Starmer has been referenced by ‘surname only’ in 2/3rds of references in 2024 (66 percent). This is an identical proportion to that found for ‘Sunak’.
• ‘First name only’ references to the Labour leader have increased from 4 percent in 2019 to 29 percent in 2024.
  
• As noted, the significance of these changing patterns in the mode of address of the two main leaders should not be overstated. First name usage doesn’t always indicate a fond designation and there are numerous instances where they are used alongside political rebukes (e.g., ‘882 Migrants “Here for Keir”’, ‘Rishi and the Broken Leaders’ Club’). Nevertheless, the scale of the overall shift of naming practices is suggestive of some realignment in the editorial personification of the main protagonists across the two campaigns.

Key Findings

• Negativity in Conservative coverage has intensified further in Week 4 of our sample. A significant proportion of this has been driven by intensive coverage of the betting scandals that are mainly associated with Conservative party figures.
• Negative coverage of the Labour party has also increased as the campaign enters its final stages. Levels of negative coverage now exceed those found for the first week of our sample, when the dispute over Diane Abbott’s candidacy attracted high levels of press coverage.
• All the other parties registered much smaller deficits for week 4 compared with Conservatives and Labour.
• The minor fluctuation for the SNP and Lib Dems mainly indicates their marginality in press coverage.
• The figures for Reform are more reflective of the polarised nature of their coverage, in which negative and positive news angles tend to counterbalance themselves.

Key Findings

• Only aggregate coverage in the Daily Express is registering a positive value for the Conservatives. Coverage of ‘Reform’ is also uniquely positive in this paper.
• Aggregated Conservative coverage in the Daily Mail has now shifted into the negative side of the ledger.
• The Daily Telegraph and The Times have accrued comparable levels of negative coverage of the Tories. Where they differ is in their negativity towards Labour. In the Telegraph, levels of Labour bad news are twice as high as those found in The Times.
• Levels of negativity towards Labour have increased in The Sun over the last week, but these are below those found for the Express, Telegraph, and Mail.
• Labour has commanded a positive overall press in two papers: the Daily Mirror (by a country mile) and the Financial Times (by a whisker).
• The highest levels of negative reporting towards the Conservatives have been observed in The Mirror, The Guardian, The I, and the Financial Times.
• Overall, newspaper negativity in the reporting of all parties tends to prevail. Only the Mirror registers a significant surplus of positivity for their preferred party.