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This article investigates the extent and nature of the press coverage of the personal lives and personal qualities of contemporary British political leaders. In particular, it explores the legacy of the politicization of Blair’s private persona, or the Blair effect. Was Blair’s era a temporary anomaly, or did it have a transformative effect on the way that parties, politicians, and journalists conceive the role of the personal in public discourse and in the construction of a leader’s public persona? This research demonstrates that the degree of politicization of private persona still depends, to an important extent, on the personality of the leader and on the leader’s communication strategies, and that it is still possible to have a prime minister such as Gordon Brown, who tries to keep his personal life mostly private. But this is only part of the story. Blair’s era altered expectations about the role that the personal plays, and ought to play, in public discourse, and how much significance is given to it as a criterion of leadership evaluation.

In the last few decades personalization has been identified as a defining trend of contemporary political communication. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed and there are very few studies that explore more than a single-case study. This article investigates media personalization in comparative perspective by analysing the press coverage of recent general elections in Germany (2009) and the United Kingdom (2010). Was the reporting in both campaigns (equally) personalized? How and to what extent does the phenomenon vary across the two countries? What does this mean for our understanding of personalization? The analysis shows that there are at least as many differences between the countries as there are similarities; although both campaigns can be considered personalized in some respects, the form it takes is substantially different due to structural variations in the media and political systems, as well as the more transient, but key, impact of the distinctive characteristics of the campaigns and each of the candidates.

This article examines the roles of the media in the process of political agenda setting. There is a long tradition of studies on this topic, but they have mostly focused on legacy news media, thus overlooking the role of other actors and the complex hybrid dynamics that characterize contemporary political communication. In contrast, through an in-depth case study using mixed-methods and multiplatform data, this article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the “Windrush scandal” reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial. They greatly amplified the salience of the issue and, once in “storm mode,” they were key for sustaining attention and pressure, eventually compelling the government to respond. It shows that they often remain at the core of the “national conversation” and certainly in the eye of a media storm. In the contemporary context, characterized by fierce battles for attention, shortening attention spans and fractured audiences, this is key and has important implications for agenda setting and beyond.

Most analysis of political advertising questions how it matches up to the normative standard of providing information to voters. It tends to treat advertising as a core, and often debased, resource for deliberation. However, advertising as a form is less suited to complex information and more to engagement of interest. Despite this, political advertising normally is both constructed and analysed as information carriers. While commercial advertising attracts interest through pleasure and popular discourse, political advertising remains wedded to information. The persuasive strategies of political and commercial advertising are marked as much by dissimilarity and similarity, the former aiming at plausibility and the latter at pleasure. The article analyses Party Election Broadcasts in the UK over two general elections, according to a scheme which elicits both the informational content and its aesthetic and emotional appeals. Both the analysis design and the underlying rationale may have application beyond the UK. They help answer the question: why does political advertising seem so dull and so bad to so many people?