Party Strategy and Media Bias: A Quantitative Analysis of the 2005 UK Election Campaign

Abstract

A BSTRACT This article investigates the current state of press partisanship in the UK. Utilizing content analysis data from the 2005 General Election campaign, recent hypotheses about press dealignment are tested with quantitative methods. Partisan tendencies in reporting are measured in terms of coverage bias , statement bias , and agenda bias . As the governing party, Labour benefits from coverage bias in all papers, while the Liberal Democrats remain marginalized. It can be shown that increasingly ambiguous endorsements in broadsheet and tabloid press alike translate into a general absence of open support for political parties. At best, endorsed parties receive neutral treatment, with their opponents being harshly criticized. Partisan tendencies do, however, manifest themselves in other patterns of campaign coverage. Even weakly partisan papers engage in strategic behaviour, most notably by reinforcing the issue agendas of endorsed parties. With both the Independent and the Guardian lending strategic support to the Liberal Democrats, and the Murdoch press being largely non-committal, the analysis hints at an erosion of support for New Labour.

Gaining voice in the mass media: The effect of parties’ strategies on party–issue linkages in election news coverage

“…However, some scholars also analyzed the similarity between party agendas and reported party agendas in media coverage -so far producing mixed evidence. In a study on the UK general elections of 2005, Brandenburg found that parties' agendas correlate quite high with parties' agendas reported in the media (Brandenburg, 2006). Similarly, a study analyzing press releases and news coverage at the 2007 Danish parliamentary elections found parties to be differently successful in getting their messages in the news (Hopmann et al, 2010 Helbling and Tresch (2011) found no connection between parties' issue emphasis in electoral programs and in the respective news coverage on the issue of European integration.…”

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

“…Previous research has considered party issue agenda-setting in the media (Brandenburg, 2002(Brandenburg, , 2006Hopmann et al, 2012) or the visibility of political actors in the news (Cook, 1988;Gattermann & Vasilopoulou, 2015;Kriesi, 2012;Tresch, 2009). More recent studies have focused on media gatekeeping of individual messages such as parliamentary questions (Van Aelst & Vliegenthart, 2014;Van Santen et al, 2015) and party pledges (Kostadinova, 2015).…”

The Impact of Increasing and Decreasing the Professionalism of News Webpage Aesthetics on the Perception of Bias in News Articles

“…Dissemination: There is an extensive compendium of research on bias in the dissemination of news in print, radio, and television. A small sample of the research includes studies on bias in photographs in newspapers and news magazines [5,42,55,76,77], research into the overarching area of visual biases [38,43,56,96], bias in news anchors' facial expressions [32,73,80,117], news anchor intonation and tone [41,78], presenters' non-verbal communication [3,69,114], television soundbites and image-bites [24,40], newspaper layout [8,99], newspaper coverage [9,10,17,58,59,64,84,92], newspaper headlines and lead stories [105,52,58,60,63,70,98,106,108,110], and description or labelling bias [22,66,67,68].…”