Tabloid Media Campaigns and Public Opinion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Euroscepticism in England

Abstract

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

Tabloid Tales: How the British Tabloid Press Shaped the Brexit Vote

“…We believe our article is acutely relevant given the well‐documented link between the ‘knowledge gap’ and negative attitudes towards the EU (McCormick, 2014). Like Foos & Bischof (2022), we believe that media actors and issue entrepreneurs can raise the salience of a political issue (in this case Brexit) while providing a strong frame that citizens rely on to interpret the issue. In this respect, we interpret the BTP as a political actor, which tries to change the beliefs and policy preferences of mass and/or elite audiences, thus affecting subsequent policy decisions.…”

“…While there is no doubting Murdoch and News Corp's influence in framing a narrative that has contributed to the mainstreaming of a eurosceptic discourse in British political debate during the 1990s and 2000s (Foos & Bischof, 2022), the BTP's lopsided and anti‐EU stance is not something that uniquely originated from the pages of News International publications. Researchers have speculated as to whether the BTP more generally has contributed to the rise of euroscepticism (Startin, 2015).…”

Can the social dimension of time contribute to explain the public evaluation of political change? The case of European integration

“…But on the procedural level, the average EU mood always favors faster integration in comparison to the perceived speed. This does not challenge the notion that Euroskepticism is a persistent phenomenon (Usherwood and Startin, 2013); however, Figure 1 does challenges the excessive emphasis on the negative sentiments toward the EU, especially after Brexit in 2016 (De Vries, 2018;Foos and Bischof, 2022;Treib, 2021). The United Kingdom was only one of (then) 28 member states.…”

The Politics of Free Movement of People in the United Kingdom: Beyond Securitization and De‐securitization?

“…It is not easy to directly measure the causal effects of long‐term securitizing narratives on public attitudes and subjective feelings of (in)security and anxiety in the UK. But based on survey‐oriented empirical work, we can legitimately claim that public sentiment on FMoP/EU citizens (and/or migration and the EU in general) was significantly influenced by both ‘media coverage and elite rhetoric’ (Blinder, 2015, p. 96; see also: Evans and Mellon, 2019; Foos and Bischof, 2022). As such, the securitizing narratives of prominent media and political figures can be taken as a useful proxy for the various subjective views of the substantial percentage of the British public that we know was either concerned about, or outright opposed to, freedom of movement by the time of the 2016 referendum.…”