Prof Lee Edwards
Professor of Strategic Communications and Public Engagement at the London School of Economics. She focuses on the relationship between strategic communications and inequalities, social justice, democracy, and media literacy. She writes extensively on topics including deliberative engagement in media policymaking, media literacy, and public relations and democracy.
UK Election 2024
Section 7: News and journalism
73. Why the press still matters (Prof Steven Barnett)
74. When the Star aligned: how the press ‘voted’ (Prof Dominic Wring, Prof David Deacon)
75. Visual depictions of leaders and losers in the (still influential) print press (Prof Erik Bucy)
76. Towards more assertive impartiality? Fact-checking on BBC television news (Prof Stephen Cushion)
77. The outsize influence of the conservative press in election campaigns (Prof Dan Stevens, Prof Susan Banducci, Prof Ekaterina Kolpinskaya and Dr Laszlo Horvath)
78. GB News – not breaking any rules… (Prof Ivor Gaber)
79. Vogue’s stylish relationship to politics (Dr Chrysi Dagoula)
80. Tiptoeing around immigration has tangible consequences (Dr Maria Kyriakidou, Dr Iñaki Garcia-Blanco)
81. A Taxing Campaign (Prof David Deacon et al)
82. Not the Sun wot won it: what Murdoch’s half-hearted, last-minute endorsements mean for Labour (Dr John Jewell)
83. Is this the first podcast election? (Carl Hartley, Prof Stephen Coleman)
84. A numbers game (Prof Paul Bradshaw)
85. Election 2024 and the remarkable absence of media in a mediated spectacle (Prof Lee Edwards)
86. 2024: the great election turn-off (Prof Des Freedman)
The mediatisation of politics is now a feature of political life and at the heart of party strategies, particularly during election campaigns. While Rishi Sunak’s campaign was plagued with gaffes and revelations that led to media and voter amusement, shock and incredulity (perhaps in equal measure), Keir Starmer was criticised for a lack of capacity to deliver a performance that captures media attention. Doggedly following the PR prescription of key message repetition, he and his team repeatedly deflected personality critiques in favour of the Labour mantra of stability and ‘fully costed and fully funded’ policies, apparently content to observe the Conservative party construct their own defeat.
The media’s role in maximising visibility for politicians and their messages during and beyond election campaigns is of course critical. From a politician’s perspective, media maximise the reach of their carefully crafted messages, as well as giving a sense of how those messages might ‘land’ with the public. Media also provide representation for all candidates and parties and act as an essential proxy for the public interest when journalists robustly challenge claims designed to appeal to voters. However, fulfilling these roles does not guarantee a strong foundation for the democratic process of voter decision-making; that depends on having a robust media landscape, designed to foster democratic participation and deliberative debate, and protected by a coherent and civic-oriented media policy. Yet this is rarely a key feature of the election agenda.
Equally, analysis illustrated, media policy attracted very little space in the Labour and Conservative manifestos for this election and nothing radical. While the Liberal Democrats and Greens were much more focused on constructive reform to challenge current distortions in the media landscape (for example, expanding media ownership and providing support for local news ecologies), their status as smaller parties unlikely to secure a governmental majority meant they received far less exposure and their media policies were completely overlooked.
Media-related issues that did feature primarily focused on concerns about misinformation and associated challenges for election integrity. Tips for voters engaging with campaign material came from the Electoral Commission, while Ofcom collaborated with Shout Out UK and the Electoral Commission to launch the Dismiss campaign, helping younger voters understand and evaluate potentially misleading online content. Both strategies attempted to enhance media literacy skills, although stakeholders agree the effectiveness of such interventions remains under-researched.
Debates did not address the ‘elephant in the room’: that trust in media has declined, and that this lack of trust might also affect election outcomes. Edelman Trust Barometer showed almost 70% of UK respondents did not trust the media to ‘do what is right’; trust in government was equally low. But while trust in politics and politicians was a regular theme in election coverage, trust in the media, and how it might be addressed, was not.
By focusing on users’ media literacy and combatting misinformation, the institutional structures of media and their power to influence both election coverage and audience engagement, have been overlooked. The result is a remarkable absence of media self-scrutiny. Instead, scrutiny is left to regulators and professional associations: Ofcom regulates broadcast coverage of election campaigns in the interests of balance and accuracy, while the Independent Press Standards Organisation lightly regulates newspapers and magazines via its Editors’ Code, which leaves its members free to campaign for any party, cause or individual, as long as they ‘clearly distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact’.
The Media Reform Coalition’s Media Manifesto argues in an era of mediatised politics, with high media influence on political process, ensuring diverse media ownership, protecting a robust public service media sector, and supporting increasingly cash-strapped local media content, should be central to the media policy of any democratic government. But such reforms can only result from a clearly thought-through and informed understanding of media and its value as part of the democratic process.
Perhaps it is too much to ask journalists and politicians to reflect on media policy when they are so focused on securing legitimacy from voters and media policy is low on the public agenda. But now that Labour has a secure majority, this remarkable absence should be addressed so that in the next election, voters are both more informed about the power of media, more aware of its capacity to influence them, and ultimately more prepared to engage with the information they circulate, based on this knowledge.
Even before their Labour’s victory, Keir Starmer argued that improving trust in politics is essential in the longer-term fight against polarisation and populism. But as the Edelman Trust Barometer shows, we face an equally urgent lack of trust in the media, which needs urgent attention. Sleepwalking into a world where media trust remains low, public service media are increasingly treated as a political football, media ownership is limited to a few dominant actors, and media coverage remains focused on spectacular, rather than consequential, events in politics, offers no benefit for voters, journalists or politicians.
