Prof Dan Stevens
Cornwall Professor of mass political behaviour, University of Exeter.
Email: D.P.Stevens@exeter.ac.uk
Prof Susan Banducci
Professor and Director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre, University of Exeter.
Email: s.a.banducci@exeter.ac.uk
Twitter: @femalebrain
Dr Ekaterina Kolpinskaya
Senior Lecturer in British Politics, University of Exeter.
Dr Laszlo Horvath
Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Exeter
Twitter: @_lhorvath
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)
After facing some hostile questions from a BBC Question Time audience on the final Friday before the July 4th election, Nigel Farage said that he would no longer appear on the BBC due to its bias. What type of bias concerned Farage? The BBC has been accused of being biased in favour of the major parties, hostile to the left, and captured by pro-government forces.
Another type of potential bias is the extent to which impartial broadcasters, such as BBC and ITV follow the lead of the conservative press, allowing it to set the news agenda and tone of debate for the day. In our forthcoming edited volume Media Effects and British General Elections (University of Edinburgh Press), we bring systematic evidence to bear on this question of media bias. We examine the volume, tone of coverage of issues and the major party leaders during the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general election campaigns on the BBC, ITV, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Guardian and Daily Mirror. We ask a straightforward question of who follows whom: does the volume and tone of BBC and ITV broadcasts seem to follow changes in these features of press coverage or vice versa?
There are two principal answers to this question of “intermedia agenda-setting”—media being influenced by each other. First, it could be that there is no relationship between television and newspaper coverage, and they are very much independent of each other. Second, it could be that there is a relationship, but it is one that is consistent with impartiality: following news cycles could lead us to expect that the volume, but not the tone, of coverage of leaders and issues on television will agree with the volume of coverage in the press simply because they are covering the same campaign events.
The answer we found was somewhat different, however. The BBC and ITV news coverage were systematically more responsive to coverage in the Telegraph and the Mail than in the Guardian or Mirror — especially for issues such as the economy and the NHS but less so for tone. This was particularly true of the Mail’s coverage of the issue of immigration and of the Telegraph’s coverage of the major party leaders. In other words, the BBC and ITV in these elections exhibited a bias towards the agenda being set by the Conservative press.
While it is too early to say whether this was also the case in the 2024 campaign. The analysis by the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University suggests the Conservative press has been less positive in its coverage of the Conservative Party than in other recent election. However, we could point to anecdotal evidence that this type of intermedia agenda-setting bias was evident in 2024.
First, the coverage of the letters from “business leaders” published in 2015 in the Telegraph supporting the Conservatives stands in stark contrast to 2024 coverage of a similar letter in the Times supporting Labour. The 2015 letter was reported on the front page of the Telegraph, which said that “business seems to be coming out in favour of Conservative policies” and the letter also showed “Labour’s rift with British business.” The publication of the letter then led the BBC 10pm news, reporting that “Labour denies it’s anti-business following criticism from over 100 business leaders”, lauding the list of high-profile signatories and referring to the letter as “Hammering home the good news” (for the Conservatives). In 2024, Conservative newspapers, such as the Telegraph, dismissed the business leaders’ letter supporting Labour, not because of its lack of famous names, but because it did not have signatories from executives in the FTSE100. The BBC then described the signatories as, “not necessarily a representative sample of business.”
Second, Loughborough’s analysis of the 2024 Election also shows that taxation was the leading issue in the media for most of the campaign. In addition, a search of the terms “Starmer” and “tax” in articles in these newspapers in June 2024 on Nexis showed 30 percent more stories in the Telegraph than the Guardian, suggesting that taxation loomed larger in the Conservative press. The BBC seemed to follow the lead of the Telegraph who accused Starmer of “opening the door to tax rises” after he said he did not want to raise taxes for working people during an LBC phone-in the previous day. The BBC Today show picked up this line from the Telegraph asking Rachel Reeves the following morning what was meant by “working people.” Meanwhile, the Guardian cited a poll by the Financial Fairness Trust where twice as many respondents wanted tax rises as wanted tax cuts.
Of course, there may be reasonable explanations for both of these examples from 2024. But given our analysis of the 2015, 2017 and 2019 media coverage, our own starting point is that they are likely reflective of a systematic bias in BBC and ITV news.
