Methodology

Funding

The Centre for Research in Communication and Culture would like to acknowledge the kind support of the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust and Loughborough University in making this study possible. 

Method

Our weekly ‘real-time’ media audits present statistical evidence relating to patterns and trends in national television and print news coverage of the campaign. These measures are based on scrutiny and analysis of relevant content by the Centre’s dedicated research team. We believe this approach has two key advantages over automated coding of web content because:

• analysis of published and broadcast news reporting (rather than their web equivalents) provides significant insights into the editorial values and priorities of news organisations
• this kind of approach is the most reliable way for capturing more complex themes and evaluations in news reporting (NB Inter-coder reliability checks have been conducted for all measures)

What is coded

The team code any ‘item’ in its sample frame that makes a clear reference to the 2024 UK General Election. An ‘item’ is defined as follows:

For television

An item begins the moment a newsreader or presenter introduces a topic.  In most cases, this will then lead into a filed report from a journalist or an interview. The item ends either when: (1) The programme returns to the reader or presenter after the conclusion of the filed report/ interview or (2) another filed report, clearly authored by a different journalist, segues onto the end of the first report.

For newspapers

In the main, items have their own headline. However, there may be occasions when a separate article has been tagged on to the end of another. On these occasions they are deemed as separate items.

Our sample

The team code all relevant editorial content in TV programmes sampled (see below). For newspapers the team code all election related news items that appear on the front page, the first two pages of the domestic news section, the first two pages of any specialist section assigned to the coverage of the campaign, and the pages containing and facing papers’ leader editorials.

The study commenced on 31 May 2024. Our sample focuses on weekday election news coverage from the following:

UK-wide television news

• BBC1
• Channel 4 News
• Five News Tonight
• GB News
• ITV
• Sky

UK-wide newspapers

• The Daily Express
• The Daily Mail
• The Daily Mirror
• The Daily Star
• The Daily Telegraph
• The Financial Times
• The Guardian
• The I
• The Times
• The Sun