Dominating the debate: visibility bias and mentions of British MPs in newspaper reporting on Brexit

Abstract

Brexit has been the most important issue in British politics in recent years. Whereas extra-parliamentary actors dominated the run-up to the 2016 referendum, the issue moved back to Parliament after the vote. This paper analyses newspaper reporting on Brexit in major British outlets during the post-referendum phase from July 2017 to March 2019. We study the visibility of Members of Parliament to assess whether the debate was balanced between parties and individual MPs relative to their vote and seat share. We conduct an automated text analysis of 58,247 online and offline newspaper articles covering the ideological spectrum from left to right, and from pro-Brexit to anti-Brexit. Our main findings are: (1) Conservative politicians dominated the debate, and (2) organized pro-Brexit MP pressure groups such as 'Leave Means Leave' were disproportionally more visible. This means that reporting was biased towards Conservative MPs and within the Conservative Party towards supporters of a hard Brexit. These findings are remarkably stable across different types of newspapers. The results challenge previous analyses that found a higher degree of balance in reporting but corroborate recent studies on the tonality of Brexit reporting that found a pro-Brexit bias.

News media coverage of COVID-19 public health and policy information

“…News media search strategy and inclusion criteria. Print and online news media records were retrieved from the Factiva database for news outlets across the political spectrum of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States (see Table 1) (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010;Puglisi and Snyder, 2015;Anderson and Coletto, 2017;Mitchell et al, 2018;Hönnige et al, 2020;Jurkowitz et al, 2020;Austen, 2020). Selected news media outlets have primary news products in print and online media, rather than television broadcasting or social media, and full article entries available in Factiva.…”

“…In this paper, we systematically quantify the amount, scientific quality, and sensationalism of newspaper media coverage of COVID-19 in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Newspapers studied span the political spectrum of each case-study country (Table 1) (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010;Puglisi and Snyder, 2015;Anderson and Coletto, 2017;Mitchell et al, 2018;Hönnige et al, 2020;Jurkowitz et al, 2020;Austen, 2020). Our analysis begins two weeks prior to COVID-19's official recognition as a pandemic and follows its development over the subsequent five months (i.e., from 1 March 2020 to 15 August 2020).…”

Communicating science in the COVID-19 news in the UK during Omicron waves: exploring representations of nature of science with epistemic network analysis

“…Print and online news articles were searched using the news data base, Factiva. Four news media outlets, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Telegraph and Daily Mail were selected because they represented a range of political orientations from left-wing to right-wing (Hönnige et al, 2020). The selected news publishing companies have only print and online media instead of television broadcasting, so their full articles can be systematically retrieved from Factiva (Mach et al, 2021).…”

Emotions and domestic vote choice

“…The continuous news coverage of this highly newsworthy event (e.g. Hönnige et al 2020) has encouraged nationwide debates about Brexit-related policy, increased public scrutiny of the government's response and prompted government evaluations. Brexit requires a collective response in the sense that any government's solution to the Brexit question should reflect as many varied interests as possible in order to be perceived as legitimate.…”