A Journalist's Duty? Continuity and change in local newspaper reporting of recent UK general elections

Abstract

Research studies of political communications at the local or constituency level are scarce. There are few detailed analyses of local newspapers' coverage of the constituency campaign or any systematic account of local journalists' attitudes towards election reporting. This paper seeks to redress this neglect by providing a longitudinal overview and analysis of local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 1987, 1992, 1997 and 2001 UK general elections. Drawing on the findings of a unique and extensive analysis of newspapers' election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, the paper argues that while certain aspects of local newspapers' election coverage have declined recently, local journalists' commitments to reporting the election remain strong and coverage continues to be informative and wide ranging: indeed the findings suggest that on some grounds local press reporting of elections compares favourably with national press coverage. But in 2001 three significant changes in local coverage were evident. Reporting was: (1) markedly more locally oriented than in previous elections; (2) notably more disposed towards a "lighter" editorial emphasis preferring to focus on human interest stories about candidates than discussions of policy, and (3) finally, more partisan than previously with newspapers' overall "balance of partisanship" being replaced by a tendency to favour the Conservative Party above Labour - a trend strongly at variance with national newspapers' political sympathies.