Amateurs or Adversaries?: Local Journalists’ Coverage of the UK Non-General Election

Abstract

John Prescott launched local newspapers into the 2005 election agenda following his acrimonious exchange with a local journalist in Gwent reported on the front page of the Guardian. Angered by what he judged to be the reporter’s parochial questions, Prescott claimed, ‘I’m a national politician. I don’t care about the Welsh situation. Bugger off you amateur and get back on your bus’ (Guardian, 21 April 2005). The deputy Prime Minister’s typically blunt suggestion was markedly ‘off message’, since the Labour party, along with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, has increasingly targeted local newspapers during elections as valuable conduits for conveying party messages to local readers and voters (Franklin, 1989; Franklin, 2004; Negrine, 2005). Six months earlier, election coordinator Alan Milburn underscored the point by declaring that the 2005 election would be ‘as much fought locally as it is nationally’ (Guardian, 11 November 2004). Two days before Prescott’s comments, Independent journalist Stephen Glover had complained about politicians’ courting of local journalists to the exclusion of national reporters; the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts, for example, had been denied entry to a Conservative event in Gloucestershire that was ‘limited to local journalists’ (Independent, 18 April). A week later, when the ‘Blair/Brown road show’ visited the north west, the editor of the Liverpool Echo claimed, ‘only local and regional journalists were granted interviews despite the nationals hopeful attendance’ (Guardian, 25 April 2005, p. 5).KeywordsLocal NewspaperPolitical CommunicationRegional NewspaperConservative PartyDaily MailThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.