Tabloid Media Campaigns and Public Opinion: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Euroscepticism in England

Florian Foos,Daniel Bischof

doi:10.1017/s000305542100085x

Abstract

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.

Highlights

A re powerful media outlets able to shape public opinion? This question is central to political science and extensively debated in other disciplines (Bartels 1993; Horkheimer, Adorno, and Noeri 1972; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948; McQuail 1985; Mutz and Martin 2001; Zaller 1996)
Consistent with our hypothesis that the decline in Euroscepticism in Merseyside post-1989 was driven by The Sun boycott, treatment effects are stronger among generations that came politically of age during the boycott and among unskilled and semiskilled workers, the social group that was most likely to read The Sun before Hillsborough
The effects we identify cannot be explained by differential trends in party preferences between Merseyside and other Northern English counties, nor are they likely to have resulted from differential access to European Union (EU) structural funds or differential effects of globalization on offshorability

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A re powerful media outlets able to shape public opinion? This question is central to political science and extensively debated in other disciplines (Bartels 1993; Horkheimer, Adorno, and Noeri 1972; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948; McQuail 1985; Mutz and Martin 2001; Zaller 1996). Following individual attitudes in Merseyside and other Northern English counties for more than 30 years, we provide evidence of the longterm influence of sustained media campaigns on public opinion. The occurrence of the Hillsborough disaster, gives us the rare opportunity to identify the causal effect of a sustained media boycott on attitudes toward the EU because the circulation of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid was significantly reduced due to a sporting disaster, which was unrelated to the tabloid’s EU coverage. The unexpected occurrence of the Hillsborough disaster allows us to estimate the causal effect of a widespread, but geographically restricted, boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper in the UK, caused by a plausibly exogenous event, on attitudes toward leaving the EU. As the BSA reports the interview dates for each respondent, we can directly identify which respondents were interviewed before and after the 19th of April 1989 —the day The Sun published its first of several slanderous front pages on the Hillsborough Disaster

RESULTS

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

FUNDING STATEMENT

CONFLICT OF INTEREST