Impact case study database

The four campaigns occurred in a context of tumultuous political change, with each framed by controversy over the UK’s future relations with Europe. Three of the four campaigns also produced unanticipated outcomes. It is especially challenging to make rapid and prominent interventions in these highly charged and competitive environments. Deacon, Wring, Stanyer, Downey, Harmer and Smith developed five impact pathways to ensure immediate and sustained high visibility for their research throughout each campaign:

(1) Weekly news audit reports and commentaries: during the five weeks of campaigning before each polling day (seven weeks in the EU Referendum case), the team produced weekly commentaries and statistical reports. Every instalment identified and measured trends in news coverage and was published on a bespoke University website. During the 2015 campaign, the site received 8.2K visitors and 6.7K unique users. These figures increased exponentially over time, with our 2016 Referendum analysis achieving 26.8K views and 21.3K unique users and our analysis of the 2019 election reaching 36.7K visitors and 30.7K unique users. We wrote additional analytical pieces to promote every instalment published during each campaign for a range of influential blog sites and online journals. These included the ESRC sponsored UK in a Changing Europe, the Press Gazette and Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. We published fourteen articles in The Conversation (the highly respected independent on-line site for academic expert opinion) across the four campaigns. These received a total of 97K readers, with an average of 6930 readers per item [ S1].

(2) Social media: key findings from every report were distributed via Twitter, Facebook and other channels. Our tweets aggregated 2.64 million Twitter impressions and 172k engagements across the four campaigns. These figures only capture Loughborough account-linked tweets and social media activity prior to polling day. They do not include the wider, more substantial circulation of our findings by external users nor their post-vote distribution. During every campaign, leading politicians, opinion-forming journalists, and influential public figures retweeted and commented on our findings, thereby significantly enhancing the public reach of the research. These included, Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Conservative Cabinet Minister, Esther McVey, Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, former Downing Street strategist Alastair Campbell, ex-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, singer Lily Allen, musician Mick Hucknall, senior SNP politician Angus MacNeil, actor Rob Delaney, and prominent journalistic commentators such as Owen Jones ( The Guardian), George Monbiot ( The Guardian), Stephen Smith ( Financial Times) and Jim Waterson ( The Guardian) [S2, pp. 40-53].

(3) Media relations: Advanced copies of CRCC reports were released to selected contacts at the Press Association, Guardian, Independent, BBC and Huffington Post; additional data analysis was requested and provided to various journalists including the flagship ITV political programme Peston, the Guardian, Independent and Huffington Post. Weekly news and video releases were also distributed and in 2019 we produced our own podcasts. Together these activities generated considerable news interest in the research. Nationally, these included items in The Observer, Peston, Huffington Post, BBC Radio 4, The Financial Times, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. Internationally, the research was reported by numerous outlets including the New York Times, China Today, Al Jazeera and CNBC [S1],[S2],[S3],[S4],[S5]

(4) Post-mortem events : after each campaign, the team hosted a collaborative event, at which journalists, political strategists, pollsters and other external stakeholders reflected on the campaigns and the key takeaways [S1].

(5) High level briefings for senior policy makers: team members received numerous invitations invited to present findings in person to numerous high-status external stakeholders, including public bodies such as the Welsh Assembly, Ofcom and the French Embassy [S1].

A major factor in securing high levels of public and media reach was gaining recognition for the significance and authoritativeness of our research evidence. In 2015, Ivor Gaber, a

former political journalist with BBC, ITN and C4 and now Professor of Journalism at the University of Sussex, observed of the research: ‘It’s the gold standard if you like…People recognise it as the definitive statement of media agendas, media bias and so forth and also in particular compared to other surveys, it covers both press and broadcasting and that is very useful’ [S9]. In 2017, Gaby Hinsliff, former political editor of the Observer, stated the Loughborough studies were ‘the British equivalent’ of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (‘Is Labour fighting shocking media bias or does it need to get its act together?’, The Observer, 20/5/2017).

This research improved the quality of media coverage and public debate during elections and referenda. This was achieved through three impacts which depended on close and continuous engagement with media sources. It is important to emphasise that Journalists and news editors were significant external stakeholders in their own right, as the research addressed directly their professional practices.

1. Helping politicians and journalists raise public awareness of inequality of media access

This impact derived from the monitoring of ‘stopwatch balance’ [R2], [R3], [R4]. Loughborough’s analysis extended beyond checking party political imbalances (such as the dominance of Conservative sources in the Referendum coverage) to consider wider issues concerning media diversity. For example, the CRCC identified major gender inequalities in the reporting of all four campaigns covered by this impact case study. During the Referendum, former Deputy Labour Leader Harriet Harman wrote to Ofcom, complaining that broadcast coverage had been dominated by men and it was “ time for women’s voices to be heard” (24/5/2016) [S3, pp. 2-3]. Ms Harman cited Loughborough’s data at the public launch of her complaint - which also involved three Shadow Secretaries of State and received blanket national press coverage– and in her formal submission to Ofcom [S3, pp. 7-16]. Loughborough’s research showed there was a marked shift in TV news coverage following the MP’s intervention. In the 12 weekdays before Harman’s Ofcom complaint, women accounted for 20 percent of the political sources appearing on primetime TV news coverage of the Referendum. For the same period after the intervention, this figure increased to 31 percent - a statistically significant difference [S3, p.17]. This change was partly the result of a shift in the dynamics of the campaign that followed directly from the complaint. According to the Financial Times, both the official Remain and Leave campaigns nominated women politicians to represent them in the ITV Referendum debate held on 9 June in direct response to these criticisms, with Boris Johnson the only male among the six campaigners onstage [S3, pp. 4-6]. Our evidence in 2016 was also used to support public interventions by the Fawcett Society and Operation Black Vote raising concerns about the lack of diversity witnessed in the Referendum campaign [S3, pp. 18-21]. In the 2019 General Election, our findings were cited by Dr Helen Pankhurst, great granddaughter of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, to highlight enduring gender inequalities in media reporting [S3. pp.22]. In February 2019 Conservative Cabinet minister Esther McVey, quoted CRCC statistics on the gender imbalance of Referendum news coverage in launching her ‘Ladies for Leave’ pressure group. The video on Twitter had more than 872k views and 10k tweet engagements.

2. Enabling campaigners and journalists to identify and challenge media partisanship

This impact links to Loughborough’s research on trends in the ‘directional balance’ of campaign coverage [R2], [R5]. UK national newspapers routinely endorse parties (and positions) during campaigns, and typically most press opinion has nominally supported the Conservatives. But political partisanship is not an ‘either’/‘or’ matter: there are several gradations in the strength of these endorsements. Most significantly this is expressed in the degree of routine positive/negative editorial treatment of candidates and policies. In recognition of this, the CRCC developed a methodology for calculating the aggregated strength of individual news outlets’ support/opposition for competing positions. By linking these calculations to circulation, the team were able to show that pro-Leave coverage had a significantly wider public distribution than pro-Remain coverage in the 2016 EU Referendum, despite equal numbers of daily titles supporting either campaign [R3]. This methodology also demonstrated that anti-Labour coverage intensified significantly in the 2019 General Election. Both these findings received considerable public and media exposure and the latter findings were cited by senior politicians. For example, on 19 December 2019, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn retweeted a link to our analysis of press partisanship with the comment ‘ *What was it about our plans to make the super-rich pay their fair share that the billionaire press barons didn't like?*’ [S2, p.51]. This tweet generated more than 45K additional engagements within three days. Other senior Labour politicians also drew attention to Loughborough’s data, including the Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Transport Secretary [S1, pp.30-32]. On occasion, the interpretation (but not the integrity) of our evidence was the subject of public debate and this further expanded its reach. For example, following a complaint from a Daily Mirror political correspondent, the BBC Radio 4 statistics programme More or Less ran a segment assessing contrasting interpretations of Loughborough’s figures relating to the prominence (or not) of Jeremy Corbyn in the reporting of the 2016 EU Referendum [S7].

Loughborough’s methodology has been adopted by opinion-forming media outlets. In December 2019, when researching the role of mobile news apps in alerting voters to political content, The Guardian acknowledged it was: ‘Following a methodology applied by Loughborough University to analyse print news’. It has since reused the method to conduct further investigations into the partisan treatment of the Royal family and celebrities [S6].

3. Improving the balance of media agendas

This impact relates to the findings on ‘agenda balance’ [R2], [R3], [R6] and has been achieved in three ways. First, the research promoted reflexivity about the nature of the news and its significance during campaigns. As Richard Hooper, Producer of BBC R4’s The Media Show, commented after his show’s review of the 2019 election ‘The inclusion of Loughborough’s research enhanced the quality of the debate, making it more informed and increasing the awareness and understanding of the role of the media among the participants’ [S4]. Second, leading journalists and editors approached us on many occasions for data to assist them in developing new lines of editorial enquiry about media-campaign dynamics. For example, we frequently furnished data and analysis to ITV’s flagship current affairs show Peston to expose important aspects of the mediation of the campaigns [S5, pp.3-8]. In October 2018, following intense political debate over the implications Brexit held for custom arrangements for Northern Ireland, on our own initiative we provided the programme with findings demonstrating how little coverage there had been of Northern Ireland and border issues during the Referendum campaign itself. The results were prominently reported in the programme and afterwards Kishan Koria, producer of ITV’s Peston show stated:

‘We are always on the lookout for the best research and data to help tell the story of what is happening in politics and we've come to find the Loughborough University CRCC an incredible resource to help us do this’ [ S5, p.2].

Third, our research also influenced wider editorial strategies in campaign reporting. For example, the BBC consciously increased the substantive policy focus of its news coverage in the 2017 General Election after our research helped to highlight the inordinately high percentage of coverage that focused on the political drama rather than the policy substance of the preceding 2015 campaign [ S8].