The Press and its Influence on British Political Attitudes under New Labour
| Author | Neil T. Gavin,David Sanders |
| Published date | 01 October 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00442 |
| Date | 01 October 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Press and Its Influence on British
Political Attitudes under New Labour
Neil T. Gavin
University of Liverpool
David Sanders
University of Essex
To explore the impact of the press in Britain during the first New Labour administration, we used
aggregate-level analysis to assess the relationship between the economic content of press and
changes in the public’s political and economic attitudes. We examine the effects on attitudes of
economic coverage in the broadsheets, ‘black top’ and tabloid newspapers. The results suggest that
the broadsheets and ‘black tops’ do exert an influence on voters’ views, whereas the tabloids do
not. The impact is, however, not global, but confined to particular segments of the population.
The modest effects we have charted, nevertheless have important cumulative political significance
in the medium- to long-term, and they put press influence into sharper and more realistic per-
spective than many current accounts. Methodologically our results suggest the need for further
work to focus on press effects on specific groups of voters.
Central to contemporary Britain politics is the relationship between the media and
the political parties. The media lavish considerable attention on the personalities,
policies and practices of national politicians, and, in turn, political parties expend
a great deal of energy on media relations, image management and ‘spin doctoring’
(McNair, 2000). A central but largely unspoken assumption here is that the media
in general, and the partisan press in particular, have either a potential or actual
impact on the way the public think about and evaluate the political parties. But
for those engaged in research in the area of ‘media influence’, this assumption is
contested, and some contend that the evidence is too sketchy and the results too
contradictory to make a definitive call on the overall potency of the press (Corner,
2000). Researchers have stopped asking whether the media generally, or the news-
papers in particular, do or do not have an impact. Instead, they have begun to look
at the complex and often situationally contingent relationship between media
coverage and the public’s political preferences.
The question remains: what precisely are these contingencies and what can we say
about the potency, or otherwise, of particular news messages? We sought to address
these issues through the analysis of the aggregate relationship between newspaper
output and changes in the public’s political attitudes. The results show a complex
pattern of influence. They suggest that there is still room for the notion that, in
some clearly defined circumstances and for some important segments of the
population, particular newspaper groups (though not all) make a significant con-
tribution to the formation of public opinion.
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 573–591
© Political Studies Association, 2003.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
574 NEIL T. GAVIN AND DAVID SANDERS
Research on Media Effects
An extensive literature exists on the media’s agenda-setting and priming capacities
(McCombs and Shaw, 1993; Iyengar and Kinder, 1987). However, essentially, this
deals with the media’s role in directing the gaze of the public (and the implications
that follow), rather than their ability to change public attitudes and behaviour. If,
on the other hand, the quest is to get a clearer understanding of the media’s impact
on attitudes and actions, a set of problems emerge. These revolve around the fact
that researchers use a wide variety of data sources and empirical techniques to
explore ‘impact’. A look at some of the principal studies in the field highlights the
issues. For example, Harrop (1987) used what might be termed a ‘deductive’
approach in marshalling evidence that suggests that voters are more vulnerable to
the media than they were previously. He pointed out that audiences use the media
as an important source of political information and that, in turn, coverage of
politics has reached saturation point. But he also noted that partisan attachments
to political parties are weakening, that there are more floating voters and that,
in this sort of context, the public can be swayed by media messages. In these
circumstances, he argued, surely the media must have an impact.
Harrop’s deductive inferences have found support in Webber’s (1993) research,
which focused on the relationship between the circulation of newspaper titles and
the vote for particular parties. He was particularly interested in the ratio of Sun-
to-Mirror readers and Telegraph-to-Guardian readers across parliamentary seats, and
noted that the former newspaper in each case outperforms the latter in distinc-
tively Conservative-oriented constituencies.1But the nature of the relationship here
is, at best, difficult to interpret and may simply reflect the rather mundane notion
that Conservative newspapers are more likely to sell strongly in areas that have
high Conservative turnout at elections. This is a long way from establishing that
high levels of newspaper sales in some sense cause rising support levels for the
parties endorsed. The data, in this instance, are incapable of helping us distinguish
between rival interpretations.
Researchers have increasingly turned to survey evidence to assess how the reading
habits of individual voters are related to their propensity to vote for, or change to,
particular political parties. Dunleavy and Husbands (1985) highlighted the close
correspondence between newspaper reading habits and voting behaviour, yet the
issue of which was cause and which effect was again underexplored. Subsequently,
Miller et al. (1990) noted that the swing to the Conservatives between 1986 and
the election in 1987 was most pronounced among readers of the most strident Con-
servative newspapers (the Sun and the Star). However, they also observed a similar,
if less pronounced change among Daily Mirror readers and those who read no news-
paper at all (Miller et al., 1990, p. 89). Newton (1992) went on to argue that, if we
look at the 1983 and 1987 elections, a correlation between press readership and
vote is evident, even after we control for the public’s political attitudes, and he sug-
gested that this is potent evidence of press influence. Although these studies form
a more plausible basis for press influence than Harrop’s deductive approach, they
belong to an era when the political climate and the political positioning of the news-
papers were quite different from what they were at the end of the twentieth
century or are at the beginning of the twenty-first.
To continue reading
Request your trial