Overall patterns between newspapers

It was generally difficult to identify trends that linked the titles with common features, such as popular titles versus qualities or right and left-of-centre papers based on the issues they mentioned. In this section I discuss a few tendencies, though most of them are not consistent either across both samples or across both election years.

In 2001 the debates on Britain‟s relationship with Europe and the possibility of adopting the Euro seemed to be “right-of-centre” issues in the English/UK sample, because they received most of their mentions in The Telegraph (7% and 7.5% of the paper‟s mentions of all issues respectively), The Mail (8% and 6.3%) and The Sun (5.7% and 9.3%). In the Scottish sample these issues received less attention from all titles and even though the Euro had 8.4% of the total issue mentions of The Scottish Sun and Europe had 7.3% of the issue mentions in The Scottish Daily Mail, the other papers had lower proportions and the trend of the right-of-centre English/UK titles is not so obviously reflected in the Scottish sample.

In both election periods, crime received the most attention in the two editions of The Sun (between 6.8% and 8.3%). Among the indigenous Scottish titles, The Daily Record had the highest proportion in 2001 (7.3% of all its issue mentions), which could lead to the interpretation that crime was a “popular press” issue, but in 2005 this trend was not repeated in The Record.

In 2005 immigration appears to be a “popular press” issue in the Scottish sample. Its highest proportion in that sample is found in The Daily Record (6.7% of all issue mentions), followed by The Scottish Sun (6.3%) and The Scottish Daily Mail (6.1%). Yet the same is not the case in the English/UK sample, where the issue has most of its mentions in The Guardian (8%). Similar distinctions are not found in the mentions of immigration in 2001. Once again though, these trends highlight the inadequacy of content analysis in explaining how issues are constructed. One might expect a different representation of the immigration issue in a left-of-centre title, like The Guardian, compared to the right-of-centre Scottish Daily Mail. Yet for such distinctions to be made a more qualitative approach would be required.

More consistent quantitative distinctions appear in the non-central belt titles in comparison to the rest of the Scottish sample. In both election years The Aberdeen Press and Journal is the Scottish title with the highest proportion of mentions of transport and the environment, while rural issues and employment are also more prominent in this title in 2001. In 2005 The Press and Journal and The Dundee Courier have the highest proportion of mentions of employment, council tax, the possibility of abolition of the Scottish regiments and fuel prices. These two papers also have the highest proportion of mentions of fuel prices in 2001 (appendix 1.2).

There seems therefore to be an issue agenda which is particular to non-central belt titles and includes geographically significant issues, which receive less attention in the rest of the Scottish coverage. In all these issues, the differences in the mentions between Scottish titles were found to be statistically significant, which confirms that the non-central belt titles follow different trends.

Scottish editions of English newspapers are also consistent in following the agenda of their mother editions with few variations. For example, in 2001 the euro is a major issue for the English edition of The Sun (9.3% of all issue mentions) and the Scottish edition has the highest proportion on this issue in the Scottish sample (8.4%). The same happens with immigration in the two editions of The Sun and with Europe in the two editions of The Mail in 2001; with law and order in the two editions of The Sun in both election years; and with postal voting fraud in the two editions of The Mail in 2005.

No major differences were found between the agendas of the two central belt quality papers, The Scotsman and The Herald. The only exception is a stronger emphasis on fiscal autonomy (table 25) and devolution (appendix 1.2) in The Scotsman compared to The Herald in 2001. Hamish Macdonell, the political editor of The Scotsman, stressed that his paper is very similar to The Herald, both in terms of the election coverage offered and the type of audience addressed. Indeed it seems that the two papers gave prominence to a similar agenda in the two general elections.

Macdonell also mentioned that in 2001 there was an editorial decision in his paper to focus on “new politics” issues such as the environment and globalization. The reason for deciding to focus on these was that:

We perhaps looked at these issues like the environment and globalisation because we were able to cut across the division of reserved and devolved

issues that was there; so it was our way of dealing with things in a slightly different way I think.

The paper decided to promote these issues and ask politicians to comment on them, yet Macdonell recognises that sometimes the developments in the campaign meant that the paper‟s agenda “got swept along by what was happening”. Although when reading my data to form the categories I measured, globalization did not emerge as an issue, not even from the coverage of The Scotsman, the environment did and it appears that indeed this paper had the highest number of mentions of this issue in the Scottish sample (57 mentions in The Scotsman versus 26 in The Herald and 19 in The Press and Journal). Proportionally the issue got 2.9% of all the issue mentions in The Scotsman and 3% in The Press and Journal (appendix 1.2).

Apart from these issues, Macdonell and the other interviewees said that their papers did not consciously promote any specific election issue. As discussed in this section though, both The Scottish Sun and The Dundee Courier did mention certain issues more than other Scottish newspapers (for example crime in The Scottish Sun, “non-central belt” issues in The Courier).

It might be that these emphases characterize the coverage of these titles in general, outside general elections, therefore there was no conscious decision to focus on them specifically during the elections. Besides, Steve Bargeton said that The Courier has a loyal readership in its region and generally caters for their need for news that concerns their area. Or perhaps the time that passed between the two elections and the interviews meant that the journalists could not recall any specific

concerns in their papers during those elections. It is notable though that, at least in their interviews, the Scottish political editors claimed that the agenda was led by politicians. I return to this point in chapter 7, where I examine whether news actors or newspapers themselves promote issues and construct their representation.

This section has tried to identify patterns in the agendas of Scottish papers, relating them to each other and/or to the English/UK titles. I have found that the most consistent differentiations within the Scottish sample are between central and non-central belt titles and between Scottish editions of English papers and the rest of the Scottish press. Other differences concern individual titles and issues and do not form a very distinguishable pattern.

6. Conclusion

This chapter has compared the quantitative performance of the Scottish press in the public sphere around the two general elections to that of English/UK titles and has found both similarities and differences. Based on Higgins‟(2006) criteria for the quantitative evaluation of election coverage, the English/UK sample has a stronger contribution to the electoral public sphere only in terms of the amount of coverage it dedicates to the election. The criteria which look at the balance of evaluative and informative content, the distribution of coverage in time and the positioning of election items in the front part of the paper did not reveal consistent differences between Scottish and English/UK papers.

More similarities were found in the prominence of issues mentioned by the Scottish and English/UK newspapers. The small differences identified might reflect different considerations in the Scottish coverage – for example the relatively reduced emphasis on issues such as immigration and Britain‟s relation with the EU might reflect a more tolerant approach in Scottish papers on these issues, though qualitative analysis would be needed to validate such a speculation.

However this pattern of similarity, which might suggest that English/UK papers set the Scottish papers‟ agenda, seems certainly more complicated than this and is likely to be the result of a variety of factors. According to the Scottish political editors interviewed, devolution introduced a number of challenges in the coverage of general elections regarding both the significance of these elections and the balance between covering reserved and devolved issues. Scottish political parties had a significant role in the process, pushing issues on to the agenda and organising the communication with Scottish journalists on behalf of their Westminster counterparts. Scottish newspapers had to learn to balance their coverage in a new political environment, trying to change their working practices and perspectives to respond fully to the devolved context, and perhaps these external and internal factors partly influenced their coverage of these two elections. Whether the time that passed since the early years of devolution might affect the trends identified here during the next general election remains to be seen.

Moreover, even though in quantitative terms the English/UK and Scottish agenda appear similar, the qualitative analysis undertaken in the following chapters reveals differences. For example, despite the high prominence of the Iraq issue in Scottish

titles, it is constructed differently compared to English/UK newspapers with regard to its relevance for a Scottish readership, as will be argued in chapter 6.

Within the Scottish sample, the two central belt quality papers appear very similar to each other. Even though The Scotsman shows more interest than The Herald in issues which have to do with the devolution settlement, overall the two titles follow a similar agenda and they both drop their coverage significantly in 2005, perhaps in response to the increasing significance of Scottish affairs, as would be expected from titles that are marketed as Scottish national newspapers.

This decline however seems to affect the pattern of coverage in the Scottish press:

the title with the most election coverage in 2005 is not a quality paper as might be expected but a middle-market title. Although it might seem surprising that the Scottish Daily Mail emerges as the newspaper with the highest degree of attention to the election in the Scottish sample in 2005, this results not from a radical change in the quantity of its coverage from 2001 but from the substantially decreased coverage in the Scottish quality titles.

Although The Daily Record occasionally shows interest in issues which are prominent in other popular titles and especially The Scottish Sun, its major competitor in its market section, it is hard to identify consistent trends in the agenda of popular or quality titles, which hold for both newspaper samples or for both election years.

The most systematic distinctions can be found between newspapers produced in the central belt and more northern regions as well as between indigenous Scottish titles and Scottish editions of English newspapers. This finding is significant because it shows that there is an opportunity for individual Scottish titles to promote the issue agenda that they consider important. Non-central belt titles mentioned more often issues which appear to have a geographical significance, while Scottish editions of English papers remained close to the agenda of their mother editions. However, with few exceptions, these differences are not in the most mentioned election issues.

Even though fuel prices are prominent in The Press and Journal, they do not appear among this paper‟s top two issues. In most Scottish titles, reserved issues like the Iraq war and taxation feature very prominently in the election debate.

On the other hand of course, the two editions of The Sun are the only papers in 2001 which have the Euro among their top two mentioned issues and if one is to look at the top five instead of the top two issues, more such “exceptions” will be found in individual titles. The conclusion here is that although generally consistent, neither the English/UK nor the Scottish coverage is internally homogeneous.

The evidence in this chapter seems to suggest that after devolution attention has not completely shifted away from Westminster elections in the Scottish press, neither is the election agenda in Scotland completely different to that in England. On the contrary, overall the coverage appears very similar on both sides of the border.

However there are signs of divergence in the Scottish coverage: a decline in the coverage of the “national” Scottish quality titles in 2005, the emergence of issues that have to do specifically with Scotland (fiscal autonomy, devolution and the

abolition of Scottish regiments appear in the Scottish coverage even though they are not among the top issues) as well as more attention to issues of regional relevance within Scotland. These might be seen as differentiating the mediated debate and setting the performance of Scottish newspapers apart from that of the English/UK press.

6. The construction of national identity in the coverage of