Despite the difference in the overall amount of coverage, the Scottish and English/UK samples appear quite similar with regard to the other criteria set by Higgins (2006) and outlined in the introduction of this chapter.
In both samples, the majority of the coverage consisted of news items. As discussed in chapter 4, I use the term “news” to refer to predominantly informative content and “opinion” to refer to evaluative content, even though news items are not necessarily opinion-free. Table 5 shows the distribution of informative (news) and evaluative (signed opinion items, editorials, readers‟ letters) articles in each sample.
Table 5. Distribution of coverage in the Scottish and English/UK sample (percentages refer to the proportion of the overall coverage in each sample)
Informative coverage
Evaluative Coverage 2001
News Signed opinion Editorial Letters
Scottish titles 2081 (65.5%) 333 (10.5%) 190 (6%) 574 (18%) specific issue. What appears certain though is that newspapers on both sides of the border offer their readers very similar proportions of information and advice regarding the election. The proportion of advice offered to readers through opinion coverage has been linked with a greater contribution to public debate (Higgins, 2006), however here the performance of the two samples appears equal.
Similarly, there are few differences in the distribution of the coverage across the campaign. In 2001, the greatest number of news items is found in the final week of the campaign in both samples (tables 6 and 7). The three types of opinion coverage reach their peak in the final week in the English/UK sample (although the number of editorials is equally high in week 2) and in the second week in the Scottish sample. By increasing both news and opinion coverage before the time of the vote,
the English/UK titles can be seen as offering information and advice that will help readers make an informed choice just before the election, as discussed earlier.
The same data may also be interpreted in terms of the perceived newsworthiness of the election in each sample over time. It would be expected that as the day of the election - which can be seen as the “dramatic climax” of the campaign - approaches it would become more prominent in the coverage of the media (Galtung and Ruge, 1965). This seems to be the case in both samples, as they both increase their informative coverage. However, in addition to that, the English/UK sample also increases its evaluative coverage, demonstrating an additional interest in debating issues but perhaps also in influencing the way readers will vote.
Table 6. 2001: Distribution of articles over the campaign – Scottish titles
423
Table 7. 2001: Distribution of articles over time – English/UK titles interpret in relation to the samples‟ performance in the election.
Table 8. 2005: Distribution of articles over time – Scottish titles
313
Table 9. 2005: Distribution of articles over time – English/UK titles nearer the front of the paper, and especially on the front page, has been suggested as one way in which newspapers might signal the prominence they give to an issue (Higgins, 2006). The average2 number of articles that appeared in the first three pages in the Scottish and English/UK sample is shown in tables 10 and 11.
Table 10. 2001: Position of articles (average number of articles)
24 23
2 Because the Scottish sample has more titles than the English/UK sample, tables 10 and 11 show the average number of articles appearing on the first three pages per newspaper in each sample.
Table 11. 2005: Position of articles (average number of articles) the large amount of data in the corpus, tables 10 and 11 show a similar amount of coverage on the front page in English/UK and Scottish newspapers, especially in 2001. Given that the front page is conventionally seen as a particularly prominent page in a newspaper (Hutt and James, 1989:78), it appears that the two newspaper samples gave equally this prominent position to articles related to the election. In 2005, the English/UK titles have on average a third more articles on the front page than the Scottish sample which might reflect the gradual decline of interest in Westminster elections, discussed by Macdonell in the previous section.
The coverage on page 3 also appears similar in the two samples, however the Scottish sample has consistently less election coverage on page 2. This might have to do with the various titles‟ policies in placing election material on a specific page within the paper. Higgins‟ study (2006) mapped out the distribution of the coverage across all pages and found systematic differences between his two samples in the number of articles placed in the front part of the newspaper. Although my study
looked only at the first three pages, its findings do not seem to suggest a similarly systematic difference.
This section has discussed that although Scottish titles dedicate less coverage to the two elections, they offer a similar proportion of information and advice to the English/UK sample. In 2001 they concentrate their evaluative material earlier in the campaign, while English/UK papers offer more evaluation and advice closer to the day of the election, when it might have more immediate influence on voters‟
decisions. In 2005 however, English/UK and Scottish papers are more similar in the distribution of coverage across the duration of the campaign. The amount of front-page coverage seems to be slightly higher in the English/UK titles, however the findings do not appear to suggest a marked divergence. Apart from the difference in the overall amount of coverage, the other differences between the samples do not seem to evidence a more distinctive contribution to debate in the public sphere.