Television and Press Coverage of the 1997 British General Election

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The aims and objectives of the project were : to assess the impact of structural change in media coverage of politics through a content analysis of main evening television news programmes and national newspapers in the run-up to and during the four week general election campaign; to examine the nature and extent of change since the 1992 election in the national newspapers and television news and to compare this news with other countries, based on comparable studies in Germany (1990, 1994), Spain (1993 and forthcoming) and the USA (1992, 1996); to explore the dynamics and outcomes of the agenda setting battle at the next general election; to address questions of media effects, via a triangulated collaborative venture involving the ESRC-funded CREST panel survey and the proposed experimental study of television news by David Sanders and Pippa Norris.Main Topics:The dataset includes content of television and press news, coded according to pre-determined variables. The coverage was as follows : content of TV news coverage Mondays to Fridays, 1st-30th April 1997 (part of the general election campaign period) in BBC 'Nine O'Clock News', ITV 'News at Ten', Sky News 10pm news hour; content of stories originating on press front pages Mondays to Fridays from 1st April to the 1st May 1997 General Election in six newspapers - 'The Sun', 'The Mirror', 'Daily Mail', 'The Independent', 'The Guardian' and 'The Times'; content of TV news coverage Mondays to Fridays 27th September-18th October 1996 (i.e. from a comparable non-campaign period) in BBC 'Nine O'Clock News', ITV 'News at Ten' and Sky News 10pm news hour (latter for four days only); content of TV news coverage Mondays to Fridays 19th April-10th May 1996 (i.e. from a comparable non-campaign period) in BBC 'Nine O'Clock News', ITV 'News at Ten'