Thread by @Richard_Ampere

Thread: How are UK online news outlets covering #Brexit in 2018? An analysis, with data and charts!

Round 1: **DExEU vs Shadow DExEU**

Like the piece on referendum overspend, all conducted in a personal capacity. I mean, how else would I spend my weekends and evenings...

1/

This is intended to be the first of a selection of pieces of analysis quantifying different aspects of #Brexit coverage in UK news media, so I’ll be covering different angles in future threads.

See appendix for methodology. 2/

Firstly, looking at 2000 #Brexit news headlines from 9 news outlets since Jan 18, I’ve searched for each of the current and previous @Conservatives DExEU ministers and their @UKLabour shadow counterparts. 3/

David Davis does best, with 34 headlines referencing him (largely the Mail and Sun), to Dominic Raab’s 12. Keir Starmer achieved just 4 – in the BBC, Guardian and Independent only. 4/

Some of Raab’s headlines were likely due to his brand new appointment in July, but he has already clocked up more headlines than the entire Shadow DExEU team has since Jan this year. 5/

Next, who’s referenced in the body of the items? Well, David Davis again. Across a subset of 1300 news items from 6 sites, David Davis is referenced in 292 (over a fifth of pieces), and Dominic Raab in 113 (8%). 6/

Keir Starmer beats Steve Baker, but is the only Shadow DExEU representative with any significant coverage. And at an average of 4% of items, coverage isn't particularly wide. 7/

In terms of news outlets, Dominic Raab is covered at fairly similar rates across sites, but David Davis has peaks in the Mail – 30% of Mail Online items have some reference to David Davis. Keir Starmer has low coverage, but the Guardian and BBC give slightly more prominence. 8/

@BuzzFeedNews just seems to enjoy passing references to Steve Baker in many of its Brexit pieces… 9/

So what does this mean? Inevitably, a skew favouring DExEU could be perceived as a bias, however, the fact that this persists across outlets indicates that it is an issue more with communication and public profile of the Shadow DExEU team than with news outlets themselves. 10/

Obviously the angle that articles take will differ quite significant across news outlets, but what it does mean is that the @Conservatives DExEU team has been leading the news agenda across the board, while @UKLabour has failed to engage even with friendly sites. 11/

Next time: The big guns – how frequently are Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and other prominent politicians being cited, and what does this mean? 12/

Appendix 1:

How: I generated a list of nearly 2000 headlines using Google’s site search feature (looking for ‘Brexit’) restricted to items published since Jan 1 2018. For 1300 of these items (those not behind a paywall), I’ve assessed the article contents for keywords.

Appendix 2:

I’ve done my best to remove errant links/references to other items on each site from the text analysed, as this risks over-representing certain terms on certain sites. This does mean there is a margin of error in this analysis.

Appendix 3:

This isn’t a 100% exhaustive list of all items published by each news outlet on Brexit, but it’s a good sample, representing at least 1 per day for most of the major news sites.

Appendix 4:

Each article is only counted once per politician - regardless of how many times they are referenced in that article. I took into account the fact that full names might not be used in articles.