New data show the media really are ignoring the Greens
Posted in Climate Sock, Media on October 25th, 2014 by Leo – 2 CommentsGreen supporters often say their party is ignored by the media. The proposal to exclude Natalie Bennett from the leaders’ debates triggered the latest protests, but this is a long-running argument.
In particular, Greens point to the coverage that Ukip get, which they say is much more than the Greens get, and unfairly so.
I’ve never been quite convinced by this. Ukip have at least twice the popular support of the Greens, so it seems natural that they should get more coverage.
But now I’ve measured how much coverage each party gets, I’ve realised I was wrong. Even after factoring in their relative levels of popular support, Ukip get several times more coverage than the Greens.
More coverage than the Greens, and growing
I’ve searched for how many times Ukip and the Green Party were mentioned by UK national newspapers each month since January 2012* – and compared it with the voting intent for both parties in the Ipsos Mori monthly political monitor.
The dominance of Ukip coverage (purple bars), relative to the Greens (green bars) is striking:
What we really want to know, though, is how proportionate the coverage is to each party’s popular support.
Dividing the number of mentions by the parties’ poll ratings gives a sort of conversion score: how many articles they get for each percentage point of popular support they have.
Using this we see that Ukip get far more coverage relative to their support than the Greens do. This chart divides the number of media mentions by each party’s poll score at the time – so if their coverage was proportionate to their support, the lines would be the same height.
It’s interesting to look at this in three distinct phases.