ABSTRACT
Negative campaigning, i.e., attacking the political opponent to decrease the opponent’s electoral attractiveness, is a frequently used electoral strategy, including by political parties in the UK. Research on negative campaigning does not often study uncontrolled communication means, such as newspapers and television news. However, how the media report the campaign impacts voters’ perceptions of the campaign, including the tone of the campaign. Voters’ perceptions of parties’ campaign tone can affect their party preferences, vote choice, participation, and trust in politics. Studying how the media report negative campaigning is of importance as the media are often criticized of painting a distorted picture of reality by over-representing negative campaigning and thereby amplifying the negative effects of negative campaigning. This chapter examines how the print media reported negative campaigning by political parties in the 2015 UK general election. The results show that different newspapers made different selections of which positive and negative campaign statements to report. This selection reflected in general the partisan nature of the newspaper. The data show a clear selection bias in the coverage of negative campaigning; newspapers tend to cover both more attacks as well as self-praise from the party they support and attacks targeting the main opponent.
