ABSTRACT

The general election of 2001 came at the end of four years of Labour government, concluding a political cycle in which several issues regarding the condition of the political public sphere in Britain remained prominent on the scholarly and journalistic agenda. 1 In relation to press bias, for example, there was once again a huge newspaper ‘deficit’ in the coverage of the campaign. By this I mean that only one daily newspaper (the Daily Telegraph), representing a mere 7.6 per cent of national daily circulation, supported a party (the Conservatives) which for all that its defeat was historic in scale still won 32.7 per cent of the vote. In contrast, Labour's 42 per cent share of the vote was backed up by editorial endorsements from newspapers representing some 56 per cent of national daily circulation. The fact that the press deficit in 2001, as it had in 1997, benefited a party of the left rather than the right (a reversal of the pattern observed during most of the preceding century) does not change the fact that there was a major discrepancy between the newspapers’ voting preferences and those of their readers.