Identifying Informational Opportunities in Political Responsibility Reporting: A Study of Television News Coverage During the Coronavirus Pandemic in the UK's Devolved System

Abstract

How the news media report who’s responsible for political decisions is fundamental to an informed citizenry. Our study develops a new way of examining political responsibility coverage by drawing on the concept of informational opportunities in order to explore how television news could enhance audience understanding. We examine how television news reported who was responsible for making policies across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on a content analysis study of five UK television news bulletins (N = 181), we found that reporting did not regularly attribute political responsibility to all four governments of the UK at the start of the pandemic. Once the nations began to adopt different lockdown measures the clarity of reporting legislative decisions improved, but there were still missed opportunities to clarify which government was responsible for specific policies. By way of conclusion, we argue that scholars examining how the media report political responsibility need to find creative ways of theorising and empirically studying informational opportunities in order to enhance public understanding.