Melody House, Karen Boyle, Talat Yaqoob
In the lead up to the 2024 General Election, a team of researchers at the University of Strathclyde[1] set out to investigate the representation of women of colour in Scottish news media for Pass the Mic with funding from the Equal Media and Culture Centre. This study builds on two prior studies investigating women of colour in Scotland’s news media in 2020 and in the run up to the Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2021.
In the 2020 study, one of our key findings was that women of colour were concentrated in non-Scottish stories. As a result, in our Scottish election study in 2021, we deliberately focused on stories with a Scottish angle as these are the stories over which Pass the Mic’s media partners in Scotland have most control. We have replicated this Scottish focus in the 2024 study.
The General Election study represents our largest sample to date, investigating media coverage in the four weeks from June 7 to election day on July 4, covering the same print, broadcast and twitter accounts as our previous studies (Table 1) – though, unlike the earlier studies, this study does not include web content.[2] A total of 7836stories were included: 515 on television; 3376 from newspapers;[3] and 3945 from X.
Table 1: News media sample, Friday June 7 – Thursday July 4, 2024
| Television (all stories with a Scottish angle) | Newspapers (top 20 stories with a Scottish angle) Sister Sunday publications also included | X (formerly Twitter) (25 stories) |
| Reporting Scotland | Herald | @HeraldScotland |
| STV News | Scotsman | @TheScotsman |
| The Nine/ The Seven | National | @ScotNational/ @SunScotNational |
| Daily Record | @Daily_Record | |
| Scottish Sun | @ScottishSun | |
| Scottish Daily Mail | @BBCScotlandNews | |
| Sunday Post | @STVNews |
Across all platforms, we focused on news and opinion, but did not include editorials, advertising or sports stories unless these were presented as news, i.e. within the main news bulletin, or on the front pages of a newspaper. We made minor changes to the coding guide developed for the 2020 study in order to enable us to better capture the nuances of General Election coverage in a Scottish context. Election stories made up 28.6% of all stories in the sample and we will focus on these specifically in a later blog. We realised at the beginning of the study that three big non-election stories might have a disproportionate impact on our findings: the first three nights of Taylor Swift’s UK tour in Edinburgh (in week 1 of our study); Scotland men’s team’s performance in the Euros (from their first game on June 13 to their exit on June 23); and the ongoing war in Gaza. Taylor Swift was the focus of 3.2% of all stories and the Euros 9.3%. There was very little coverage relating to Gaza with any kind of Scottish angle (n=60, 0.8% of all stories).
Our study is centrally concerned with who makes the news both as journalists and as people in news stories. Across our sample, we coded 8056 journalists or anchors[4] and 17,920 people appearing in these stories.
For each person, we gathered additional information. For both journalists and people in the news we wanted to know their gender and whether or not they were a person of colour: in this, we followed the procedures laid out for our 2020 study. For people in the news, we additionally coded their occupation and function in the story (using categories adapted from the Global Media Monitoring Project), and noted whether or not they were photographed or directly quoted. For all election stories, we also noted whether people in the news were party leaders (UK or Scotland) and/or candidates (in Scotland or other parts of UK) and noted party affiliations.
If you want to read more about what we coded, you can access our methodology guide with the full details used by all coders here. In the next couple of blogs we will outline the key findings – starting with the sample as a whole before drilling down into election stories.
[1] The research team was led by Professor Karen Boyle and Research Assistant Melody House who designed the study along with Talat Yaqoob from Pass the Mic. The wider research team were: Dr Fiona McKay, Dr Michael Higgins and coders Caroline Darke, Emma Flynn, Marie McDermott and Elisa Sajed.
[2] This was an issue of capacity and – given the significant repetition across platforms – we decided it was more beneficial to use our resources to capture coverage over a longer period of time.
[3] Not all of the Scottish editions of the London-based papers reached 20 stories with a Scottish angle each day.
[4] In a change to our previous study, here we only coded anchors once per broadcast rather than in relation to each story they fronted.