CODING MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE 2026 ELECTION
Melody House and Karen Boyle
In the lead up to the 2026 General Election, a team of researchers at the University of Strathclyde[i] set out to investigate the representation of women of colour in Scottish news media for Pass the Mic, with funding awarded by the FLAX Foundation and the Equal Media and Culture Centre. This study builds on three prior studies investigating women of colour in Scotland’s news media in 2020, in the run up to the Scottish Parliamentary elections in 2021 and the run up to the UK General Election in 2024. As in the 2021 and 2024 studies, we 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. However, whereas in previous studies we focused on all news stories appearing in the election period, our 2026 study is more modest in scope, focusing specifically on election coverage in the four weeks from 10 April to election day on 7 May across print and broadcast media. A total of 1505 stories were coded: 121 on television and 1384 from newspapers (Table 1).
Table 1: News media sample, Friday 10 April – Thursday 7 May, 2026
| Television | Total number of stories | Newspapers Sister Sunday publications also included | Total number of stories |
| Reporting Scotland (BBC1 Scotland) | 52 | Herald | 202 |
| STV News | 31 | Scotsman | 224 |
| Reporting Scotland News At Seven (BBC Scotland) | 38 | National | 291 |
| Daily Record | 160 | ||
| Scottish Sun | 231 | ||
| Scottish Daily Mail | 248 | ||
| Sunday Post | 28 |
Across all platforms, we focused on news, opinion and – in a change to our previous studies – we also included editorials. We made minor changes to the coding guide we used for the 2024 General Election, primarily to enable us to identify stories on immigration. Our study is centrally concerned with who makes the news both as journalists and as people in news stories. Across our sample, we coded 1654 journalists or anchors and 6240 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 whether or not they were photographed or directly quoted. 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.
[i] The research team was led by Dr Melody House who designed the study along with Professor Karen Boyle and Talat Yaqoob from Pass the Mic. The wider team of coders were Abeera Baig, Chiemela Immaculata Azubuike, Buster Adams, Wajeeha Arif and Annamaria De Felice.