How should broadcasters allocate coverage in what is effectively becoming a multi-party political system? The fracturing of the UK’s electoral landscape as seen in the 2024 election – when four parties received over 12 per cent of the vote share – has deepened over the past year and a half. The party consistently leading the polls since February only has five MPs, while the official opposition party is stuck in third – or sometimes fourth or even fifth – place.
This has proved challenging for broadcasters attempting to reflect the shifting reality while remaining fair. Put bluntly, some parties are faring better than others. The BBC and ITN came under fire in September when researchers from Cardiff University found that Reform UK was covered significantly more than the Liberal Democrats on the two broadcasters’ News At Ten bulletins between January and July this year, despite having less than a tenth of the MPs.
This led Ed Davey to accuse the BBC of “fuelling Reform’s rise by plastering Farage across our screens without providing the proper scrutiny the public deserves” – an attack that was hotly debated during the Lib Dem conference later that month. In response, ITN argued that “editorial decisions are guided by news value and public interest, with coverage reflecting electoral performance and significant political developments”, while the BBC justified its coverage of Reform by noting how the party was “setting the political weather”.
The Cardiff researchers have been busy since then. New research published today, seen exclusively by the New Statesman, looks at the coverage of all opposition parties between January and September 2025 on BBC News At Ten and ITV News at 10, for a more comprehensive picture. The study was produced by Professor Stephen Cushion and Dr Matt Walsh and their team at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University. They chose to focus on these bulletins because “they represent two of the most-watched broadcast news programmes in the UK, adding the acknowledgement that “while they are the respective channel’s flagship news programmes, they do not reflect all BBC and ITV political content across their broadcast, online and social media channels.” They focused on references to opposition parties and leaders, thus excluding Labour as the governing party.
The findings are fascinating. The headline is that Reform (five MPs) overtook the Conservatives (120 MPs) as the most referenced opposition party in September on both channels. This is not simply because Reform UK had its party conference in September. The report notes that “if coverage of Reform UK’s party conference is excluded from our analysis in September, the party still featured more in TV news (30 references) than the Conservatives (22 references)”.
Overall, “Reform UK was the dominant party in more than twice as many stories as the Conservatives and just under four times more stories than the Liberal Democrats. On the BBC News at Ten, Reform UK was the main focus in 26 items, compared to the Conservatives’ 14 items, and the Liberal Democrats’ 8 items. On ITV, Reform UK was the dominant party in 25 items, compared to the Conservatives’ 11 items, and the Liberal Democrats’ 5 items.”
The report adds that Nigel Farage was the most referenced party leader on ITV News At Ten, with 49 references compared to 33 for Kemi Badenoch and 10 for Ed Davey. On the BBC News At Ten, Kemi Badenoch was the most referenced party leader with 57 mentions, followed by Nigel Farage (47) and Ed Davey (20).
Picking up on the work of the previous report, the trend for the Lib Dems has not changed: “Reform UK received three times as many references as the Liberal Democrats on ITV News at Ten, and 1.36 times as many references as the Liberal Democrats on BBC News at Ten.”
For the Green Party, which has one fewer MP than Reform, the picture is even starker. Of the 338 references to opposition parties on BBC News At Ten, 83 went to Reform and 12 to the Greens. Of the 225 references to opposition parties on ITV News At 10, 74 went to Reform and 10 to the Greens. In other words, Reform received about seven times as much coverage as the Green Party. The report notes that when the Green Party was covered, “it was mostly in the context of the local elections and the Greens’ 2025 leadership contest. And even then, neither BBC nor ITV News at Ten covered the announcement or build-up to the Green Party leadership election in the summer. Both bulletins only covered the result on September 2.”
You could argue that the number of MPs is not the only metric by which to assign coverage. Reform is the most dominant opposition party in the media because it has been leading the polls. But even so, the coverage is disproportionate. The Greens have received very little coverage despite polling at 10 per cent for most of the year. Speak to the Lib Dems, meanwhile, and you’ll quickly hear how the goalposts appear to have changed. In 2019, there were times when the party actually led the polls, at around 23 per cent. Yet the message they say they received from broadcasters was that coverage was allocated based on MPs, and the Lib Dems only had 12. Today, Reform is getting significantly more coverage with less than half the number of MPs the Lib Dems had then.
What about the claim about “setting the political weather”, made by the BBC after the previous report was published? One argument often made about the amount of coverage Reform receives is that Reform is the party leading on the issues that most matter to the public – namely, immigration. But as the study notes, it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which concern about immigration may be driven by the media focus on this issue and coverage of Reform.
The Cardiff researchers have been tracking this too. “At the beginning of 2025, 44 per cent of people thought [immigration] was one of most important issues facing the country at this time,” they write. “By mid September – the peak of Reform UK’s coverage – this rose to a record 58 per cent of people that year who believed it was the most important issue. This is despite the fact that net migration has fallen over the last year.”
The New Statesman has previously covered research from the think tank Labour Together highlighting the challenges of finding out which issues voters care most about from polls, with the answers depending on how questions are asked and which options respondents are given to choose between.
There is also the question of whether a party should be allocated coverage on a certain issue just because it has particularly radical position on it. Reform’s immigration policy – such as its announcement in September that it would be scrapping indefinite leave to remain for foreign nationals who may have lived in the UK legally for decades – might be attention-grabbing, but it is not necessarily representative of public sentiment. The report notes the relative absence of Lib Dem coverage on immigration stories compared to Reform, Labour and the Conservatives, even though the Lib Dems have their own “distinctive if more moderate” policy on this issue.
It raises “alarm bells”, the researchers warn, of a situation where being more extreme is seen as a way to increase coverage and pragmatism is a disadvantage. They add that that “allocating airtime through the prism of news values or political agenda-setting risks undermining the impartiality of editorial judgements about which political parties and leaders should appear in political news”.
The researchers do not accuse either the BBC or ITN of breaking UK rules impartiality, noting that “broadcasters have a considerable degree of editorial flexibility in how they impartially allocate airtime to parties, rather than having to follow a strict mathematical formula to ensure balance”. However, they do highlight discrepancies in how coverage is allocated, with the latest opinion polls privileged over the number of MPs, and the subjective nature of both choosing which issues to cover and which parties to be part of that coverage.
“Broadcasters have considerable freedom to make editorial judgements about the airtime parties receive based on a range of criteria,” said Professor Stephen Cushion, who led the study. “At present they appear to be applying greater weight to trends in opinion poll data and which party is setting the political weather, rather than number of MPs a party has or its total vote share at the last general election.”
There is a strong case that Reform UK should be treated as the main opposition party, given its position in the polls this year and the way it is shaping debate in other parties (at Labour Party Conference in September, the government focused heavily on attacking Reform – while Ed Davey mentioned Nigel Farage 30 times in his own keynote speech at Lib Dem conference). It also topped the local elections in May, with an Ipsos Mori survey at the time finding “the British public is now slightly more likely to consider Reform UK (37 per cent) as the main opposition party (defined as the most likely party to lead a government in Westminster if Labour loses the next GE), ahead of the Conservatives (33 per cent)”.
All the same, parliament still matters, and in terms of scrutinising legislation, sitting on select committees, making interventions in the chamber and representing constituents, parties with dozens of MPs will by definition play a more significant role than a party with five.
Cushion acknowledged that it is “not always easy to feature all parties in TV and radio programming”, but added that “broadcasters need to be transparent to their audiences about how they allocate airtime. The public need to understand how broadcasters interpret the impartiality of political news.”
As the electoral landscape continues to split between multiple parties polling close together – made even more complicated in the devolved elections in Scotland and Wales where national parties are added to the running – the challenge for broadcasters attempting to remain impartial and consistent in allocating coverage is clear. The question of who is “leading the agenda” – and why – is a subjective one. And sometimes politics can be shaped by the media just as much as the media is by politics.
A BBC spokesperson said: “The research gives only a partial picture and the BBC Editorial Guidelines make it clear that ‘coverage for different political parties, who have varying levels of political support, requires – primarily – good and impartial editorial judgement, rather than mathematical formulae’.”
An ITV News spokesperson said: “As this study focuses purely on one bulletin in isolation it lacks the wider context of the huge amount of coverage ITV News produces across a wide variety of programmes and platforms. ITV News scrutinises all political parties and their policies, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum. Editorial decisions are guided by news value and public interest, with coverage reflecting electoral performance and significant political developments.”
[Further reading: I was at school with Nigel Farage, this is what I heard]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment