Abstract
Documenting the coverage of the campaign in traditional and social media, this chapter provides a particular focus on Sinn Féin, which ran a vigorous social media campaign and provided the narrative of ‘change’ that dominated election messaging. This chapter demonstrates that Fine Gael received a disproportionate share of coverage in the traditional media relative to its vote share, a finding explained by the party’s central role in the outgoing government. Sinn Féin was the dominant actor in social media, with the party and its senior politicians generating a much more significant footprint on Twitter and Facebook than its rivals. Electioneering—which includes party politics, election strategy and campaigning—accounted for 51 per cent of all articles in news media, while housing and the pension age were the issues covered most prominently.
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Notes
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Niamh Kirk et al., Digital News Report Ireland 2019 (DCU FuJo & Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, 2019).
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Gerry Moriarty, ‘Old question of who pulls the strings comes back to haunt Sinn Féin’, The Irish Times 6 February 2020.
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Pat Leahy, ‘Campaign strategies: how the campaign was won and lost’, pp. 75–97 in Michael Gallagher and Michael Marsh (eds), How Ireland Voted 2016: the election that nobody won (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 91.
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- 9.
The mainstream media percentages reported here include all topics for which we coded with the exception of electioneering. Thirty-six per cent of the articles addressed topics that were not covered in the exit poll and so the figures for mainstream media coverage total to 64. While this does not enable a direct comparison between the two sets of figures, it does allow us to see the degree of under- or over-representation among the topics reported.
- 10.
Miriam Lord, ‘The left woos Mary Lou as FG tries to keep Ireland’s nanas and granddads happy,’ Irish Times 22 January 2020.
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Appendix: Coding categories for dominant topic
Appendix: Coding categories for dominant topic
1. Macro economics | 13. Defence |
2. Civil rights, freedoms | 14. Culture/Media |
3. Social affairs | 15. Foreign affairs |
4. Agriculture | 16. Democracy/Governance |
5. Employment | 17. Party politics/Election strategy/Campaigning |
6. Education | 18. Other |
7. Climate/Energy | 19. Emigration |
8. Immigration | 20. Opinion polls |
9. Traffic/Transport | 21. Brexit |
10. Justice/Crime | 22. Healthcare (added during recoding) |
11. Housing | 23. Pension age (added during recoding) |
12. Micro economics (Tax/Spending) | 24. Childcare (added during recoding) |
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Park, K., Suiter, J. (2021). Media and the Election: Social and Traditional Media Narratives in the Campaign. In: Gallagher, M., Marsh, M., Reidy, T. (eds) How Ireland Voted 2020. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66405-3_6
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