Fact-checking GE2019 compared to fact-checking GE2017

Public debate in the last two general elections saw significant input from UK fact-checkers. Jen Birks examines the role of fact-checking journalism during the 2017 and 2019 campaigns, and identifies differences in approaches as well as in the policy issues covered

Introducing the Slave Next Door

Past studies have indicated that the British public consider human trafficking to be remote from their personal experiences. However, an increase in local press reporting, alongside the emergence of locally co-ordinated anti-modern slavery campaigns, is starting to encourage communities to recognise the potential for modern slavery and human trafficking to exist in their own localities. In this article, we examine how local media and campaigns may be influencing public perceptions of modern slavery and human trafficking. We draw upon a content analysis of local newspapers to review how reports represent cases of modern slavery, and use focus group discussions to understand how local coverage modifies—and sometimes reinforces—existing views. We find that, whilst our participants were often surprised to learn that cases of modern slavery and human trafficking had been identified in their area, other stereotypical associations remained entrenched, such as a presumed connection between modern slavery and irregular migration. We also noted a reluctance to report potential cases, especially from those most sympathetic to potential victims, linked to concerns about adequacy of support for survivors and negative consequences relating to immigration. These concerns suggest that the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ to migrants may be undermining the effectiveness of ‘spot the signs’ campaigns, by discouraging individuals from reporting

'Moving life stories tell us just why politics matters’: personal narratives in tabloid anti-austerity campaigns

This article examines the use of personal narratives in two tabloid newspaper campaigns against a controversial welfare reform popularly known as the ‘bedroom tax’. It aims firstly to evaluate whether the personal narratives operate as political testimony to challenge government accounts of welfare reform and dominant stereotypes of benefits claimants, and secondly to assess the potential for and limits to progressive advocacy in popular journalism. The study uses content analysis of 473 articles over the course of a year in the Daily Mirror and Sunday People newspapers, and qualitative analysis of a sub-set of 113 articles to analyse the extent to which the campaign articles extrapolated from the personal to the general, and the role of ‘victim-witnesses’ in articulating their own subjectivity and political agency. The analysis indicates that both newspapers allowed affected individuals to express their own subjectivity to challenge stereotypes, but it was civil society organisations and opinion columnists who most explicitly extrapolated from the personal to the political. Collectively organised benefits claimants were rarely quoted, and there was some evidence of ventriloquization of the editorial voice in the political criticisms of victim-witnesses. However, a campaigning columnist in the Mirror more actively empowered some of those affected to speak directly to politicians. This indicates the value of campaigning journalism when it is truly engaged in solidarity with those affected, rather than instrumentalising victim-witnesses to further the newspapers’ campaign goals

Press protest and publics: the agency of publics in newspaper campaigns

Campaign advocacy is a common but rarely researched practice in British tabloid journalism. Newspaper campaigns give an account of ‘public opinion’ to politicians, make explicit claims to speak for ‘the public’ and authentically represent them, and also address readers in an unconventional way in order to recruit their support. This article therefore examines the effect to which agency is attributed to readers and other publics in two such campaigns, and argues that publics were portrayed as active only in relation to the newspaper’s activity, and as primarily as reacting emotionally to the problem. The campaigning press promote themselves commercially and politically as quasi-representatives who challenge distant and ‘out of touch’ political representatives with the populist impulses of ‘public’ demands, but without enhancing the democratic process, or publics’ position within it

The democratic role of campaign journalism: partisan representation and public participation

Campaign journalism is a distinctive but under-researched form of editorialised news reporting that aims to influence politicians rather than inform voters. In this it diverges from liberal norms of social responsibility, but instead campaigning newspapers make claims to represent the interests or opinions of publics such as their readers or groups affected by the issue. This could be understood as democratically valid in relation to alternative models such as participatory or corporatist democracy. This essay examines journalists’ understanding of the identity and views of these publics, and how their professional norms are operationalised in their journalistic practice in relation to five case studies in the Scottish press. The campaigns are analysed in terms of four normative criteria associated with corporatist and participatory democracy: firstly, the extent to which subjective advocacy is combined with objectivity and accuracy; secondly, the extent to which civic society organisations are accorded access; thirdly, whether the disadvantage of resource-poor groups in society is compensated for; and finally, to what extent the mobilisation of public support for the campaigns aims to encourage an active citizenry

Tax avoidance as an anti-austerity issue: the progress of a protest issue through the public sphere

Theorists of left and right agree that periods of crisis are fertile times at which to precipitate change. However, protesters on the periphery of the public sphere must overcome barriers, or what Habermas called ‘sluice gates’, if their discourse is to be publicly and politically influential. This study of newspaper discourse and activity in parliament and the public sphere over a six year period takes tax justice campaigning in the UK as a case study, and in particular protest group UK Uncut’s attempt to mobilize opposition to austerity by advocating a crackdown on tax avoidance as an alternative to cuts. It finds that whilst UK Uncut successfully amplified existing arguments previously raised by experts, trade unions and the left-leaning press, austerity barely figured in debate about tax avoidance once it was picked up by other actors in the public sphere on the other side of the 'sluice gates'. The reasons for this were structural and discursive, related to the role and interests of receptive actors at the institutional centre of the public sphere, and their ability, along with the conservative press, to transform the moral framing of tax avoidance from the injustice of making the poor pay for the financial crisis through cuts, into the 'unfairness' of middle class earners paying higher taxes than wealthier individuals and corporations. The latter reifies the 'hardworking taxpayer', and implies a more instrumental and clientalistic relationship to the state, and an essentially neoliberal sense of fairness. Where neoliberal ideology was challenged, it was in social conservative terms – nationalist opposition to globalisation, framing multinational corporations as a threat to the domestic high street – rather than protesters’ social democratic challenge to market power and social injustice. This indicates how a progressive message from the periphery can be co-opted into the currently resurgent right-wing populism

The politics of protest in newspaper campaigns: dissent, populism and the rhetoric of authenticity

Newspaper campaigns embody newspaper’ most emphatic claims to speak for ‘the people’, and as such are generally regarded as populist. However, they can be oppositional, engaging in dissent of one sort or another, and often assume a certain amount of political engagement with that dissent on the part of the audience. This article examines the potential of newspaper camapigns to facilitate the political engagement of citizens through the politics of protest. It draws on qualitative analysis of seven campaigns that ran in the Scottish press between 2000 and 2005, and semi-structured interviews with relevant journalists. The distinction between legitimate protest and manipulative populism is made in terms of: (a) the rhetoric and strategies of political representation, participation and influence and (b) the construction of political legitimacy in terms of the public interest and the moral authority of the ‘victim’. It is argued that populist impulses dominate, driving a tendency to use discourses of emotional authenticity and offence to legitimise demands for a plebiscitary response to popular of ‘victim’ preference and to close down controversy and debate, with the principal objective marketing the newspaper as an influential community champion

Design and construction of the MicroBooNE detector

This paper describes the design and construction of the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber and associated systems. MicroBooNE is the first phase of the Short Baseline Neutrino program, located at Fermilab, and will utilize the capabilities of liquid argon detectors to examine a rich assortment of physics topics. In this document details of design specifications, assembly procedures, and acceptance tests are reported