A Crisis in Democracy? Brexit and the 2017 General Election in an age of PostTruth

Abstract

A Crisis in Democracy? Brexit and the 2017 General Election in an age of PostTruth The newspaper media of the United Kingdom has, in the past, been seen to have been an influential source in guiding and reflecting the views of voters on salient political issues of the day. With the advent of an age of post-truth and the increasing scepticism of objective facts and statistics in many quarters, the aim of this research has been to see how media portrayals of issues and voters were expressed in the media in comparison to the opinions of those who voted for the victorious side in those debates. Primarily, it seeks to answer the question “Do media portrayals of sides in a debate exaggerate political conflict and do research participants think that they exacerbate it?” Through the use of discourse network analysis, a broad picture of the relevant discourse was produced followed by testing the salience of these discourses (using Q-Sort methodology and a short qualitative questionnaire) amongst two separate groups of 15 university attending Leave voters and 15 university attending Conservative voters to gather their opinions on the key topics in the discourse. By researching the issue, it became evident that whilst discourses were more complex than might first have been assumed (particularly in the case of the 2017 General Election), there was a large variety of opinions expressed by participants with regards to the issues discussed that were not adequately reflected in the press. Participants felt, in general, that the discourses around both the Brexit Referendum and the 2017 General Election had both become too personally focused in attacks and more polarised than was warranted.