Using text analytics to analyse the BBC's Budget coverage
I used data science techniques to analyse the media and political discourse around the recent Budget, here's what I found.
Pictured below is a word cloud of the most frequently used words during approximately six hours of BBC news coverage of the recent Budget. *
The corpus amounts to around 24,000 words and was harvested in the days before and during the Budget on 15 March. The corpus was cleaned, tokenised and the highest frequency words ranked in a Document Term Matrix (A DTM is basically a spreadsheet that makes it possible to rank words by their frequency of use). It gives an insight into the most salient words and issues that occurred.
From the word cloud it’s clear that “People”, “Tax” and “Work” were among the most salient words. But on their own they don’t tell us much about the budget discourse or the meaning around those words. So in addition we can use a technique called Key Words In Context (KWIC) to gather more qualitative insight.
KWIC allows us to search the corpus for high salience words like “people” in context. For example, a 10-word search window provides context from the 10 words preceding “People” and the 10 words after it. This combination of “bag of words” and “KWIC” allows us to zoom in and out of the corpus with ease, giving a mix of quantitative and qualitative tools to do text analysis quickly and precisely.
Below is a basic flow chart of the method as I applied it to the BBC’s budget coverage.
“People” and “work”
Whether analysing media coverage, focus group transcripts or testing messages, “people” is often a very high salience word we use when talking about politics (this is my own anecdotal observation). And the word cloud above shows that “work” was the term most frequently associated with “people” in the corpus.
It’s good to look deeper into the meaning that surrounds words and KWIC analysis quickly revealed two politically interesting ways in which “people” and “work” were used in the corpus.
The phrase “back to work” emerged almost exclusively as one associated with Conservative Party politicians. Indeed, the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was very effective at framing the Budget as a “back to work” budget.
By contrast, Labour MPs used the term “working people” in a specific way, as a kind of social persona they were keen to signal their alignment with. This was most common in the rhetoric of Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves MP, and the Labour leader, Keir Starmer MP.
“Parents” were clearly part of the discourse too, but what’s also interesting about a discourse like this, is the words and issues that are missing. In this case the other personas of “people”. For example, “children” were salient but only insofar as they were framed as the offspring of people the government wants back in work: “parents”. By contrast it was interesting that “nurses” or “teachers” or other pubic service personas one might associate with the word “people” were low salience.
Metaphors and tropes about work
Further digging using KWIC analysis revealed a metaphor about “barriers” to work that was used regularly by the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. He talked about “breaking down barriers that stop people working,” and framed much of his budget in terms of his mission to remove these barriers.
He talked of:
“.... breaking down barriers that stop people working,”
The same “barrier” metaphor was used by the Institute of Directors’ Chief Economist, Kitty Ussher.
In a pre-Budget interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme she said:
“everyone who feels there’s some sort of barrier preventing them from working … have that barrier removed and to perhaps think differently about how they can offer their services to the work place.”
Of lower salience, but really worth noting was Mr Hunt’s insistence in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuennesberg that work is a “Conservative virtue”. In his budget speech the Chancellor went further and talked about “dependency” with a strong implication that social security makes people “dependent”. (It’s notable that this ideological passage was an ad libbed addition and isn’t recorded in the Government’s official transcript). Hunt’s argument has its roots in the trope of “jeopardy” that’s popular among conservatives. This is the idea that social security leads people to become dependent and that dependency jeopardises individual freedom.
While Mr Hunt talked at length of the barriers to work that people living with disability face, there was no acknowledgement of the extent to which chronic poor health or disability might be the real barriers to work. He also added that “sanctions” (literally removing money from unemployed or sick people) would be one of his ways of removing barriers. This is consistent with the conservative trope of jeopardy since for a conservative, social security is a barrier to freedom. By Hunt’s logic, benefit sanctions remove that barrier (of security) thus making people freer.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, he said:
“Conservatives believe work is a virtue. We agree with the road haulage king, Eddie Stobart, who says the only place that success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
During his Budget speech he added:
“Independence is always better than dependence… which is why a Conservative government believes those who can work should work… so [benefit] sanctions can also be applied more rigorously to those who fail to meet strict work search requirements or refuse to take a job.”
The BBC’s “Westminster Village” obsession meant a “tax cuts” framing dominated
In the corpus “tax” is the fourth most salient word, the highest ranked policy word throughout. KWIC analysis revealed some other qualitative findings.
Aside from “corporation”, “tax” and “cut” were pretty much inseparable in the discourse. But what was also revealing was the role that BBC journalists played in setting up a “tax cuts” discourse.
The corpus is full of instances of BBC journalists posing questions to Conservative MPs about tax cuts, for example:
“when are you going to make them [Conservative MPs] happy and cut taxes?” (Laura Kuenssberg to Jermy Hunt MP), or
“But what also other people want in your party and as we've just heard from your colleague Simon Clarke, they think that cutting tax would be the best way to go.” (Laura Kuenssberg, BBC).
“Hunt will be resisting pressure from some in his party for tax cuts…” (Simon Jack, BBC).
“those [Conservative MPs] asking for tax cuts” or “those [Conservative MPs] expecting tax cuts,” and “in the Autumn statement I cut business taxes… Conservatives cut taxes.” (Jeremy Hunt).
The high salience of Conservative Party MPs’ discussion of “tax cuts” was compounded by an absence of any positive framings of tax. Instead metaphors about a tax “burden” and tax “reliefs” appeared throughout the corpus, for example:
“we will always look to reduce the tax burden.” (Jeremy Hunt MP).
“The chancellor hopes to lessen the burden of the corporation tax rise,” (Faisal Islam, BBC Economics Editor).
When “higher” tax was discussed in the corpus, it was usually in order to frame a negative argument about taxation.
The tax cut discourse identified in the corpus tends to amplify arguments taking place between Conservative Party politicians in and around Westminster. Tax cuts are assumed to be what Conservatives want and the fact that the Conservative Party has been overseeing tax rises is therefore a newsworthy line of questioning for journalists.
This tax cut framing is a really good example of how “Westminster narratives” dominate economic stories at the BBC, something they’ve even acknowledged themselves.
Show me the money
“Pay” ranked 38 in terms of frequency of use while “wage” was not even within the top 200 most frequently used words in the corpus. The word “cost” (as in “cost of living”) ranked 34.
KWIC analysis found 20 different uses of the term “cost of living crisis” within the corpus, overwhelmingly by Labour politicians and the media.
Within the corpus there were many instances of the term “pay” being used as a verb. Labour politicians used it to frame a story about working people being made to “pay for” the cost of living crisis or "pay the price of" Conservative government failure.
But pay as a verb was much more salient in the corpus than pay in terms of wages or income. This is surprising (and probably an anomaly) given the salience of the cost of living crisis and the workplace strikes that have taken place recently in the UK.
The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, mentioned the cost of living once in his budget speech and there was only one instance in the corpus of a Conservative MP talking about pay as wages. Given the ongoing context of a cost of living crisis and wage suppression, it’s notable how absent pay in terms of wages was.
In summary
Issue salience
Within this corpus of BBC media coverage of the budget. “Tax”, “work”, “growth” etc were salient, whereas “wages”, “cost of living”, and public services like the NHS were low salience or missing altogether.
Framing
The Conservatives’ used a “back to work” message and a “barriers to work” metaphor to frame the budget. This may signify something important about how social security policy changes might be framed in future. The Chancellor’s ideological comments about work being a virtue and social security being a dependency barrier to work signal the Conservative’s evergreen use of the jeopardy trope.
There was a notable difference between the Conservatives’ “back to work” framing that centred on people who are out of work and Labour’s framing of people who are already in work that they want to align with (I suspect this is an anomaly particular to this corpus. In other contexts I suspect Labour have been much more vocal about back to work policies).
It was notable that in speaking of “barriers” to work there was no mention of the health barriers that people face. This is a surprise given the nature of the covid pandemic and its negative impact in terms of the chronic poor health of many workers. Instead the barriers to work were overwhelmingly framed in terms of financial and social security ones.
Although less salient, the Chancellor made reference to work as a conservative “virtue” while also referencing the idea that social security leads to “dependency”. These are long-standing conservative tropes.
Tax cuts
The BBC’s tendency to focus on the parliamentary Conservative Party’s disagreements about tax led to a discussion that was very narrowly defined and overwhelmingly negative about taxation more generally.
This resulted in a debate that was overwhelmingly dominated by the obsession of a small, powerful yet unrepresentative group of people in Westminster. Yet polling shows that even Conservative voters (particularly older ones) are not nearly as supportive of tax cuts as Conservative Party members and MPs. In fact, the public at large are broadly in favour of higher taxes, especially if they are linked to public service investment.
Tax is a contentious issue, but no space was given in the corpus to the positive role it plays in tackling problems we can only solve together. Instead of framing tax as a solution to those problems, it was entirely normal for tax to be framed in the corpus as a “burden.” In the absence of a positive framing of tax, there is a danger that debates about tax policy become narrowly focussed on the ideological whims of a small, unrepresentative group of low tax, small state politicians.
The BBC programmes studied in this corpus were: BBC1’s pre-Budget Sunday with Laura Kuennsberg, BBC Radio 4s Today Programme Budget coverage and BBC Politics Live’s live Budget Day broadcast.