-This is the result of research conducted on the coverage of Ireland’s General Election. For methodology, please scroll down to the second part-

Datamining

I collected and analysed 1,150 articles published between 03/02/16 and 25/02/16.

Research was conducted for Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and Labour for the period 03/02/2016 to 25/02/2016, across five publications: The Irish Times, RTE, Irish Examiner, The Independent and TheJournal.ie.

A Google search query was repeated for each party as follows:

allintitle:“Fine Gael” OR “Enda Kenny”

allintitle:“Fianna Fail” OR Micheal Martin”

allintitle:“Sinn Fein” OR “Gerry Adams”

allintitle:“Labour” OR “Joan Burton”

And repeated again for each publication (site:rte.ie / site:independent.ie etc)

Quantity

In that context, Sinn Fein received the lowest coverage of the four main political parties, with only 97 headlines:

When modifying the query for negative headlines and including the following terms: “IRA” OR “Special Criminal Court” OR “Gang” OR “Slab Murphy”, coverage for Sinn Fein jumps substantially to 287 headlines, a near 200% increase:

Looking at Independents, here are the headlines repartition, Renua received the most in the three week campaign:

Frequency

We can also look at the number of headlines published on any given day and compare parties, to see who received the most. Here FG and SF compared: