At the start of the week, Boris Johnson expressed his concern in an interview with the Sun’s political editor that ‘people have slightly lost their focus on the political crisis that we face. Unless we get this thing done, unless we get Brexit done, this country cannot move forward. And I think maybe we need to bring that back’.

Our findings confirm that the reduced media emphasis on Brexit noted in previous weeks continues to gather pace. Brexit is no longer the most prominent substantive policy issue in national media coverage, even though issues that are directly related to its implementation gained considerably greater prominence in the penultimate week of the campaign (e.g. the future of the NHS). Brexit has become increasingly part of the background context of the campaign rather than its focal point.

We also compare the prominence of issues in the mainstream media with those emphasised by the two main political parties in their official twitter feeds. The analysis of party-based messages demonstrates the stark differences in the issue agendas of the Conservatives and Labour and that, for the period sampled, aggregate press and TV coverage have tended align more closely with the Conservative agenda. These are aggregate findings and need to be interpreted alongside the weekly volatility of the issue agenda we identify in the first section of this report.

Newspaper negativity towards Labour has intensified slightly more from the high levels observed in the previous three weeks. However, it hasn’t been a great week for the Conservative party. Although the party can still rely on staunch support from some of the most popular selling newspapers, the unweighted data shows that negative coverage of the Conservatives doubled in week 4 compared with week 3.

There is no sign that the two-party squeeze in press coverage in the penultimate week of campaigning. The Brexit party have almost vanished in proportional terms and all the other minor parties have struggled to gain any significant newspaper presence.

The picture is less narrowly defined in television coverage, with the Liberal Democrats and the SNP cumulatively accounting for 1 in 5 of all-party political appearances.

In both press and TV appearances, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn are attracting almost identical levels of media presence, as are other representatives of their parties. Of course, in press terms at least, this quantitative equality masks significant qualitative inequalities.