The British Media Environment

While the British and American media markets seem similar, there are some stark differences. News delivery in the United States is unregulated and dominated mainly by partisan cable networks and nominally objective print publications, only a handful of which cover the entire country. Compare that to the British media market, dominated by the publicly owned and officially unbiased British Broadcasting Corporation, whose news division leads in evening television viewership by a large margin (Maher, 2022). Only recently has partisan or overtly opinionated television news launched in the United Kingdom. Today, the Office of Communications regulates broadcast media in the UK.
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While the BBC and other forms of broadcast journalism fall under the remit of Ofcom, British newspapers are self-regulated and can be separated into two categories, broadsheets and tabloids. Broadsheet publications cover more serious investigative journalism, while tabloids, mid-markets, or "red tops" include more sensational topics, celebrity gossip, human interests, and the like. The lack of regulation, along with the News International phone hacking scandal and subsequent recommendation of the Leveson Inquiry of 2012, led to the creation of the Independent Press Standards Organization in 2014 (Leveson, 2012). While membership in the IPSO is voluntary, all the newspapers covered in this discourse analysis opted to join the body (IPSO, 2020).​​​​​​​