"Read all about it": determinants of press coverage of the BNP Mark Baimbridge 1 and Richard Anderson Centre for European Studies, School of Social and International Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, BD7 1DP, UK 58 th Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Swansea University Abstract When analysing the far right, the literature addressing the written media has to-date focused on its role in relation to their increasing support. Although the British national press has taken a strong stance against the far right (whether in the guise of the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s, or the BNP in the 1990s and beyond), the media’s reporting of asylum and immigration issues has been criticised for giving the far right an opportunity to establish themselves as a ‘household name’ on the British political scene (e.g. Copsey, 2004; Fieschi, 2004; Eatwell, 2005, 2006). In contrast to this existing literature, this paper seeks to examine the occurrence of BNP-related stories in mainstream British newspapers. The Lexis-Nexis database is used to record the number of BNP stories over the period September 1999 to December 2007 on a monthly basis for nine British national newspapers. We then examine the impact upon BNP coverage through the use of a series of hypothesised explanatory variables (e.g. elections and media attention) to explore which factors influence the rate of BNP stories in relation to both individual newspapers, as a comparative study between the respective newspapers, together with two pairs of categorised groups the possess identifiable characteristics (e.g. broadsheet/tabloid, left-wing/right-wing). 1 Email: m.j.baimbridge@bradford.ac.uk r.p.anderson@bradford.ac.uk Copyright PSA 2008