The British Election Longitudinal News Study 2015–2019 (BELNS) contains campaign coverage relating to three general elections: 2015, 2017, 2019 and the 2016 EU referendum. Media included are national newspapers, local newspapers, television and radio news. The print newspaper component tracks topic and general election candidate coverage across 46 national and local sources, including actor-level sentiment in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections. The television and radio component tracks topic and general election candidate coverage across 24national and local sources, including actor-level sentiment in the 2017 and 2019 general elections and the 2016 EU referendum. For issues, the data are at the outlet-day level on topics that correspond to mii, the “SINGLE MOST important issues facing the country” asked in all waves of the British Election Study Panels 2014 to 2023 (Fieldhouse et al. 2019) as open-ended response items. The unit of analysis is the news source with repeated measures for each day during the study period, with variables corresponding to election period (GE2015, GE2017, GE2019, Brexit), and topics. For the candidate data, the unit of analysis is the candidate standing for election (or political figure during the referendum) and the variables relate to: election period (GE2015, GE2017, GE2019) or the EU Referendum in 2016, number of stories in which candidate was mentioned across all sources, as well as sentiment per source using different measures.This project gathered data on media coverage of the 2019 general election, with a view to developing a longitudinal media data file that combines our database of media news coverage of the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, and of the 2016 EU Referendum. These data provide an opportunity to assess and understand the influence of media in British politics. This opportunity comes at a critical point in British politics, with a country divided by the new Brexit cleavage; more extreme parties whose moderates have been "hollowed out" by deselections and retirements; an increasingly hostile environment accompanied by incivility and a "coarsening" of political debate; and growing salience of local concerns driven by austerity politics.

Newspapers: we queried, daily, Lexis UK for archived news stories using keyword searches. Some of these keywords were common across the three elections, e.g., "election", "candidate", "poll", "tory", "tories", while others were unique to particular elections, e.g., "change uk" . Television: we queried, daily, Box of Broadcasts for news stories on television and radio using the same keyword searches as for newspapers.