This study aimed to explore how issues of food shortages, stockpiling and panic buying, were portrayed by the British media between the build up to the EU referendum in 2016 and the UK officially leaving the EU single market in 2020. Media reports on the impact of Brexit on the UK food system were largely absent in the six months before the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016, only increasing in frequency from mid-2018. The three media outlets included in this study cited information from government sources more frequently than information from the food sector, academics and other experts or opposition party politicians. The key themes developed during the analysis were food shortages and panic buying; food supply chain disruption; economic impacts of Brexit and preparation and stockpiling by the government, food sector and individuals.
Trends and frequency of articles on food and Brexit
Reports by the media about the impact of Brexit on the UK food system were largely absent in the six months before the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016 and only increased in frequency from mid-2018 onward, peaking in mid-2019 following the appointment of Boris Johnson as prime minister. The relatively late emergence of articles mentioning ‘food’ suggests that the impacts of Brexit on the food system were not frequent themes of Brexit discourse during the Brexit campaign or during the early stages of UK-EU trade negotiations. Indeed, causal mapping of televised debates during the build up to the UK-EU referendum found the most dominant themes to be immigration, impacts on the economy, job opportunities and ‘taking back control’, with no reference to the food or farming sector [24].
There were three main peaks in media reports on the impacts of Brexit on the food system, coinciding with Theresa May delivering the Brexit whitepaper (The ‘Chequers Plan’) in July 2018; the government losing the ‘meaningful vote’ on their EU-exit deal in January 2019 and the lead up to the UK submitting a new EU-exit plan to the EU in October 2019. These events all coincided with the government outlining plans for the future of the UK food sector, including farming subsidies to replace the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and impacts of tariff and non-tariff measures (e.g., sanitary and phytosanitary measures) on food imports and exports [25]. Indeed, the disproportionate volume of EU legislation governing the food and farming sector [6] made the process of withdrawing from EU institutions highly complex and contributed towards delays to the UK’s departure from the EU and numerous rejections by Parliament of the government’s Withdrawal Agreements [26].
Key sources from which stories emanated
Media articles cited information from government sources (50% of articles) more frequently than information attributed to food sector representatives (42% of articles), academics and other experts (22%) or opposition party politicians (6% of articles). While previous studies have criticised the media’s disproportionate representation of politicians initially involved in shaping the Brexit campaign [26, 27], it is well recognised that politicians use the media as a tool for communicating with the public and a way to influence public opinion [28], and these findings support previous research which also found political voices to feature more prominently than other stakeholder groups [7].
Representation of government figures, food sector representatives and opposition parties were broadly similar across media outlets, however, academics and food system experts featured more frequently in The Guardian (33% of articles) than the Daily Mail (7% of articles). In line with previous research, which has shown media outlets to select and promote issues that reinforce their own political agenda [7], it is plausible that concerns voiced by academics of food shortages and disruption to the food supply were more aligned with the anti-Brexit position of The Guardian than the pro-Brexit narrative of the Daily Mail, resulting in increased prominence and reporting by The Guardian.
Themes and framing of relevant issues
The key themes developed during the analysis were food shortages and panic buying; food supply chain disruption; economic impacts of Brexit and preparation and stockpiling by the government, food sector and individuals. The theme of ‘food shortages and panic buying’ occurred in 96% of coded articles. Government communication around potential food shortages was framed as being chaotic and confusing [29]. For example, articles often included both reassuring quotes from the government that there was no risk of food shortages, followed by contradictory warnings of future panic buying and food supply chain disruption from government reports (e.g., Operation Yellowhammer). While it is not possible to elucidate what impact this mixed messaging had on human behaviour, evidence from both the COVID-19 pandemic and 2007/08 food crisis have shown it is often the act of panic buying itself, rather than disruption to the food supply, that results in product shortages at the consumer-level [30, 31]. As media messaging can promote either reassurance or anxiety on the issue of food shortages and cause anything from no change in behaviour, to better preparation for real challenges or panic buying in response to real or imagined challenges, the media must consider what impact their messages may have on human behaviour.
The theme of food supply chain disruption, which occurred in 86% of articles, also had parallels with government communication during the COVID-19 pandemic with an emphasis on reassuring the public there will be no disruption to the food supply chain [32]. These messages, however, contradicted warnings in the media, often within the same article, of disruption to the food supply chain and reduced availability of food items. Warnings of food supply chain disruption were often associated with a no-deal scenario, an event that was not borne out, with most articles coinciding with the government losing the ‘meaningful vote’ in January 2019 and parliament being prorogued in September 2019. Findings reported here agree with previous evidence tracking the emergence of the no-deal scenario (using reports from parliamentary debates and UK internet searches) emerging at a late stage in the Brexit process amid growing disillusionment among Brexit supports [26].
Reports on the economic impacts of Brexit occurred in 80% of articles and typically focused on a no-deal scenario resulting in increased food prices as a result of higher import tariffs. A further socio-economic dimension, reported by two Guardian articles but not the Daily Mail, was that disruption to the food supply chain would disproportionately impact those already struggling to access food. A similar scenario was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic when disruption to the food supply chain and economic instability contributed towards the number of individuals experiencing food insecurity increasing by 250% over pre-Covid-19 levels, to 2.9 million people [33].
Reports on preparation and stockpiling by the government and individuals occurred in 63% and 22% of articles, respectively. It is possible that the media were using lived experiences of their readers to highlight the importance of stockpiling food as a way to prepare for Brexit. This phenomenon, known as ‘media persuading’, has the potential to influence behaviour at the population level [34]. For example, an increase in the volume of media reporting on transmission of the Zika virus within the United States was associated with an increase in the perception of risk in contracting the virus and protective behaviours, such as consulting medical professionals [35], while an experimental study in Taiwan found media reporting on swine flu to invoke a sense of vulnerability rather than instigating protective behaviours, such as preparing for the outbreak [36]. In relation to Brexit, there was even recognition by The Guardian newspaper that newspaper headlines could become self-fulfilling, as well as requests for readers to contact media outlets to report on their own stockpiling stories. These findings are particularly timely given the potential role of the media in instigating stockpiling behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on images of empty food shelves, rather than centring the message that there was no overall shortage of food in the supply chain [20, 31, 37, 38].
Implications
There is an opportunity for the Editors’ Code of Practice [39], enforced in the UK by the Independent Press Standards Organisation, to consider what impact sensationalised reporting has on the health and wellbeing of readers. While the Editors’ Code of Practice considers factors such as taking ‘care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information’, there is currently no requirement to consider what behavioural response may be induced, as a result of sensationalised media stories. In part, this sensationalised reporting is a result of oversimplifying complex arguments, as observed in media portrayals of immigration throughout the Brexit campaign [13]. This tension between delivering accurate reporting and a need to attract readers has previously been shown to negatively impact health and wellbeing [40] with a wide body of research showing that media reports on suicides and body size can influence suicidal behaviour and eating disorders, respectively, particularly among vulnerable groups and young people [41,42,43,44].
Limitations
There are limitations associated with this study. By restricting this study to three media sources there is a focus on information targeting a subset of the general population, however the three media outlets were selected based on their appeal to different demographics and include the two most widely read print newspapers and the most widely read digital newspaper in the UK. Component 2 of this study included a subset of 50 articles due to time and resource constraints, further themes may have been developed if additional articles had been included, however no new themes were developed after screening 30 articles, so it is possible that data saturation had been achieved. While findings do not seek to prove causal effects of a relationship between media reporting and panic buying, they do provide innovative insights into how the media report on potential disruption to the food system. This study did not consider reporting of food shortages and panic buying by social medial, an important area of future study given the potential role of social media platforms in shaping fear and consumer responses during the COVID-19 pandemic [45]. Finally, it is to be expected that the search terms utilised in this study (e.g., ‘food shortage’) would identify media reports that emphasised potential threats to UK food security rather than reports that Brexit would not impact the UK food system. However, we also included more neutral terms (food supply, food availability, food buying). Nevertheless, the articles identified did not simply report concerns raised by the food sector and other stakeholders, there was a focus on individual stockpilers and ‘preppers’, which seemed to normalise irrational stockpiling behaviour.
