What a difference a year makes. In the month before the election last year, only five per cent of online news coverage of the Liberal Democrats was negative. Last month, 21 per cent of coverage was negative, similar to the amount of unfavourable coverage of the Conservatives and Labour (23 per cent and 20 per cent respectively).

 
There has been a noticeable change in sentiment towards the Liberal Democrats, as voters were disappointed by broken pre-election promises surrounding spending cuts and tuition fees. Recently, political commentators, such as the Spectator magazine's Martin Bright, have been questioning the effectiveness of the coalition, for example Bright wrote on 26 March “The attraction of coalition politics was that it appeared, for a while, to put an end to the knee-jerk sectarianism of two-party politics. The irony is that the consensus politics of the coalition is proving increasingly divisive.”

The media hasn’t given either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats an easy ride in the last year, but worse could be yet to come. Earlier this year, Peter Oborne wrote in the Telegraph  “Politically, 2011 will be fraught. I predict that the coalition will probably fragment, and could even collapse, leaving David Cameron marooned at the head of a tottering minority government.”
 
As the local council elections draw near on 5 May, some in the Liberal Democrats are also nervous that the party will lose seats due to the unpopular decisions the coalition has made so far. On 12 April for instance, bbc.co.uk reported: “Nick Clegg has rejected a call from a senior Lib Dem councillor to end the coalition in order to save his party.”
 
However, getting into government has certainly raised the profile of the party, and that has to be good news. Looking at the amount of coverage of the three parties shows that Liberal Democrats scores 37 per cent of mentions, just 3 per cent lower than the Conservatives and a whopping 14 per cent more than Labour. The Lib Dem party may be getting more negative stories in the press, but at least it is getting its share of political coverage these days.
 
Methodology
PRmoment asked Echo Sonar to analyse share of voice and tone of voice of the three leading political parties looking at online news in 2010 and 2011. The research period was 6 to 26 April 2010 and 6 to 26 March 2011.