Let me make a confession. I have no sympathy for the political goals of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-of-centre British minority party, with a profoundly anti-European bent. When this week a UKIP supporter mentioned that there was a media campaign against his party – well, the words ‘paranoid’ and ‘delusional’ came popping into my head.

But I had a quick trawl back through three months of stories with UKIP headlines and here are the none-too-scientific results of the total word count:

newspaper %
Telegraph 31.4 (15.4% news / 16.0% opinion)
S Telegraph 20.1 (16.2% news / 3.9% opinion)

Times 12.4 (9% news / 3.4% opinion)
S Times 6.8

Daily Mail 9.0

Independent 8.6

Guardian 5.5

Express 4.1 (4.1% opinion)
S Express 0.6

Mirror 0.8

Sun 0.7

UKIP fascination is definitely highest at the Telegraph group with 51.5% of all coverage, but over half the Daily’s coverage is op-ed. However, conspiracy theorists take note, not all the opinion is negatively slanted towards UKIP – with substantial contributions by Simon Heffer in favour of the UKIP’s key positions.

But if there is a conspiracy, it’s a silent one. The Kippers only merited 21,601 words in three months…do I sound sorry? I am sorry. Really.