Television in the 1987 British Election Campaign: Its Content and Influence
| Published date | 01 December 1989 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1989.tb00293.x |
| Author | W. L. Miller,D. Broughton,N. Sonntag |
| Date | 01 December 1989 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1989),
XXXVII,
62665
1
Television in the
1987
British Election
Campaign: Its Content and Influence
W.
L.
MILLER,
N.
SONNTAG
AND
D.
BROUGHTON*
University
of
Glasgow
Our
main purpose in this paper is to look at the content of television news during
the month of the official election campaign in 1987, and then use our British
Election Campaign Study panel survey to see what influence television had on the
electorate in that short span of time.
The election was announced on Monday
11
May. On Tuesday
12
May we
began video-taping a wide range of television news programmes and on
Thursday
14
May we started to interview
(or
rather re-interview)
our
panel
of
electors. We continued to record the news and interview an approximately
random subset of
our
voter panel on every weekday until the eve of the election.
Earlier, during the week from Monday
30
March to Friday
3
April we had
carried out
a
similar operation
-
recording all the main news programmes and
interviewing our representative panel of electors The panel consisted of a
clustered random sample
of
the British electorate, initially interviewed by
SCPR
for the 1983 British Election Study
or
for the
1986
British Social Attitudes
Survey. We used
a
specially installed computer-controlled bank
of
50
telephones
to re-contact these respondents in March/April 1987, twice during the election
campaign
-
once in the first fortnight, once in the second fortnight, and then
finally in the week after the election. During the pre-campaign week in March/
April we did approximately
250
interviews per evening; during the campaign
itself we did approximately
150
interviews per evening
-
making considerable
attempts
to
ensure that each day’s subsample was a random subsample of the full
panel. This survey design aimed to provide a sensitive measure of day-to-day
opinion trends which could be compared with the daily output
of
television news.
This paper
is
based upon our analysis of the four news programmes with the
largest viewing audiences: the
Six
O’Clock
News
and the
Nine
O’Clock
News
on
BBC-TV plus
News
at
5.45
and
News
at
Ten
on ITN. We recorded every
*
This is a shortened and revised version of a paper prepared for the Political Studies Association
Conference at the University of Warwick, 4-6 April
1989.
For
more details about the British Election
Campaign Study see
W.
L.
Miller,
H.
Clarke, M. Harrop, L. LeDuc and
P.
Whiteley,
How
Voters
Change
(Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1990).
The paper is based upon research funded by grants from
the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC)
to
W.
L.
Miller. Neither the IBA
nor
the
ESRC
bears any responsibility
for
the accuracy ofthe research
nor for any opinions expressed.
N.
Sonntag was employed under the IBA grant and was responsible
for the coding of the TV broadcasts.
D.
Broughton was employed in connection with the ESRC grant
and was responsible for the preparation of the survey tapes. W.
L.
Miller directed the project and was
responsible for this analysis.
0032-32
1
7/89/04/062f%26/%03.00
0
1989
Political
Studies
Debate
627
broadcast by these programmes in the campaign and in our pre-campaign week
at the end of March.
How was the electoral contest presented: positively or negatively? Were parties
shown presenting their own case or attacking their opponents’? Were parties
presented as monolithic unities or as collections of factions and individuals with
differing viewpoints? Did the broadcasters attempt to guide the viewers’
interpretation
of
news events? Did the parties receive balanced coverage
-
whatever balance may mean? Did television present
a
particular agenda of issues?
Did that agenda reflect the agenda
of
one party more than others? Did television
impose its agenda on the voters? And how did the voters react to the media itself?
Did they accuse it of bias? And
if
so
what kind of bias? Were they right?
To
all these questions we shall try to give answers that are quantitative as well
as objective.
Sources
of Information and
Influence
After the election we asked our panel to ‘look back over the whole campaign’ and
tell
us
‘how useful’ they had found radio, TV and other sources for making their
political judgements. We asked about television, radio, the newspapers, party
leaflets and ‘conversations with family, friends and acquaintances’. Substantial
numbers had avoided or ignored the press, radio and party leaflets. But almost
everyone had watched television and had personal conversations about the
election.
Of
these two sources they found television more useful than personal
conversations, not just for information but also for helping them decide how to
vote. Other mass media sources were rated less useful than television, even by
those who were willing to rate them at all.
So
for the electorate as
a
whole,
television was unquestionably the main source
of
campaign information and the
main basis for campaign decisions.
However television, like all other sources, was judged much more useful for
information than
for
decision -we should not overstate its influence. On a
10-
point scale, television scored an average of
7.1
points for its usefulness in
explaining the issues, but only
4.5
points for helping our panel decide how to
vote. The main source need not be a dominant influence, expecially in the short
term: television supplied the information but the voters themselves took the
decisons
-
or
so
they claimed.
In the longer term, however, the media may influence decisions in ways that are
not apparent even
to
the voters themselves. We must be a trifle sceptical about the
voters’ claims that the media (and personal conversations as well!) had little
influence upon their voting decisions.
No
doubt they could resist the overt appeal
of a headline urging them to ‘VOTE
LABOUR’,
or
‘VOTE
CONSERVATIVE’
on election day. But whether they could resist the steady drip drip
of
selected
information designed to sustain a particular political viewpoint is another
matter. Similarly, they may easily resist the biased selection of news and comment
on one media source provided they are exposed to a variety of other sources
which present a different viewpoint. But whether they can resist a ‘media
consensus’, in which the same viewpoint is adopted by ostensibly competing
media sources, is once again another matter. Bias recognized is bias neutralized;
but bias undetected is accepted as truth and exerts its corrosive influence despite-
indeed
because
of
-
the voters’ denials that they are being influenced.
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