and viewers seemed happier with television’s own correspondents.
Reflecting the government’s unpopularity in the polls, the public
thought there was too much coverage of the Conservative party in
television news, while in contrast a fifth of all viewers would have
liked more about the Labour party, and also the minor parties like
the Greens who rarely featured in the news. As we have seen Europe
received extensive attention in the press, but the public felt that
the amount of news about this topic was excessive, along with the
level of attention given to foreign policy more generally.
Lastly, the public were also asked to evaluate the standards of
television news, whether it met the requirements of public service
broadcasting by being accurate, informative, balanced and
interesting. Here viewers expressed largely positive reaction to
news programmes on British television (see Table 7). Channel 4’s 7
O’Clock News anchored by John Snow came out particularly well from
this evaluation, especially in terms of accuracy and balance,
perhaps because the distinctively longer format allows more
opportunity to present all points of view. The general picture which
emerges from this survey during the campaign confirms once more that
British television news is widely held in high regard for providing
a broadly impartial source of information, across all the major
channels.
Conclusions: Evaluating the Coverage
During the 1997 British election many voices expressed disquiet
about media coverage. On the one hand, some observers claimed that
television failed to provide serious, critical and informed debate
about public policy issues35. As we have seen the media agenda was
frequently taken over by a feeding frenzy focussing on sexual and
financial sleaze, and later the high drama of Conservative party
splits over Europe. The obsession with sensationalism may have
obscured debate about many complex issues facing Britain, and
hindered critical scrutiny of many aspects of the new Blair agenda.
On the other hand, other critics argued that, far from providing too
little serious coverage of the election, television, — particularly
the BBC, — provided far too much36. The media was charged with
presenting a saturation diet of politics during the long campaign,
including BBC1’s specially extended 9 O’Clock News, as well as the
extensive campaign supplements in all the broadsheet newspapers, and
this, some suggest, may have contributed towards turned-off voters.
At present we can only speculate about the full effects of the
campaign on voters, which awaits further analysis once the British
Election Campaign Panel study becomes available. What does seem
clear at this point, however, is the effects on parties. Little is
certain in politics, but we can take a fairly safe bet that the
techniques learnt by the Blair team for staying on-message in a more
complex and diverse media environment during the permanent campaign
are going to be emulated by all the other parties. In this regard
the 1997 election did represent a watershed, not just in terms of
the outcome for the fortunes of the political parties, but also for
the process of campaigning in Britain.