The Battle For Campaign Agenda In Britain — страница 10

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Conservative party. Without policy conflict, something had to fill the political columns. Throughout the first two weeks these stories reinforced the image of a discredited government under weak leadership, the final nails in the coffin from which the Conservatives never recovered. Overall CARMA estimated that on balance Conservative coverage was generally negative (44 percent was rated unfavourable to only 18 percent favourable, with the rest neutral). CARMA confirmed that the papers most positive towards the Conservatives in their contents, (reflecting their editorial preferences) were the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, and the Daily Mail32. If ratings are weighted by the size of circulation of newspaper articles, the government’s overall disadvantage in the press was

even more marked. Labour and the Liberal Democrat coverage was far more evenly balanced between positives and negatives. Lastly, just over a third of all press stories concerned the party leadership and candidates, which probably represents a substantial increase on previous campaigns33. Here, as shown in Table 5, most of the coverage focussed on the two main leaders, with Blair enjoying a slight edge over Major, while Ashdown trailed far behind (with only 4 percent of the leadership stories). Within the Labour party, Blair clearly dominated coverage (with 51 percent of stories), followed by Gordon Brown, John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and Robin Cook. Ashdown’s dominance of the Liberal Democrat coverage was even more pronounced, with almost no stories about any other of their

politicians. In contrast only a third of the Conservative leadership stories focussed on Major. In second place within his party, Neil Hamilton attracted slightly more coverage than Mrs Thatcher, Ken Clark or Michael Heseltine. Overall the list is overwhelmingly masculine, due in large part to the predominance of the three main party leaders, although women spokespersons were slightly more prominent in the Labour party. Lastly, the content analysis also rated the favourability of the coverage of the leaders, and here coverage of all the Conservative leaders (with the single exception of Norma Major) was on balance classified as unfavourable, with particularly poor ratings of Tim Smith, Neil Hamilton, Stephen Dorrell and Michael Forsyth, while the equivalent coverage of the Labour

leadership was generally neutral. The Impact on Voters Lastly, if political campaigns in Britain are moving towards the post-modern era, what impact did this have on voters in the 1997 election? How did viewers react to the campaign coverage on television, in particular did they reach for their remotes to turn off, or turn over, from news and current affairs on television? And did viewers feel that the election coverage was interesting, informative and fair? Here we can monitor viewership figures using data supplied by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB), which provides the industry-standard measure of viewing behaviour from a panel sample of over 4,000 monitored households. The evening news and current affairs programmes on British television continue to reach a mass

audience, but the availability of alternative channels has slightly eroded their market share. Commentators noted that BBC1’s Nine O’clock News suffered particularly sharply from a fall in viewership after it was specially extended with campaign news to 50 minutes after Easter. The BARB figures confirm that this programme lost one third of its viewers, down from 5.8 million in the first week to 4 million thereafter (see Figure 2). This figure was also well down from the equivalent during the spring 1992 campaign, when about 6.3 million viewers tuned into BBC1’s main evening news. But what commentators failed to notice was that ITN’s News at Ten, with its regular 30 minute slot, also steadily lost some of its audience during the campaign, down from 6 million in the first

week to 5.6 million in the last. Channel 4 News at 7pm (with 0.6 million viewers), ITV’s Early Evening News at 5.45pm (with 4 million) and BBC1’s 6pm News (with 5.8 million) remained popular and relatively stable, subject only to the natural trendless fluctuations caused by the television schedules. Current affairs programmes also experienced fluctuations in their audiences (see Figure 3). The sharpest fall was registered by BBC1’s Panorama which carried interviews with all the major party leaders (with an average viewership of 2.8 million throughout the campaign), although they also picked up towards the end of the campaign. A similar pattern was registered with Question Time (2.8m), while BBC1’s On the Record (1.5m) managed a modest and steady rise during the campaign.