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Reporting different second order elections: A comparative analysis of the 2009 and 2013 local and EU elections on public and commercial UK television news bulletins

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Drawing on a systematic content analysis, this article examines how far television news bulletins with different levels of public service obligations reported the EU and local elections in 2009 and the local elections in 2013. The aim is to compare coverage on the main evening terrestrial bulletins in the United Kingdom (the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) during different types of second order campaigns and according to their regulatory responsibilities. Although UK citizens appear to value local above EU elections, the latter campaign was more extensively reported than the former on all broadcasters, with politicians sourced differently. Most striking was the market deficit of second order election news, notably Channel 5 – the broadcaster with the lightest public service obligations – containing no policy related stories. It was left to the BBC – the broadcaster with the strongest public service commitments – to deliver the most comprehensive and policy-orientated coverage.

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Notes

  1. Eurobarometer data can be accessed here: http://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer/topics-trends-question-retrieval/eb-trends-trend-files/ Accessed 16 April 2014.

  2. The aim of our study was not to simply compare the BBC with three commercial broadcasters. After all, the three commercial broadcasters have different levels of public service obligations. These can be evidenced by a close reading of the license agreements for each broadcaster, which can be accessed in the following documents: For Channel 4 http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/c4/c4drl.pdf, for Channel 5 http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/c5/c5drl.pdf and for ITV http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/tv-broadcast-licences/current-licensees/channel-3/. All documents were accessed on 1 June 2013.

  3. We excluded weekends for logistical reasons. The media monitoring system at our university only records weekday bulletins because on the weekend bulletins are often scheduled at irregular times making them difficult to pre-record. In addition, the following bulletins – the BBC on 25 May 2009 (Bank Holiday), Channel 4 on 3 June 2009 and 5 News on 3 June 2009 – did not record for technical reasons.

  4. Our study was a part of a larger set of ongoing studies into television news that drew on similar variables. Therefore, for example, drawing on Fleiss’s (1981) approach to intercoder reliability, one study involving several coders recorded an overall score of 0.965 (Cushion and Thomas, 2013). According to Fleiss’s compressed scale, this result can be interpreted as excellent.

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Cushion, S., Thomas, R. Reporting different second order elections: A comparative analysis of the 2009 and 2013 local and EU elections on public and commercial UK television news bulletins. Br Polit 11, 164–183 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.26

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