Abstract
How do journalists report elections and does that reporting lead to better informed citizens? Those are the questions that underpin this impressive attempt by Cushion and Thomas to reconcile data from more than 100 studies of election coverage and their own original qualitative interviews with senior editors of British TV news on the journalistic norms of campaign coverage. Their aims are ambitious: to prompt a rethink of election reporting and to consider how it could strengthen democracy.
The past few years have brought a wealth of empirical data for academics who study elections. Not least in the United Kingdom, where two referendums and two general elections in the space of four years have led to fundamental changes in its constitutional arrangements, as well as providing a series of case studies in election reporting. Revisiting the agenda-setting work of McCombs, Cushion and Thomas consider where the power to set the agenda for the public resides during campaigns. After a somewhat nervous defence of the power of television news as the primary source of trusted public information during election campaigns, the authors consider the intermedia agenda-setting functions of newspapers and the internet but settle on television as the main area of study.
This is unsurprising given the nature of the campaigns considered. The authors focus on the United Kingdom and United States as their main areas of study, although some campaigns from continental Europe, in particular Scandinavian countries, are also analysed. Even as the power of the newspapers to set the agenda has waned in recent years, most dramatically demonstrated in the 2017 UK general election where Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was dismissed, demonised but not defenestrated by the newspapers, trust in TV news has remained high. While it has become a cliché to say that the next election will be the most fiercely fought with digital tools, the public continues to rely heavily on TV for election theatre, such as candidate debates, as well as reporting and analysis of the issues.
As the authors demonstrate, though, TV news is obsessed with the horserace, the daily diet of stories about who is up and who is down, who is winning and who is losing. Process stories about the nature of political deal-making or campaign tactics can also dominate at the expense of policy reporting. The analogy with sports reporting has often been made and is revisited here; politics may be show business for ugly people but what to make of the breathless coverage of the political super-fan during the excitement of election competition? Recent UK elections have exposed the hollowness of this approach, with political programmes in 2015 obsessed with reporting the red lines of political deal-making in the event of a hung parliament, only to see David Cameron pull off a surprise victory, and in 2017 being dismissive of Labour’s electoral appeal only to see it achieve its highest share of the vote since Tony Blair’s glory days.
The horserace is attractive though. As any journalist who has ever covered an election will tell you, when you are in the midst of a campaign, the daily minutiae can seem fascinating while the bigger picture can be harder to discern. This is part of the reason TV news creates touchpoint moments in the campaign, for example, policy analysis, constituency reports, manifesto launches that are given a free hit, or gimmicks such as town-hall style events. All these mechanisms are efforts to set the agenda and break free of the regimented, gridded election campaigns the parties want to fight. But Cushion and Thomas find there is too little coverage of significant policy issues in campaign coverage and warn this is to the detriment of the public’s understanding of policy choices and is a disservice to the democratic process.
The authors also warn against the over-reliance on polls, which they believe are attractive as theoretically impartial ways of covering the horserace. While the use of polls has undeniably increased, I have to say that as a former editor of TV news, I never viewed them in the way the authors describe. They are a snapshot of the public mood but little else. That is part of the reason poll-trackers have become more popular in recent years. Some editors do seem to believe polls predict the future but then again, they are often disappointed. After every election, journalists always say they’ll never trust polls again. Until the next time.
In the end, Cushion and Thomas argue in favour of a form of public service election reporting. One built around the public interest; focussed on policy reporting not process watching, on news values that are embedded in serving and informing the public and questioning the parties’ campaigns. In the age of the Trumpification of news coverage, the authors argue the public needs reliable factual information that questions political assertions and exposes falsehoods. Impartial news reporting in the public interest, they say, will outweigh political deceit. This neo-Reithian ideal may not be a quick-fix, they suggest, but will encourage a public logic in campaign coverage that better connects with the democratic needs of the electorate. A romantic vision perhaps but attractive for all that.