Debate on Television

Television as a Forum for Debate

Television has long been regarded as one of the most promising spaces for the conduct of civic debate. There is abundant research showing that it is from television that most citizens receive their political information, in or outside of election periods (Chaffee and Kanihan 1997; Weaver 1996). As an information provider, agenda-setter, analyst of public events, and stimulus for discussion among families and friends, television has, since the 1960s, become the dominant medium of public communication. From mundane local news to momentous global events, television provides interpretive narratives and stimuli to interpersonal discussion that shape our understanding of social reality. Television does not tell us what to think, but it certainly tells us what to think about.

For most of us, television is our best or only means of exposure to people, situations, and perspectives that are beyond the horizon of our immediate experience. And yet, for many media scholars and theorists of the democratic public sphere, television as a forum for debate has been a disappointment, rarely opening up spaces through which the most democratically promising forms of multiperspectival communication might be realized. Too often characterized by the frustrating vacuity of the angry headline, the overdramatized incident, the image of the denunciating mob, and a prevailing mood of cynical resignation, the televisual public sphere all too often abandons deliberation for declamation, turning televised politics into a spectacle of unrestrained uproar or virulence. All of this has had troubling consequences for democratic citizenship. First, when all politics is made to seem either fraudulent or futile, the most likely public response is to disengage. There are well-recorded trends of this happening. And of politics per se being identified in popular parlance as a dirty word. Second, as the media have come to be characterized by intensified competition for public attention, their messages have tended to become increasingly consumed by sensationalism, focusing on the ephemeral: headline-making demands; the latest example of corruption; and a perpetual search for inconsistencies, gaffes, and sleights of hand. Third, even when citizens do feel motivated to engage with public affairs, there is a growing gap between the long-term character of sociopolitical problems and the short-term pressures that tend to dominate the political agenda. This leads too often to a public discourse framed by the pragmatic priorities of immediacy, with both politicians and journalists strategizing in ways that ignore underlying problems and durable consequences.

Why can’t television do a better job at opening up intelligent public debate? One answer to this question lies in the history of the medium—a history that is, of course, only one version of how our mass-mediated culture might have developed (Williams 1974). When the BBC was established as a Corporation in 1926 (producing only radio until 1936), it was explicitly forbidden by government to deal with matters of political controversy. As Sir William Mitchell, the Postmaster General who was the BBC’s political master, put it, “if you once let politics into broadcasting, you will never be able to keep broadcasting out of politics.” This resulted in an atmosphere of extreme timidity, best illustrated by two examples.

In 1931, in one of its first forays into political debate, the BBC ran a series of occasional discussions on issues of political interest titled The Debate Continues. Only the three main political parties were represented in them. The party leaderships were invited to decide who would speak for them; this would not be a matter for the BBC to decide. It was agreed that in any discussion relating to forthcoming legislation, the government would be invited to have the final word. The series turned out to be more like a stilted re-enactment of exchanges on the floor of the House of Commons than a spontaneous clash of views.

In the same year, the BBC Talks Department endeavored to break out of the politicians-only format for debate by initiating an interesting new series called Conversations in the Train. The idea was to record ordinary people talking about everyday concerns, while traveling on trains across different parts of Britain. This was a promising idea, opening up the airwaves to “real” people reflecting on issues that mattered to them—except that the “ordinary people” were played by actors and the debates were all scripted in advance by eminent literary figures such as Dorothy Sayers and E. M. Forster. The series actually proved to be quite popular, but as drama rather than debate. In the mid-1930s, this production was transferred to the Drama department. In both of these cases, the BBC’s extreme nervousness about allowing the public it was supposed to be serving to have any political voice at all, resulted in two undemocratic strategies: only allowing the elite to speak about politics and setting up “ordinary people” (either by simulation or editing), as if the citizenry was best represented by people who sounded like real people rather than real people themselves.

When television emerged as a mass medium, exclusively run by the BBC until 1954, it continued to treat debate as something that had to be highly managed and closed to most voices. In fear of seeming to be biased, the BBC agreed not to discuss any matter to be considered in Parliament within the next fourteen days and not to report on election campaigns. It was as if political debate was the exclusive province of the elected elite and television could only enter into this space when invited, and then on the most deferential of terms. How long this self-imposed repression might have endured we shall never know, for in 1955 along came commercial television, in the form of ITV. From the outset, ITV felt itself to have a different set of public obligations: more distant from the political elite; more populist in style; less willing to sacrifice spectacle for edification.

If there was a single moment when broadcast deference finally collapsed and debate on television would clearly never be the same again, it was during the 1959 election campaign, when, on 15 September, Granada TV broadcast what it called The Last Debate. Filmed in a large, galleried studio in Manchester, the program invited leading politicians from the three main parties—Selwyn Lloyd for the Conservatives, Barbara Castle for Labour, and Arthur Holt for the Liberals—to deliver short speeches from a platform, after which the audience of several hundred people, many of whom seemed eager to let the politicians know that they trusted none of them, were encouraged to state their views. A large part of the ninety-minute broadcast consisted of the three politicians being jeered at, shouted down, and heckled. It was vulgar; it was intoxicating; it was debate as carnival; it was noise minus signal. The Last Debate’s producer subsequently described it in The Times as “unquestionably the best and most exciting program of the campaign.” The political parties thought otherwise—and none of them agreed to participate in any format involving a live studio audience for the following three general election campaigns of 1964, 1966, and 1970.

For a decade after it was shown, the spectre of The Last Debate was invoked regularly as the haunting image of mass-mediated mobocracy. But despite its ominous title, it was not to be the last debate. As television became a mass medium in the 1960s, broadcasters came to acknowledge the intimate linkage between the broad reach of mediated politics and the public interest that could be served by making debates about public affairs accessible, inclusive, and engaging. To some broadcasters, adhering to what Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) have referred to as the “sacerdotal” approach to political journalism, these aspirations were seen as a desperate grab for audience attention at the expense of deliberative depth, but for at least two reasons, the tide was irresistible. First, there emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century a much less deferential public that would no longer tolerate being addressed as if it were a slow-witted tutee called into the study of an Oxbridge don. The language and tone of aloof elitism became objects of ridicule, mocked to destruction by satires such as That Was the Week That Was and, later, Spitting Image. The worst thing that can happen to a rhetorical tradition is for it to be exposed to the point that its adoption becomes a matter of embarrassment. Public service as a form of institutionalized condescension became simply unsustainable. So, television producers have spent a lot of time and energy in recent years trying to devise ways of bringing the public in to political debate, without casting them as noisy extras or robotically applauding sycophants.

At the same time, a second driver for what might be regarded as the democratization of mediated debate has been the emergent ubiquity of interactive technology. First, in the late 1960s, the technical ability to link home telephones to broadcast studios heralded the rise of the phone-in as an instant audience response to the claims of political leaders. From the moment in May 1982 when a housewife, Diana Gould, demolished Margaret Thatcher’s defense of the sinking of the Belgrano on a BBC Nationwide phone-in, the scope for televised insincerity was seriously diminished. And then came the Internet—which has made strategies of one-way communication seem obsolete, as new spaces for peer-to-peer interaction are opened up. With the widespread use of online communication, scope for addressing the public from high on in the hope that one will not have to actually speak with the unwashed masses is no longer an option.

Television has had to come to terms with both of these factors: a culture in which people expect to be recognized and respected and media technologies that exceed the rhythms of the monological. In the main, television producers’ responses to these new conditions have been uninspired. Despite the claims (and genuine wishes) of broadcasters to pursue the holy grail of democratic interactivity, rather tired and unimaginative formats of television debate prevail.

Current formats of television debate tend to take three forms. First, there is the debate that is not a debate at all, but a five-minute exchange of negative statements within programs such as Newsnight. Politician is set against politician, expert against expert, with the presenter doing his or her utmost to accentuate the dissension and irreconcilability. When government Ministers say that they want a “national debate” about a controversial policy proposal, this is usually what they have in mind: a tour around the studios involving exclusive, predictable and self-referential exchanges between themselves, their opposite numbers, and the journalists they trust. Conspicuously excluded from these encounters, except as onlookers, are the citizens in whose name they act. Debate of this kind has the advantage of alerting viewers to matters of disagreement among political elites—but quite how members of the public are supposed to make sense of the arguments, arrive at a position for themselves, and intervene in the discussion are all left unclear.

Second, there is the debate as set-piece theatre. The BBC Question Time program is the best British example of this weekly dramaturgical ritual. Everything revolves around a narrow set of expectations: the politicians will do their best not to deviate from their prepared, partisan scripts; the presenter will raise skeptical, undermining comments, as if he or she were the official spokesperson for the Anti-Politician Party; the audience put their questions, weary before they start, in the expectation that the professional dodgers on the platform will do their best to evade, outwit, and beguile them. Like a Greek Chorus, the audience in the studio vocalize the sighs, groans, and sulky laughter of the audience watching at home. This is, in two senses, prosthetic democracy: the event as spectacle stands in for the vibrancy of a public sphere; the studio audience ventriloquizes the exasperated sounds of the viewers at home.

Third, there is the debate as free-for-all: the endless phone-ins, online message boards, calls for viewers to text and tweet, usually with no conspicuous relation to any outcome whatsoever. Rather like running an election in which nobody has the slightest intention of counting the votes, everyone has a chance to have their say and nobody in power has any responsibility to listen or respond. As a consequence, debate on television and its surrounding communication channels comes to be seen as a source of frustration rather than empowerment—evidence that the governing elite are more interested in the public’s silent votes than their noisy opinions. The growth of a television audience—which is at the same time a citizenry and an electorate, whose default response to political representation as shown on TV is to switch off and talk among themselves—raises important questions about whether television could do a better job of facilitating what some have called “the national conversation.”

For many media commentators and scholars, the failure of television to promote public deliberation is now taken for granted. In some cases, their hopes have been redirected toward the “vulnerable potential” of the Internet as a democratic space (Coleman and Blumler 2009; Dutton 2010). While there are compelling arguments for seeing online communication as a means of sidelining the centralized, highly regulated, somewhat neurotic control logic of television, it would be a great mistake to imagine either that television is an obsolete medium or that its best features can be replicated online. In most countries, television remains the main source of political information, far outstripping any web-based political agenda-setters, and continues to be able, if only occasionally, to create media events that reach large percentages of a national population within a single time period. In short, television has a potential role in stimulating, organizing, disseminating, and reflecting on inclusive and far-reaching democratic debate that should not be overlooked simply because it rarely happens or there are other promising spaces in which debate might happen.

One feature of television, often cited as a reason for its unsuitedness for democratic debate, is that its tendency to dramatize events turns everything—even political debate—into a show to be witnessed. For such critics, television as spectacle is regarded as inherently incompatible with the mediation of the kinds of rational-critical debate that Habermas and other deliberative theorists regard as defining characteristics of a vibrant public sphere. This critique of the televised spectacle implies that dramatizing strategies are necessarily reductive, degrading complexity for the sake of simple narrative and using precognitive symbolism as a substitute for rational argumentation. More recently, however, some media scholars have begun to argue that forms and genres of apparently nonrational political entertainment might perform a significant role in informing and stimulating citizens (Coleman 2003, 2006; Jones 2009; Klein 2011; Lunt and Stenner 2005; van Zoonen 2005). Indeed, it could be argued that television, with its unique combination of dramatizing and informing techniques and genres, is well placed to provide an appropriate “civic mix” between the high-mindedness of rational political debate and the enchanting appeal of participatory democracy (see Coleman et al. 2011 for an application of this argument to media coverage of the British prime ministerial debates).

The 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates—A Democratic Media Event?

In the aftermath of the British MPs’ expenses scandal, which seemed to destabilize the political establishment in 2009, there was a widespread sense that trust between the elite and the electors was seriously damaged and only radical change could fix it. Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Mail, told his readers, “Nobody can say any longer that our politicians are motivated by honesty, duty or patriotism. Almost to a man and woman they have been exposed as cheats and crooks whose primary motivation is lining their own pockets rather than serving Britain” (Oborne 2009), while a record 3.8 million viewers tuned in for the BBC Question Time program (Torin 2009) in which politicians were jeered at by a studio audience who referred to them as being no different from benefits cheats, “mealy mouthed,” and “all the same.” Calls for “a serious culture change” (Cameron 2009) abounded, as politicians spoke of their shame and desire to change their relationship with the public. It was common at the time for fears to be expressed that turnout in the general election following the expenses scandal would fall to an all-time low. There was much talk before the 2010 election of how social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, might offer the best chances for authentic debate, assuming that most people would simply give up on watching the old televised election formats. The major parties entered into a frenzy of online innovation, with no obvious intention of connecting the anticipated input from “real” people to the highly choreographed output that characterized their top–down campaigns.

Rather surprisingly, it was an innovation in television (the decision to televise three “prime ministerial debates”), rather than any political reform, party charm offensive, or tweety gee-whizzery, that was to have the most significant impact on the 2010 election campaign, grabbing public attention; changing the rhythm and foci of the national campaign; and possibly even mobilizing voters. (For a detailed account of public reaction to the debates, see Coleman et al. 2010.)

The 2010 prime ministerial debates came after a long history of British Prime Ministers adamantly refusing to enter into them on the grounds that they were incompatible with nonpresidential politics and would oversensationalize political deliberation. In 1960, impressed by the U.S. presidential debates between Kennedy and Nixon, the BBC sought to organize a televised debate between Alec Douglas Home and Harold Wilson. The Conservatives declined. In the 1966 election, Harold Wilson was challenged to a debate by Edward Heath, but Wilson refused to negotiate, and did so again in 1970 and 1974. In 1979, London Weekend Television invited Prime Minister James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher to participate in a live debate. This time Callaghan agreed, but Thatcher, on the advice of Sir Gordon Reece, declined—and did so again when she was challenged in 1983 and 1987. In 1997, Labour challenged Prime Minister John Major to debate, but he refused on the grounds that the Opposition had a chance to debate with him on the floor of the House of Commons. In 2001 and 2005, the Conservatives challenged Labour to a televised debate—and they declined giving the same reason. Protracted negotiations between the parties and the broadcasters in 2009-2010 resulted in a 76-point agreement according to which three debates of 90 minutes each would take place in prime time on successive Thursday nights between the three main party leaders, treated equally in all respects, and hosted respectively by ITV, Sky News, and the BBC. Questions—eight per debate—would be presented by voters in the studio audience, but would be filtered by panels set up by the responsible broadcaster for suitability for answering by all three leaders and would be partly themed (domestic affairs in the first debate, foreign affairs and defense in the second, and the economy in the third). Each leader would make an opening and a closing statement and could respond not only to the specific questions but also to his opponents’ replies. The proceedings would be overseen by leading political journalists of each of the host broadcasters, who would mainly “direct traffic” and ensure that time limits were kept but otherwise would not intervene.

In many respects, the 2010 prime ministerial debates conformed to Dayan and Katz’s definition of “media events”: they were live, preplanned interruptions in the routine of the normal flow of broadcasting (Dayan and Katz 1992). They were produced with a degree of “reverence” and “ceremony,” somehow transforming the “home into a public space” and providing moments of sacred punctuation in each of the three weeks leading up to polling day. They encouraged “viewers to celebrate the event by gathering before the television set in groups, rather than alone” (1992: 9). In this sense, they were moments of high public drama, drawing on kinds of affective tension and attachment more commonly associated with climactic, water-cooler moments in soaps or reality TV. Tony Parsons, writing in The Mirror (16 April 2010), could hardly contain himself:

It felt massive. Princess Diana on her wedding day. England in a World Cup semi-final. Jedward doing Vanilla Ice. As big as all that. Bigger. For this was more than light entertainment. It felt as though you would never forget where you were when you saw it. It was as compulsive and unmissable as the most gigantic TV events when it feels like you are watching exactly the same thing as everyone else in the country, when you can do nothing else but turn on the television and gawp at history being born.

For others, such as Marina Hyde writing in The Guardian (16 April 2010), the drama of the debate fell “dismally flat.” But both would agree that to cut it as media events, the debates needed to offer more than politics as usual. They needed to succeed, both structurally and dynamically, as dramatic events.

The nature of an event is to wrap up a single situation or context (such as an election) into a given temporal occasion with a beginning, middle, and end. Events perform a heuristic function, gathering people together within a collective space of witnessing and explanation. Some scholars of democratic theory and political communication argue that democratic debate—especially when aspiring to the standards of Rawlsian or Habermasian deliberation—calls for the dispassionate tranquillity of the seminar. Dramatic spectacle and emotive expression, they contend, can only be distractions from a focus on rational reflection, for debates as media events are bound to sacrifice deliberation for declamation and substantive analysis for strategic assessments. Arguing against such claims, Dayan (2010) suggests that

dismissing them as “political spectacles” would lead to two errors: (1) that of presupposing that the mediation they offer is superfluous; (2) that of believing that the absence of political spectacle is an ideal and a distinctive sign of modern democracies. Democracies are distinct from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, but not in terms of the presence or absence of a political ceremoniality. Democracies differ from other regimes by the nature—not the existence—of the ceremonies staged in their midst. In contemporary life, television is central to the nature of both.

Dayan’s acknowledgement of the mutually reinforcing value of arresting spectacle and democratic engagement is consistent with the findings from our study of media coverage and public reaction to the prime ministerial debates (Coleman et al. 2010). Rather than serving either a deliberatively rational or dramatically engrossing function, these televised events produced a combination of both, resulting in civic outcomes that neither quality could have produced on its own. Indeed, it may be that television’s most significant capacity as a communication medium relates to its employment of forms and techniques of popular culture with a view to exposing mass audiences to content that they would be unlikely to encounter in any other circumstances. This aesthetic foundation for democracy is easily overlooked, swamped by hyperrationalist condescension toward vernacular and quotidian modes of communication. Hajer (2005: 630-31) has argued that the setting and staging of exercises in public deliberation affect their outcomes no less than the structure and substance of argumentation; that “by analyzing political processes as a sequence of staged performances we might be able to infer under what conditions a variety of people and voices emerge in the political discussions, how the variety of contributions can be related to one another in a meaningful way and under what conditions such statements can be made with influence on the actual decision making.” Far from distracting citizens from meaningful democratic debate, creating inviting and inclusive conditions for mediated public deliberation may well be television’s most valuable contribution to the public sphere. And far from this contribution depending on the repression of television’s spectacular instincts, its successful outcome may well depend as much on the creative skills commonly brought to TV dramas, soaps, and reality formats as attention to lofty norms and rules of ideal discourse.

What I am suggesting here is that debate on television should not be judged by the standards of the university seminar—unless, of course, it purports to be reproducing the conditions of academic disputation. Democratic citizenship depends on people being informed—not about everything, but about enough to feel capable of contributing to the political conversation; being free to participate—not all the time, but at least some of the time; feeling engaged in the processes that affect their lives—at least to the point of not feeling like permanent outsiders; and experiencing a subjective belief that they have at least some chance of making a difference in the world. In seeking to realize these outcomes, television news and current affairs producers should focus on the creation of a civic mix between the substance of political argument and the dramatic effects and affects inherent to political disagreement, conflict, and resolution. In doing so, they need to be aware that they are not working with a blank canvas. In everyday life, as people work, relax, reflect, and share ideas; information is absorbed, challenged, and adapted; diverse acts of civic participation take place; and subjective notions of efficacy form, evaporate, and translate into a range of feelings about public life. In short, television does not need to bear solely the burden of creating a democratic public sphere. A more modest, but hugely important, role for television is to make the debates that are already going on in the real world accessible, engaging and inclusive to as many people as possible, and particularly those whose experiences, viewpoints, and voices are most commonly overlooked by conventional traditions of rarefied and hierarchical deliberation. Rather than simply bringing the rhythms of elite discourse to the attention of the governed, television debate’s most important contribution to democracy would be to bring the myriad, fragmented conversations of the interpersonal public sphere to the attention of disconnected publics as well as those who purport to represent them.