I was a vote counter in the 2010 General Elections. Not the most glamourous job, I know, but the pay is very good indeed considering the highest qualification you need is to be able to count to 25. It can be quite uncomfortable being a counter, as while you're working, you're being watched like hawks, by the candidates and their various henchmen. Making sure no ballots accidentally go in the wrong pile, exclaming over how many they have, or complaining about how few they have. I'm digressing. Something that stuck out to me was that, in contrast to the Party-People, there was no noticeable press coverage. I know they were there, but they were keeping a low profile. I'd expected them to be all over us as well to find out how the vote was swinging, but there was barely a peep. At the time I wondered why that was. And now I'm going to explain it.
Electoral reporting for broadcast journalists is a hodge-podge of law, tradition, and regulation. Before we get too mired in the podge, it's worth a brief explanation as to why it's important that elections are properly reported.
First and foremost, journalism in the fourth estate of the country, we are (relatively) independent of a governing body, and as such we watch them, and protect the country from any potential threats to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Consider the government our guardians, and think on the old adage: "Who will guard the guardians?". or perhaps more appropriately, who will keep an eye on the guardians to make sure they stay out of trouble. Doesn't have much of a ring to it, does it?
This view is has been very relevant in the last few weeks with the election of the Police and Crime Commissioners. People have been elected who will help decide to way the police protect us and it is more important than ever to ensure that the candidates for the job keep everything above board, and that the people know everything they can to decide who they should elect.
Which brings me onto my second point. How do you decide who it is that you vote for? You would watch debates, perhaps go online to find out what information you can on what they do, watch the news to see how competent they seem to be in various situations. Any and all of the above, is provided by journalists. The vast majority of the public aren't going to truck themselves down to watch a debate, or Question Time or what have you. Instead they can watch it all from the comfort of their homes, because we bring it to them, through live broadcasts or Twitter updates, news packages. The list goes on. And as a result, people base their voting decisions on footage we have shown them. This is quite a power to have, and I'll now start to talk about how we absolutely cannot abuse it.
Foremost, and most obviously, if the public are using our coverage to decide their vote, we have to be sure that we are 'impartial' as is stated in all of the relevant codes, regulation and law. We cannot have an bias toward one body or another. This is at least what is true for broadcasters. Newspapers on the other hand can support whoever they please. This is a throwback to the early days of the press. When daily newspapers first became popular. There could be the capacity for so many, that it really didn't matter that they were biased, the public would simply read whichever one was closest to their beliefs. But with television (this is mostly if not all in the UK) there were so few channels that they could not afford to be unbiased. Let's say there was only two channels (which, believe it or not, was once the case), and both leaned toward a particular party then the viewer is bound to get a skewed view the day's news. As a result, news channels in the UK tend to be as unbiased as possible. This is possibly unnecessary today as there are hundreds of different news channels, and we're in the same situation for TV as we once were for print.
Of course now the situation is changing for newspapers, as they are publishing video content on the internet. Perhaps new precedent will be put in place, though wouldn't that potentially have to be internationally accepted. Jurisdiction does not technically exist on the internet, and while, IP addresses and other devices that locate an internet user and allow countries to enforce their laws, media regulation seems a grey area. But I'm not here to philosophise the ethics of the intangible force of the internet. Let's look at how tv news tends to cover elections.
Broadcast media in the UK has to follow certain guidelines in the run up, and execution of the elections. The BBC, for example, have to give the same amount of air-time to the major political parties. Indeed they would keep a detailed account, down to the second, of how much time each had had. They do this because they know damn sure that the political parties are going to be checking to make sure they're not being left out.
Of course, this gives us another problem, how do we rank the various political parties? It's easy to say that Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat are all major parties. But what does UKIP, Green party, BNP, even the Monster Raving Loony party fall under? None of them are major parties, some of them have much more support than others. Do they deserve the same amount of time as the others? At the end of the day that is exactly what it comes to. Broadcasters decide who deserves more time than the others. This may seem unfair, but it's unfortunately the way it has to work. If you only have two minutes in a package, you simply do not have time to cover them all. The decision over who to leave out, is pretty much down to whoever has more support. This is most noticeable in local news. As you would expect, they know who people want to see more of.
The exception to this would simply be aesthetics. If the Monster Ravers built a giant wicker man and invited people to toast marshmallows whilst Christopher Lee was campaigning for them, well, who wouldn't want to see that?
There is always a danger, during an election period, that you will end up defaming someone. Indeed elections have always been known to get somewhat vicious as voting day draws closer. A particularly gritty example of this was in the 2010 general election, with ex government minister Phil Woolas. Whilst campainging for a seat in Oldam East and Saddleworth. He published two false statements (one of them here) saying that his rival Robert Watkins, was 'wooing the extremist Muslim vote'. He won the seat but later, the result was declared void. The court ruled he was guilty of breaching the Representation of the People Act 1983, which says that:
Section 106(1) - makes it a criminal offence to make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of an election candidate, if the purpose of publishing the false statement is to affect how many votes he/she will get.
Section 106(5) - makes it an offence to publish a false claim that a candidate has withdrawn from the election, if the publisher knows it to be false and published it to promote or procure the election of another candidate.
Needless to say, be careful during elecions. There can be people who would like nothing better than to shoot the messenger.
