Can the fourth estate help reverse falling turnout during the election campaign?
11 August 2004 Only the anoraks are looking forward to the next general election. The media, politics and the interactions between them are in bad shape. The 2001 election was a turn-off, with numbers of voters, viewers and readers significantly down. The combined audiences for the main evening news bulletins on ITV and the BBC fell from over twelve million in 1992 to less than nine million in 2001 and the turnout was the lowest for 0 years. The parties are unloved and there is popular resistance to political communication. The paradox – and the challenge – is that the party with the most sophisticated and best resourced media outfit in British history has become so widely distrusted and that such lavish television coverage of a major event like a general election attracts fewer and fewer takers. It seems to be a case of more and more for the few, not the many. The coverage of the game of party politics appears to have reached a dead end. There is some unlearning to be done. Labour has
Only the anoraks are looking forward to the next general election. The media, politics and the interactions between them are in bad shape. The 2001 election was a turn-off, with numbers of voters, viewers and readers significantly down. The combined audiences for the main evening news bulletins on ITV and the BBC fell from over twelve million in 1992 to less than nine million in 2001 and the turnout was the lowest for 0 years. The parties are unloved and there is popular resistance to political communication. The paradox and the challenge is that the party with the most sophisticated and best resourced media outfit in British history has become so widely distrusted and that such lavish television coverage of a major event like a general election attracts fewer and fewer takers. It seems to be a case of more and more for the few, not the many. The coverage of the game of party politics appears to have reached a dead end. There is some unlearning to be done. Labour has won two landslide
