Broadcasters are letting down voters by relying on so-called vox pop interviews and failing to scrutinise political claims during election campaigns, according to researchers.<\/p>\n
The study by Cardiff University<\/a> looked at how this year\u2019s national elections in Wales and Scotland, alongside the local elections in England, were reported on UK-wide television news between 2 March and 6 May.<\/p>\n The report, written by Stephen Cushion, Keighley Perkins and Maxwell Modell at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, found that strict rules requiring balanced coverage directly undermined the media\u2019s ability to thoroughly examine political pledges.<\/p>\n For the first time, the BBC\u2019s election guidelines labelled Labour, Conservatives, Reform, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP as \u201cmajor parties\u201d, so it is expected that they all broadly receive similar levels of coverage.<\/p>\n The researchers found that \u201clarge chunks of airtime were dedicated to vox pops\u201d, which featured in 26.3% of all Welsh television news items covering the election, at the expense of coverage of actual policy or political claims.<\/p>\n Cushion, who led the project, said: \u201cIn an age of multiparty politics, our new research raises serious questions about whether the UK\u2019s current due impartiality rules are fit for purpose during an election campaign period. This does not mean impartiality should be abandoned in a Fox News-style way, but the rules need to be rethought to give broadcasters the flexibility to provide greater scrutiny in day-to-day news reporting.<\/p>\n \u201cThe public expect broadcasters not only to cover political parties during a campaign, but to scrutinise their promises and challenge false or misleading claims.\u201d<\/p>\n Because \u201celection rules require broadcasters to broadly provide roughly equivalent coverage of parties during the campaign\u201d, the media\u2019s ability to \u201cinterrogate specific policies in-depth\u201d was severely restricted, the authors said.<\/p>\n While broadcasters successfully provided the six main parties with relatively balanced visibility across TV and digital platforms, the report concluded that \u201cthe breadth of coverage limited sustained scrutiny of party claims, policies or campaign messages\u201d.<\/p>\n By \u201cprioritising the breadth of party-political perspectives, coverage did not consistently interrogate the depth or credibility of competing claims\u201d, the report said.<\/p>\n As a result \u201cover 70% of claims by politicians on TV news<\/a> received no or limited scrutiny\u201d, the researchers said.<\/p>\n In television news items specifically focusing on party policy, candidate interviews or political claims, 49% featured zero scrutiny, 22% offered only brief scrutiny and just 29% provided substantial scrutiny.<\/p>\n Instead of substantive policy debate, a significant proportion of the coverage focused on the \u201chorse race\u201d elements of the election, such as \u201ccampaign events, party competition, public opinion and electoral process\u201d.<\/p>\n The study also revealed that this lack of rigorous political interrogation was compounded by a heavy reliance on \u201cvox pop\u201d interviews with the general public.<\/p>\n The report stressed that the voices of ordinary citizens were featured \u201cfar more than the perspectives of political candidates\u201d, with 164 individual vox pops broadcast in total.<\/p>\n While the researchers acknowledged the value of understanding voters\u2019 real-life anxieties, they argued that relying on vox pops \u201con this scale, they took up valuable airtime at the expense of policy coverage, scrutiny of political claims and explanation of the workings of the Welsh political system\u201d.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the report said that the short format of these interviews made them a \u201crelatively blunt tool\u201d.<\/p>\n They were highly effective at capturing general \u201csnapshots of opinion\u201d and recurring political apathy, but they were \u201cless able to explain the deeper reasons behind their views\u201d.<\/p>\n Despite these interviews frequently highlighting voter apathy and an intention not to vote, the researchers note the vox pops \u201cdid not appear to accurately capture the level of interest and engagement with the campaign\u201d, which ultimately had a record 52% turnout \u2013 the highest ever for a devolved Welsh election.<\/p>\n The study looked at flagship UK bulletins \u2013 the BBC News at Ten, ITV News<\/a> at Ten and Channel 4 News \u2013 as well as the key evening bulletins in Wales: BBC Wales Today and ITV Wales at Six.<\/p>\n It did not look at ITV Evening News, which typically broadcasts at 6.30pm for an hour.<\/p>\n ITN believes the report undervalues its total output by focusing solely on News at Ten. ITV broadcasts nearly two hours of daily national news alongside regional programming. ITV Evening News reaches double the audience of News at Ten and includes political insight.<\/p>\n