The Media Representation of Public Opinion: British Television News Coverage of the 2001 General Election

Abstract

This article examines the ideological assumptions and consequences of the media representation of public opinion through a study of television news coverage of the 2001 British general election. It discusses how a certain type of poll (the voting intention or ‘horse-race’ poll) is privileged, while other types of opinion surveys are ignored. But it also identifies less obvious means through which public opinion is invoked. First, casual and often unsubstantiated assertions about the attitude of the public are regularly made by anchors, reporters or politicians. Second, the views of individual members of the public are made to stand in for public opinion overall, either through vox pops or through the interaction of members of the public with politicians on the campaign trail. The article concludes that the consequence of the media representation of public opinion in the 2001 British general election campaign is to legitimize the hegemonic definition of politics as a sport played by political and media elites, thus reducing citizens to the limited and passive role of spectators.

Images of citizenship on television news: constructing a passive public

“…One of our first tasks was therefore to identify the various ways in which citizens are invoked. To do this, we began with the categories used by Brookes, Lewis and Wahl-Jorgensen in their study of how citizens were represented in the 2001 British General Election (Brookes et al, 2004), and developed and extended those categories to encompass our larger, more varied sample.…”

“…This may be partly because journalists are constrained in their reporting of polls-the BBC, for example, has guidelines about the use of polls which do not apply to more vague, unsubstantiated claims about public opinion (Brookes et al, 2004). But the reluctance to use polls may also be a function of a tendency to avoid overt, deliberative expressions of public opinion-a point we develop later.…”

“…Indeed, the British broadcasters are a little less likely to refer to European opinion than the inward-looking US media. There are, by contrast, almost no empirical measures of opinion world-wide, and yet British TV reporters are more likely to refer vaguely to "world opinion" than to European opinion (even while references to British atti- tude to Europe are quite common-see Brookes et al, 2004). This suggests that there persists, in the culture of British journalism, an abiding lack of interest in European life.…”

“…Politics on the news is usually about what politicians do, and not necessarily what people want them to do. In the British 2001 election, the issue on which public opinion was most often cited was Europe-even though the same polls showed that most people did not regard this as a key issue (Brookes et al, 2004). In short, citizens do not set the agenda.…”

Poll Reporting and Journalistic Paradigm: A Study of Popularity Poll Coverage in Hong Kong Newspapers

“…Among the most widely documented findings about polling in news is the prominence of horse-race polls in elections (e.g. Broh, 1980;Brookes, Lewis, & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004;Rhee, 1996;Weimann, 1990), which contributes to the game schema (Patterson, 1980(Patterson, , 1994 and the centrality of 'expectations' in campaign news (Craig, 2000). More broadly, studies on polling in news can follow a constructivist perspective, which focuses on how images of and discourses surrounding public opinions are produced through polling.…”