The Euro Election Another Predictable Outcome
The BBC is impartial, says the BBC. Of the seven candidates
in the Euro-elections, there were, apparently, four main ones.
These four received more coverage and, well well, they came
out on top. The prophesy was fulfilled. But was this media
bias justified? But first, a tale from elsewhere.
A Balkan Parallel
"Public opinion polls [in Bosnia, in 1990] showed overwhelming
majorities, 70-90%… against an ethnically divided republic".1
Yet in the December elections, the people voted for the three
(Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian) nationalist parties.
During the course of the subsequent war, the
politicians who had caused the problem then negotiated a settlement,
albeit under international (well, US) guidance. And recent
elections have seen a resurgence of the nationalist parties.
A Bosnian was asked recently to list all the
advantages of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Oh one! he started,
it stopped the war. Two! He paused, and cast his eyes to the
skies. Two? No, there is no two.2
Northern Ireland
The Belfast Agreement is not as bad as that. Nevertheless,
there are parallels. It too was in large part drafted under
US guidance by those who had caused and/or exacerbated the
troubles. Little wonder, then, that both accords institutionalised
sectarianism by insisting, not only on a dichotomous approach
to decision-making, but also on a system of designations in
the presidency (Bosnia) and the Assembly (NI). Maybe this
in part explains why the good folk of NI, like the good folk
of Bosnia, express much goodness in social surveys…
but lose it all in the polling booth.
Something is obviously wrong. Either the surveys
and/or the electoral system inaccurately reflect the will
of the people, and/or external factors such as the state media
exacerbate the situation.3 The purpose of
this article is to look at the latter and to ask whether part
of the NI problem lies in the role of the BBC.
The Theory
An election should be an open contest, with no favourites.
Admittedly, the law cannot exercise too much control over
the privately-owned press but, in a true democracy, at least
the state-owned media should give fair coverage to all. And
in a Euro-election, where parties nominate only one candidate
each, equal coverage to both party candidates and independents
should be quite possible.
Unfortunately, however, there is the law,
and the UK parliament decided that more coverage should be
given to the big parties. Well it would, wouldn't it? Furthermore,
the BBC obeys the law. This raises two questions. Is the law
fair? (which we'll answer below). And even if it is fair,
should the BBC interpret it within a regional, national or
continental context according to whether it is a NI-, UK-,
or Euro-election?
The Practice
In the Electoral Commission's January post-mortem of the Nov.
2003 Assembly elections, Democratic Dialogue analysed the
media coverage of that campaign and concluded that the four
main parties did indeed receive more than their fair share.4
The author then pointed out that, in the forth-coming Euro-election,
the really main parties would be the Socialists, the Christian
Democrats, and the Liberals. The Green Party, too, would be
pretty big, with 40 times more MEPs than that tiny DUP, for
example. Even on a national (UK) basis, the Greens have, and
had, twice as many MEPs as the DUP.
The BBC nevertheless decided to interpret
the law on a regional basis. In Britain, the Green Party was
given a degree of prominence and a party political broadcast.
But here? Oh there was some coverage, of course, but always
on the basis that the GP was a non-favourite, and there was
no GP party political.
Is the law fair?
A law can sometimes be judged by comparing it with what happens
abroad. And a number of countries - e.g., Switzerland and
Zimbabwe - don't have any laws at all, which means, in the
latter instance, that Mugabe has been able to get away with
murder!
Some form of legislation, however, is the
norm. Many democracies - Denmark, France and Italy, for example
- base their laws on the principle of equality, which means
that, subject to certain criteria, all parties get equal coverage.
And other jurisdictions - Britain, Greece and Israel - give
more prominence to the supposedly equally democratic principle
of equity (sic), which means that the big parties get more
coverage while medium parties get less and, especially in
the UK, small parties get eff all.
Who decides? Well, in Spain, in their first
post-Franco elections, all parties had equal treatment. Then,
however, the winners changed the law, and it is now based
on equity, so the big are more equal than the small.
Interestingly enough, many new democracies
opt, initially at least, for equality. Russia "stipulates
an obligation on the media to create equal conditions for
all." Bulgarian "candidates shall receive equal
coverage in the news programmes of the national mass media."
In Hungary, "the public broadcasting services [shall]
give equal news coverage to each party." And we cannot
blame the electoral success of the nationalists in Bosnia
on its law: "The public media shall [ensure] objective
information and equal treatment of the nominated candidates."
Elsewhere, to take just three non-European
countries, the same spirit sometimes applies. In Tanzania,
"every print media owned by the government… shall
refrain from any discrimination in relation to any candidate
journalistically and in the amount of space dedicated to them."
In Uruguay, coverage is given, "free of charge, on [an]
equal footing for all parties". While in Japan, "All
candidates… are provided a service broadcasting…
on an equal basis."5
Admittedly, the practice is sometimes not
as good as the law would wish. In the recent Russian elections,
for example, Mr. Putin supposedly received the highest level
of support, in terms of both turnout and percentage in favour…
in places like Chechnya in the Northern Caucasus!?
Conclusion
On balance, however, it would seem that many countries' electoral
laws are at variance to, and rather better than, our own.6
So, firstly, we should change the law, to incorporate the
principle of equality. And secondly, with or even without
that change, the BBC should interpret the law on a less parochial
basis.
Notes
1 Balkan Tragedy, Susan Woodward,
p 228.
2 Bosnia Rediviva, Nermin
Mulacic and Saba Risaluddin.
3 In contrast to the BBC in
NI, the media in the Balkans was terrible! "A surprisingly
broad spectrum of people in both Croatia and Serbia singled
out Croatian Television and RTV Belgrade as two of the most
culpable war criminals of the Yugoslav tragedy". The
Fall of Yugoslavia, Misha Glenny, p 66.
4 How did the Green Party
get on? Oh we only covered the main parties, they replied,
just the seven of them; we didn't include the Greens.
5 All of these quotations
come from state laws, national electoral commissions, official
correspondence initiated by the author, or OSCE documentation.
In my initial letter, I asked about party political broadcasts
and the media's coverage of the pre-election campaigning,
though not always did the relevant embassy respond to both
parts.
6 Further information
on this and all matters electoral can be obtained from ACE,
the "Administration and Cost of Elections" Project
on http://www.aceproject.org/
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