Abstract
The thoroughly modern election of 1997 began on radio and television and ended there. It opened with John Major, tracked by helicopter to and from Buckingham Palace in ITN’s lunchtime news, then feeding the first soundbites of the campaign into the One O’Clock News and BBC Radio’s World at One. It ended with Tony Blair arriving at Number 10 as excited wellwishers waved their Union flags, declaring that New Labour must now move from words to action. Between those two episodes lay the hundreds of hours of news, analysis, interviews and features, national and local, that now form the core of an election campaign.
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Notes
An ITC research paper put the fall over the six weeks at 20 per cent, but it was greater in the four weeks of the main campaign. J. Sancho-Aldridge, Election ’97: Viewers’ Responses to the Television Coverage (1997). The majority of viewers in the ITC’s survey paid ‘at least some’ attention to the coverage, but four in ten actively avoided it. 57 per cent thought there was too much coverage on BBC1, 46 per cent for ITV, 40 per cent for BBC2, and 28 per cent for Channel 4. The only aspect of coverage receiving ‘too little’ coverage was ‘party policies’. Substantial minorities also thought that the minor parties, including the SNP and Plaid Cymru, received too little coverage. After the election 56 per cent said that coverage had given them what they wanted, with 27 per cent disagreeing and 17 per cent not replying. Many of those who disagreed blamed the parties rather than the broadcasters.
See, for example, ‘Anatomy of a Turn-off’ by Richard Tait, Editor-in-Chief of ITN, Guardian, 20 May 1997. Tait described coverage as ‘dull and incomplete’ but apparently saw no part of the blame as falling on the broadcasters.
See commentaries by Michael Billig and others, Guardian, 11, 14, 28 April and 5 May 1997.
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© 1997 David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh
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Harrison, M. (1997). Politics on the Air. In: The British General Election of 1997. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26040-9_8
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