Who won the TV election?

Raymond Snoddy’s latest comment piece looks at how television, the press and social media handled the general election.

“Events, dear boy, events” was Harold Macmillan’s famous reply when asked what he feared most as a politician.

Events dramatically changed last night’s Media Society debate on ‘Who Won the TV Election and Why’.

None of the three main speakers – Craig Oliver, general election editor, BBC, Jonathan Levy, general election editor, Sky News and Ian Rumsey, programme editor ITN – were able to make it.

Understandably events such as the resignation of Gordon Brown and the arrival of David Cameron in Downing Street kept all of them at their ranches making television history rather than merely talking about it.

A largely makeshift panel, some recruited with five minutes notice as they walked through the door at Westminster University, soldiered on as events broke around them.

So who did win the TV election?

First there was general agreement among the media professionals and pundits that it had been a TELEVISION election and that the Prime Ministerial debates has changed the nature of British politics forever. There was even the revelation from one of those involved that they had been very carefully called Prime Ministerial, rather than Leadership debates, very precisely to cut out the likes of Alex Salmond and the Scottish Nationalists.

While the largest audiences were assembled on terrestrial television by the BBC and ITV, 24-hour television news emerged as a big winner.

It was Sky which led the charge in forcing through the first televised debates and in the aftermath of the vote the television news channels came to the fore as the parties used the medium to impose pressure in the negotiations and pass public notes to each other.

One unexplained curiosity – the suggestion that the BBC would have been free to carry the second debate live on one of its main channels as well as on BBC News but chose not to.

If true, was the explanation that the BBC did not want to give such prominence to the extensive Sky News branding on the coverage and anyway wanted to keep its powder dry for the third, decisive debate?

There was general agreement that Alastair Stewart was in third place in the anchor stakes, despite attracting the biggest audience, for sticking too rigidly to the 76 rules and interrupting leaders in mid-sentence when their time was up.

Sky’s Adam Boulton did better but the outright winner was David Dimbleby for his experience, gravitas and sheer nous to expand the rules by repeating the original question in search of answers.

Election night was a very different matter, even though the BBC comprehensively won the battle for the audience. The Corporation benefited from the phenomenon that viewers gravitate to the BBC for the big formal occasions.

But if the Media Society audience is any guide the BBC is pushing its luck.

The criticisms included: too many gimmicks, too slow with the results, too little use of specialists on the ground, too much inane studio chatter and an anchor in Dimbleby who lost the plot too many times.

And then there was Das Boot. Andrew Neil’s political interviews with Bruce Forsyth and Joan Collins did not go down well.

Media broadcaster Steve Hewlett, who was at the boat party, told how the passengers set up a competition on Twitter to name the vessel. Ship of Fools was the only contender that can be repeated in polite society.

Huw Roberts, who used to work for the BBC, noted that Hew Edwards had done an impeccable job in anchoring the BBC’s election night coverage in Wales. Edwards could be in line for promotion next time.

Prof Steven Barnett told of attending a private election party where those of mature years all started watching the BBC downstairs while the young watched Sky on a separate screen upstairs. By the end everyone, he said, had joined the Sky audience while a couple of people slept in front of the BBC output.

How well did the rest of the media do? The influence of social networking, which scarcely existed last time, has been generally discounted – perhaps too easily. Many young voters, supposedly uninterested, in politics were engaged by the TV debates and then discussed what they had seen on Twitter and Facebook.

And Facebook was able to say that more than 1 million of its users had registered the fact that they had voted.

The likelihood is that the influence of social networks on politics will continue to grow.

Likewise the influence of newspapers, and the tabloids in particular, has been given short shrift. They have lost the power to set the political agenda. True – but that probably happened some time ago.

The influence of papers probably grew in the week before the vote and after the TV debates were over. Did they play a part in the biggest mystery of the campaign – how Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems lost all of their newly gained support by polling day?

Maybe it was always weak support and went down like a slow puncture in a balloon, and nearly a third of the electorate remained undecided until late in the campaign.

But it is not inconceivable that the relentless barrage against the Lib-Dems – don’t vote for them or you will get an outcome you don’t want such as the return of Gordon Brown – could have had a significant impact on the undecided.

What did the academics and pollsters have to say?

That the TV debates, for all their imperfections, brought new groups into the political discourse although there was also “the recency effect”. The instant polls misled on long term intentions by highlighting what respondents had most recently seen on television.

The expenses scandal, which was of course the archetypal newspaper story, may have had a greater impact than was obvious.

Long term surveys showed that an unprecedented 97% of the population was aware of the scandal and 85% said they were very angry about it.

Finally if TV debates are now inevitable, in future general elections how should they be conducted? Sitting down rather than standing at lecterns and more voter involvement is part of the answer.

Yet David Hill, Alastair Campbell’s replacement as Tony Blair’s spinner, warned of the dangers of a Question Time format for the debates. When it was tried during the last election, one leader at a time, it turned into a bear garden.

How about a hybrid system – a one-hour debate involving the public followed by a ten minute “professional” interrogation by the anchor.

But there will be a lot of events before we have to worry about that.