Broadcasters too reliant on vox pop interviews and failing to challenge politicians, says study

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.

The study by Cardiff University looked at how this year’s 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.

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’s ability to thoroughly examine political pledges.

For the first time, the BBC’s election guidelines labelled Labour, Conservatives, Reform, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP as “major parties”, so it is expected that they all broadly receive similar levels of coverage.

The researchers found that “large chunks of airtime were dedicated to vox pops”, 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.

Cushion, who led the project, said: “In an age of multiparty politics, our new research raises serious questions about whether the UK’s 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.

“The public expect broadcasters not only to cover political parties during a campaign, but to scrutinise their promises and challenge false or misleading claims.”

Because “election rules require broadcasters to broadly provide roughly equivalent coverage of parties during the campaign”, the media’s ability to “interrogate specific policies in-depth” was severely restricted, the authors said.

While broadcasters successfully provided the six main parties with relatively balanced visibility across TV and digital platforms, the report concluded that “the breadth of coverage limited sustained scrutiny of party claims, policies or campaign messages”.

By “prioritising the breadth of party-political perspectives, coverage did not consistently interrogate the depth or credibility of competing claims”, the report said.

As a result “over 70% of claims by politicians on TV news received no or limited scrutiny”, the researchers said.

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.