The Show Must Go On: How Public Television’s Instant Analysis of Televised Debates Covers Debate Results and Shapes Voters’ Opinions

Published for RIPE@2008

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Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany

Abstract

Public service TV stations are usually considered to carry more, more balanced and more accurate political information than their commercial counterparts. However, some studies show that the gap between German public and private stations has narrowed in the past 20 years as far as, for example, the amount of political coverage during prime time is concerned. In addition, some studies suggest that some public service TV news-programs have become more and more emotionalized, personalized and show a trend towards scandalization.

Following that trend, public and private stations established televised debates between the leaders of the two major parties in German national elections in 2002. Since then, the national debates are followed by TV specials containing instant analysis of the debate. Here, results of representative opinion polls are presented and political experts (journalists, politicians) and laymen are asked for their opinions. From the television broadcasters’ point of view, these programmes are especially successful: In 2002, both of the two debates were watched by about 15 million viewers. In 2005, more than 20 million viewers watched the single debate broadcasted by two public and two private channels. The TV specials immediately following the debates on all of the four programmes were followed by the overwhelming majority of debate viewers.

The fact that prior studies have shown these instant analyses to be especially influential regarding viewers post-debate verdicts of who won the debate as well as subsequent voting decisions leads to the question of how public service and private stations come to terms with their responsibility to provide their post-debate audience with an unbiased and high-quality reporting.

Against that backdrop, this paper investigates how public and private TV stations covered the televised debates in their instant analysis before the 2002 and 2005 German national elections. We compared (1) the topics of public and private stations’ post-debate TV specials, (2) how they used experts and opinion polls as sources, (3) how the performance of the candidates was evaluated by journalists, experts and in the results of opinion polls and whether these evaluations were balanced, biased, or misleading. In addition we use data from an accompanying survey to show that differences in the tone of the TV specials did in fact influence viewers’ opinion formation.

Paper not available.