ABSTRACT
Television news plays a critical but difficult part in the projection of a British election. Its importance is due partly to the exceptional brevity (three and a half weeks) of the packed campaign. This not only ‘concentrates electoral activity and gives it an intensity lacking in the United States’ (Rasmussen, 1983); it also divides the campaign into a sequence of discrete single-day units, each of which opens with the morning party press conferences and closes with the two main evening news bulletins. Naturally, the parties organize much of their publicity on a daily basis with the demands of television in mind, aiming ‘to catch the midday news with the morning press conference; the early evening news with that day’s carefully staged walkabout; and the main evening news with that day’s first insert into the basic campaign speech’ (Glencross, 1983). Consequently, much of the dynamic of the British campaign, the engine by which it is predominantly driven, stems from the demands and characteristics of daily television news.
