ABSTRACT
Election communication for television is a subtly composite product that emerges from the mutually adaptive efforts of journalists and politicians in pursuit of overlapping yet distinct goals. In 1987 there were signs that their different purposes had crystallized into sharply opposed models of campaign message projection. From a BBC vantage point at least, earnest newscasters, applying a social responsibility view of their role, confronted partisan forces, each determined that, if they could not control the campaign agenda, nobody else would. To the former, communication was a tool of public enlightenment; to the latter, a weapon in a twoway power struggle – against rival parties and professional journalists.
