It is a paradox that those media that are directly owned and controlled by political parties - which are likely to be the most concerned about the outcome of an election - fall outside most systems of media regulation. If a newspaper is simply a campaigning sheet for the party that owns it, it is not effectively bound by any of the professional or legal standards that govern the behaviour of the media as a whole.

In many countries, political parties are not allowed to own broadcasting stations, since this is deemed to be an unfair allocation of a national resource - the frequency spectrum - to a narrow political interest.

Essentially, political party media will fall into one of three categories, and it will be for the regulatory authority to decide which:

• Propaganda sheets that do not fall under a media regulator, but may be monitored if, for example, they constitute campaign spending , which may be limited by law.
• Conventional private media that just happen to be owned by a party. In that case, they will have to conform to the prevailing standards or regulations for other private media.
• Government media, in a situation in which the ruling party and government have been intertwined. In that case, media using public funds should conform to the same standards as any other public media - which in practice probably means that they cannot campaign for the party at all.

Increasingly, however, another type of media is emerging that straddles the distinction between party and private media. Individual politicians, or business leaders with political aspirations, own media that appear to be regular outlets. For all intents and purposes, these are conventional private media that are subject to the same laws and regulations as any other.