Many countries have nothing in their laws to govern the behaviour of the media during elections and see no reason why they should. Others see some measure of special media regulation during an election as being part of the process of "levelling the playing field". Still others are somewhere in the middle, with a system of voluntary self-regulation, whereby the media agree to adopt a series of self-limiting regulations because of the special demands of an election period.
Even in long-established democracies, there are widely divergent views on how far the media should be subject to formal regulation in election periods. The US tradition is one of minimal regulation, while the European one tends more towards the establishment of enforceable rules. One reason for the difference is that Europe, unlike the United States, has a history of state involvement in domestic broadcasting. The implication of this is that the precious resources of broadcasting and the frequency spectrum should be used fairly to reflect the views of the different candidates and not improperly favour the ruling party. As in its broader approach to media freedom issues, the US view is generally that the "marketplace of ideas" is most readily achieved by recourse to the economic marketplace. Thus, the pluralism of many privately owned media is assumed in itself to ensure that the full spectrum of political views find their voice.
But whatever the differing political culture as regards media regulation, it is generally acknowledged that the media have a vital role to play in communicating information to the electorate. This makes it rather surprising that so few electoral laws deal to any great extent with the media. The absence of formal statutes or regulations might indicate a mature media environment in which there is a free interchange of political ideas in the press and over the airwaves and where every party has fair access to the media to get its ideas across. Or it might not.
Zimbabwean electoral law, for example, makes no mention of the media at all. In every election in the country's history, the state has had a monopoly of broadcasting (which is under tight government control) and, for most of that time, a monopoly of the daily newspapers too. The absence of any specific regulation of the media in elections, far from "levelling the playing field", has allowed the government to "move the goal posts". For example, the refusal of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) to run opposition advertisements during a referendum in February 2000 prompted the opposition to seek a High Court order against the broadcaster. They succeeded in doing so, but arguably it should not have been necessary. In subsequent parliamentary elections, the ZBC decided not to run political advertising at all - until election day, when it broadcast advertisements for the ruling party, too late for other parties to respond. Under election law (though possibly not under Zimbabwean broadcasting law), the ZBC was entitled to do this. [1]
In situations where large sections of the media are either publicly owned or under the control of one particular political interest group (this may in practice be the same thing), then it probably makes sense for the law to set out some basic rules for election coverage. These will often differ in their provisions for public and privately owned media. The areas that the law (or subsidiary regulations) may cover include the following:
- how time or space will be allocated to candidates and political parties
- whether paid political advertising is to be permitted
- what duty the media have to carry voter education material or candidate debates
- whether there is to be a right of reply to factual misrepresentation in the media
In addition, the regulations may deal with other more specific issues such as:
- news blackouts or "reflection periods"
- restrictions on reporting of opinion polls
- policies on "hate speech" and defamation
The law or regulations will probably create a statutory body with responsibility for oversight of the media during election, or will assign that responsibility to some existing body such as the electoral commission or broadcasting regulator. Included in the law, there is likely to be some speedy mechanism for dealing with complaints about media coverage.
[1] Media Monitoring Project Zimbabawe. Election 2000: The Media War, Harare, 2000, p. 11.
Image:
Election night 07/06/2009 by European Parliament is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License.
