International law establishes the general obligation on publicly-funded media to report fairly on the election process. In many countries, this obligation will be set out in specific legislation such as the law relating to broadcasting or the electoral law itself. Elsewhere, there may be a general obligation of balance and fairness established in the founding legislation of the publicly-funded media, but how this works in practice is left up to voluntary self-regulation.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, with its "stopwatch rule", is an example of the latter approach. The corporation keeps a record of the time allocated in news bulletins to the different political parties, with the aim of keeping the balance in conformity with the proportional allocation of time for party election broadcasts. The principle of record-keeping is an important one: the public broadcaster (or any other, for that matter) should know exactly what it has broadcast in order to be able to answer any subsequent complaints.
Two transitional democracies are examples of countries that have taken a far more regulated approach towards the public broadcaster. The rationale for this is that the state broadcaster in a new democracy will have little experience of operating independently of government and requires more clearly defined rules to enable it to report in a balanced manner.
Malawi
In Malawi in 1994, the electoral commission set out very detailed guidelines, which dealt among other matters with news coverage by the publicly funded (and government-controlled) Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). The MBC was required to provide fair and balanced reporting of the campaigns, policies, meetings, rallies and press conferences of all registered political Parties during the period of campaigning and thereafter to provide news of the electoral process up to the close of poll.
The guidelines went on to extend this requirement of balance to other special election programming such as debates and phone-ins. They set out extremely detailed provisions for the format and organization of these special programmes.
The guidelines imposed an obligation on the MBC to ensure that parties did not use other programmes to campaign. (In fact this did occasionally happen - for example, when football matches were used as an occasion for songs in praise of the incumbent president.)
And the guidelines contained a strict injunction to the staff of the public broadcaster:
MBC staff, as public service broadcasters, may not broadcast their own political opinions. Any commentaries or assessments must be clearly identified as such and carefully balanced to avoid bias.
Montenegro
Likewise, the Montenegrin Assembly in 1998 agreed a resolution on the role of state media in election campaigns that established a general obligation on the staff of the public media:
Each editor or presenter of the political-news programs and special programs or columns in the public media founded by the Republic of Montenegro is obliged to independently and objectively present all election list submitters and their candidates throughout the election campaign and to ensure impartiality in relation to all political, social, ethnical/cultural and other agendas presented therein.
But the resolution goes beyond a general obligation to prescribe in some detail how this objectivity is to be achieved. As well as setting out standards for special debate programmes and reporting of opinion polls, the resolution removes certain call-in and panel discussion programmes from the regular schedule and obliges the public media to observe the principles of professionalism and journalist ethics and abstain from inviting/hosting leaders or popular members of the parties to their regular and thematic programs.
The resolution states in great details how many reports the television, radio, and state newspaper must carry. For example:
The Montenegrin Television network and Montenegrin Radio network are obliged to provide 5 footage and/or sound recordings respectively with excerpts from speeches of participants in the election rallies of election list submitters and this shall be increased for one footage and/or sound recordings each on every fourth election rally held.
And so on.
This type of highly detailed regulation of content raises a genuine dilemma. The need for such prescriptions arises because of the history of bias and unprofessional reporting by state and government-controlled media. On the other hand, the impulse towards microscopic content-regulation is itself part of the legacy of political dictatorships. How far regulatory authorities should prescribe how the publicly-funded media report - and how far the media will best learn by making their own mistakes - is an imponderable question to which every new democracy will have to find its own answer.
