It is a paradox, but those media that are directly owned and controlled by political parties are likely to be the most concerned about the outcome of an election - and at the same time fall entirely 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. 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 has 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.
