British broadcasters have long operated a system of self-regulation for election broadcasting. The law provides for non-paying party election broadcasts (and prohibits paid political advertising on the airwaves) but says nothing about the allocation of time. This is carried out by a Committee on Party Political Broadcasting, composed of the broadcasters and the major political parties. The broadcasting channels have taken the allocation of time as binding.
The system has come under criticism for favouring big parties over smaller, newer ones (which could be said to reflect the political representation on the committee). A different type of criticism is that, with the proliferation of different types of broadcasting - such as cable and satellite - the system will no longer work.
The public British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) uses the time allocation agreed by the Committee on Party Political Broadcasting as the basis for its own allocation of time to the political parties in its news coverage. In its internal guidelines to editors and staff, the BBC makes the following general point:
Over the period of a campaign, coverage of each of the parties in news and current affairs programmes programmes reflects broadly the allocation of party election broadcast to the major parties. In accordance with this principle the BBC undertakes to maintain balance, over the period of a campaign, in its recorded actuality of political speeches and in film, videotape, and studio contributions from politicians....
Editors must also be aware that the voices of the Nationalist parties fighting in Scotland and Wales should be represented in UK coverage.
News values continue to apply in covering election stories, whether national or local.
See United Kingdom: BBC guidelines on election coverage for a fuller text.
The BBC's method of enforcing this balance is the much-emulated 'stopwatch method'. All mentions of parties on news bulletins are timed and coverage is planned to ensure that by the end of the campaign the timings correspond to the agreed allocation of direct access time. From the 1950s until 1992, Independent Television News, which is the common news provider for the commercial television channels, also applied the stopwatch method. In the 1992 election it abandoned it in favour of unregulated 'news values'.
