An Election has been called.
The Election Period and when the Guidelines come into effect
The Election Period for the 2010 local elections in England, when these Guidelines come into effect, begins on 29th March (25 working days before 6th May). The close of nominations is on 8th April.
The Election Period for the General Election, as defined by Parliament will begin 6th April 2010. Nominations close 22nd April 2010.
There is no longer any legal distinction, once the election has been called, between the periods before and after the close of nominations. It is now all referred to as the “Election Period” – there is no longer a “pending period”.
First Past The Post
The General Election will be contested on the basis of a first past the post system in the 650 Westminster constituencies across the whole of the UK.
Reporting the General Election
News judgements should continue to drive editorial decision making in news based programmes and bulletins.
News judgements at election time are made within a framework of democratic debate, which ensures that due weight, is given to hearing the views and examining and challenging the policies of all parties. Significant minor parties should also receive some coverage during the campaign.
Do not carry out online votes or SMS/text votes attempting to quantify support for a party, a politician or a party political policy issue.
Any proposal to conduct text voting on any political issue that could have a bearing on any of the elections should be avoided.
You should not broadcast or publish numbers of e-mails, texts or other communications received on either side of any issue connected to the campaign. (Again this could be seen as influence and contrary to OFCOM and RPA guidelines)
Day of Poll
No opinion poll on any issue relating to the election may be published. There should be no coverage of any of the election campaigns.
Remember it is a criminal offence to broadcast anything about the way in which people have voted in that election.
To achieve due impartiality, your bulletins, programme or programme strand,
as well as your online and interactive services, for each election, must ensure that the parties are covered proportionately over an appropriate period, normally across a week. This means taking into account levels of past and current electoral support.
If you have a programme piece or full show try to achieve impartiality within the programme piece or show. If that cannot be achieved you must achieve it within an appropriate period, usually a week. Try hard not to allow individual shows to go out of kilter.
How much coverage for each party?
Previous electoral support in equivalent elections is the starting point for making judgements about the proportionate levels of coverage between parties. However, other factors can be taken into account where appropriate, including evidence of variation in levels of support in more recent elections, changed political circumstances (e.g. new parties or party splits) as well as other evidence of current support. The number of candidates a party is standing may also be a factor.
Look out for stories that might have a bearing on the election. The country does not stop for a General Election and neither should your reporting. Just make sure that you follow the impartiality guidelines.
Where there are other major news stories, special care is needed to ensure that any political element is covered comprehensively, but also reflects the fact that we are in an election period. How this is achieved will depend on the particular circumstances of each case. For example, where there are major stories which fall outside inter-party rivalry, due impartiality may be achieved by allocating more time than would otherwise be given to those politicians most closely involved, to report fully statements that tell the audience what is happening, and, on occasion, to reflect vigorous internal debates within parties on such issues.
Order of Parties
The order in which parties appear in packages or are introduced in discussions should normally be editorially driven. However, programme makers should take care to ensure they vary this order, where appropriate, so that no fixed pattern emerges in the course of the campaign.
Items, which may not require contributions from other parties or candidates
In exceptional circumstances, comments from politicians can stand alone, without any other political contribution, where to use one might appear insensitive or risk the appearance of a media circus. This might include interviews about a personal tragedy, a public disaster, or where the politician concerned is an eyewitness to a news incident.
Reports on specific Electoral Areas (Constituencies or Wards) Candidates or parties declining to take part in constituency/ward reports or debates cannot, by doing so, effectively exercise a veto over such coverage.
You still have an obligation of fairness in ensuring the audience is informed of all main strands of argument. Even if the candidate refuses to take part try and get a spokesman or cover their view.
With the Westminster constituencies you should give due weight to candidates of parties which have demonstrated substantial electoral support in that area. This means that if any candidate takes part in an item about a specific electoral area, then a candidate from each of those parties should also be offered the opportunity to take part.
Constituency/ward reports or debates should also include some participation from candidates representing any other parties or independents with either previous substantial electoral support, or with evidence of substantial current support in that constituency/ward.
Programmes may decide to use either candidates or party representatives. But if a candidate from one of the parties is invited to take part, the other participants should, where at all possible, also be candidates
Full-length reports (e.g. 3 or 4 minute packages) about specific electoral areas should refer – as a minimum - to an online list of all candidates and parties standing. If such a report is being broadcast several times on the same channel in a day, the online list of candidates should be referred to on each occasion and at least once the list should feature visually or verbally.
For longer items, especially where only major candidates are receiving significant coverage, such as debates – or, where there is no online list available for the relevant electoral area - then the candidates should be listed, visually or verbally.
Content producers must ensure generally that candidates are not given an unfair advantage; for instance, camera operators should take care where a candidate’s name is featured prominently through depicting posters or rosettes etc.
Where candidates have other roles – political or non-political - care should be taken to ensure that they do not gain an unfair advantage in the election campaign over other candidates.
Before the close of nominations, content producers need to ensure due impartiality in regard to contributors who may have expressed an intention or who are expected to stand as a candidate.
As well as debates or other items using candidates within constituencies or wards, all types of content may use candidates from different constituencies or wards to discuss together election issues
When programmes or other items decide to use a candidate in a package or debate, the other participants should, where at all possible, also be candidates in the same election.
In local issue round-table debates – including where all the participants are candidates – reasonable references, for instance, to local hospitals, schools, etc, are allowed. In order to maintain due impartiality, the choice of parties represented should be appropriate to the item. The choice of candidate to represent a party will be made on editorial grounds, but care must be taken over the course of the campaign to ensure that one candidate is not unduly favoured at the expense of others or that a party spokesperson does not gain disproportionate coverage at the expense of candidates from other parties.
If a candidate is being interviewed as a national spokesperson, they should not be allowed to gain an unfair advantage over their local opponents by making repeated references to their own area.
Callers to phone-ins must be checked to see if they are candidates. They can be encouraged to contribute, though it must be clear to the audience that they are speaking not as ordinary members of the public but as contributors with a political agenda.
Care must be taken that over time programmes are not giving undue prominence to one party or undue preference to one candidate over another.
You should be keen to encourage vigorous debate and to give a higher profile to candidates of all parties in general without giving unfair advantage to one candidate or party over another.
The same guidelines as those for programmes should apply to your online content That means audio and video content as well as text content, e.g. blogs, podcasts and downloads, as well as any social networking which is associated with your radio or TV station and includes third party sites.
There is no certain solution to the problem of organised lobbying. However, all sites must be alert to the danger of distortion caused by organised campaigning
The general rule of thumb should be if we you would not broadcast it on your station, it should not be online.
During the campaign reporting of opinion polls should take into account three key factors:
1 They are part of the story of the campaign and audiences should, where appropriate, be informed about them.
2 Context is essential, you must ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of the language used in reporting them.
3 Polls can be wrong - there are real dangers in only reporting the most “newsworthy” polls – i.e. those which, on a one-off basis, show dramatic movement.
You should not lead a news bulletin or programme simply with the results of a voting intention poll. Not headline the results of a voting intention poll unless it has prompted a story which itself deserves a headline and reference to the poll’s findings is necessary to make sense of it
Do not rely on the interpretation given to a poll’s results by the organisation or publication, which commissioned it, but to come to your own view by looking at the questions, the results and the trend;
Do not report the findings of voting intentions polls in the context of trend. The trend may consist of the results of all major polls over a period or may be limited to the change in a single pollster’s findings. Poll results, which defy trends without convincing explanation, should be treated with particular scepticism and caution;
Do not use language, which gives greater credibility to the polls than they deserve: polls “suggest” but never “prove” or even “show”;
Make clear the organisation, which carried out the poll and the organisation or publication which commissioned it;
Take particular care with newspaper reviews. Polls should not be the lead item in a newspaper review and should always be reported with a sentence of context (e.g.: “that’s rather out of line with other polls this week”).
No opinion poll on any subject relating to politics or the election may be published on polling day until after the polls have closed.
The value of these programmes is to allow different sides of an issue in question to be expressed through the voices of the ‘man and woman in the street.’ But the context should always make it clear that they are an expression of an argument, not an indication of the weight of opinion on either side.
Vox Pops
Take special care with vox pops during an election campaign, for instance, give consideration to the location in which they are recorded and to edit them in such a way as to ensure different aspects of the issue are covered.
Emails
The same principle applies to all e-mails you broadcast. E-mails offer immediacy and interactivity to many programmes, but they too are an expression of opinion, not an indication of the weight of opinion on one side or the other of a question.
The range of emails selected for broadcast must reflect due impartiality, not the weight of what you receive. Content producers should be particularly alert to organised e-mail campaigns by parties and pressure groups. If mass mailings are suspected during the Election Period, e-mail contributors may be asked to include their address and telephone number so that checks can be run purely for that purpose.
During the Election Period, you should not broadcast or publish numbers of e- mails received on either side of any issue connected to the campaign.
Text Messaging
Similarly, programme-makers should be as rigorous about establishing the origins of material derived from text messages as they are about material from other sources. You should carefully scrutinize texts before using them.
Essentially, this is no different from a phone-in programme. Just as with a phone in, producers must take appropriate steps to ensure veracity of the message e.g. if a text message is received that appears to be from a person in the public eye, the programme should check the source before publishing it on air/online. Checks could include calling/texting the user back to ask for further verification.
If the programme decides to edit a text message for length, care should be taken to ensure the sender’s opinion is still fairly and accurately presented.
Producers must ensure that text votes are not translated into anything that could be construed either as a representation of public opinion as a whole, or your stations opinion.
There will be no coverage of any of the election campaigns on polling day, from 6am until polls close at 10pm on your station or online. However your online site does not have to remove archive reports.
Coverage will be restricted to factual accounts with nothing, which could be construed as influencing the ballots. No opinion poll on any issue relating to politics or the election may be published until after the polls have closed.
Whilst the polls are open, it is a criminal offence to broadcast anything about the way in which people have voted in that election.
