How the political audiences of Australian public and commercial television channels differ

The advent of television has changed the way in which politics, and election campaigns in particular, are played out. Scholars have researched the political role of television in many respects and looked at the influence of television as a whole on politics. However, there has been little if any investigation of distinctions that might occur between public and commercial television audiences, despite the various political implications such distinctions may have. In Australia, where the national public broadcaster is distinguished from privately owned television channels by not running paid advertising and by having a greater emphasis on serious political journalism, and there is another publicly funded channel with a broader world and multicultural focus, the prospect that the audiences of these channels might differ from those of the commercial stations is intriguing. This paper uses data from the 2001 Australian Election Study to explore socio-demographic and political differences between viewers who rely on different television channels for election news. One of the key findings is that viewers who look to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for election news are quite distinctive from other viewers with respect to both political orientation and social background