Information and Democracy : Audit of Public Information in the Media, 1996-1998

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This project was designed to assess the extent to which the media supply information and knowledge, which allow people to act effectively as citizens. To do so it aimed to demonstrate that it is possible continuously to monitor the provision of such information and analyse its character and contents. The media play a central role in the provision of information, symbols, and values which people deploy in acting as citizens. This is most obvious, and most extensively researched, in the context of elections. However, it is a much more diffuse and pervasive phenomenon than this focus allows. The claims of media professionals and of media analysis have tended to come into conflict over this essential characterisation of the media. However, extensive and repetitive research has cast doubt on the capacity of the media to fulfil these ideals. Such research has typically analysed the portrayal of particular events, institutions, or groups, and contrasted this portrayal with some other, purportedly more adequate account of the same phenomena (Golding, 1990, 1994). The essence of the project is thus to provide the basic resource for assessing media output which can be compared with 'performance norms' derived from expectations about the capacity of the media to serve the public interest (McQuail, 1992). The project's core activity was the routine audit of news. This entailed the quantitative analysis of major news outputs over two years, October 1996 to September 1998, from national daily and Sunday newspapers, morning radio and evening television news bulletins.Main Topics:The coding schedule categorised news stories by topic, and recorded the location of the story within the medium, the place where the event reported took place, the nature of the event, and the actors represented or reported in the story. As the project was concerned with the reporting of public policy, this latter category focused on political actors, including pressure and interest groups