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Was television media’s coverage of political parties a barometer of their actual popularity, or did it overplay or underplay select leaders? The numbers show that the coverage for the Aam Admi Party was the most disproportionate to its actual popularity, and most unfair to the AIADMK.
CMS Media Lab, the non-partisan, not-for-profit media research arm of the research group CMS, looked at the amount of time a sample of five major news channels devoted to political leaders and parties in the election season. The Hindu looked at their numbers for five channels – Aaj Tak, ABP News, Zee News (all Hindi), NDTV 24x7 and CNN IBN – between March 1 and May 11, for prime-time shows between 8 pm and 10 pm. CMS researchers recorded all coverage during these time slots and tabulated them by topic. They did not differentiate between “positive” and “negative” news.
As I >reported earlier , the BJP got nearly 40% of all prime-time TV coverage during this period, followed by the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party. Among political leaders, Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi got nearly 37% of all coverage, distantly followed by the AAP’s leader Arvind Kejriwal and the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
The Hindu compared each party’s voteshares with prime-time TV coverage numbers and found that the AIADMK, which swept Tamil Nadu, got the least coverage proportionate to its voteshare. The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress came next in disproportionately low coverage, followed by the CPI(M).
At the other extreme, the AAP got the most disproportionately high coverage followed by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, led by the combative Raj Thackeray whose controversial statements get him on air frequently, which won zero seats. Given its unprecedentedly poor performance despite being the incumbent party, the Congress features next.
The BJP got slightly more TV coverage than its voteshare would seem to warrant, but only very slightly. Essentially, the media would seem to have covered the party and Mr. Modi in proportion to his popularity.
Editors of some of the channels defended their coverage to The Hindu but declined to be quoted. “The AAP was a new party which had really captured the urban imagination. There was huge viewer interest in everything they did, and in Arvind [Kejriwal] in particular,” an editor of one of the sampled channels said. As for the Congress, much of the coverage was about the fact that it was likely to do poorly, the editor said. It was however true that parties in the south and east of the country got less coverage than they deserved, partly on account of difficulties with translating their speeches, the editor admitted.
And then there is the chicken-and-egg question. The reason that many in the media and outside are concerned over the outsized coverage that some leaders get is that the media can play a major role in people’s decision-making processes. So had people already made up their minds, and the media picked up on those leaders’ and parties’ popularity? Or did the media make up its mind, and voters picked up the signal? That the numbers cannot answer.
