Downward Spiral?Television News Coverage of New Zealand Election Campaigns, 1993-2017

Abstract

Television news is the main provider of political information to New Zealand voters during general election campaigns, despite increased use of online sources. But how good a job does television do? How has its campaign coverage changed over the past two decades, since New Zealand altered its voting system in 1996, and against a background of commercial and technological transformation? This thesis responds to those questions with a content analysis of a sample of the period 1993- 2017, and a case study of the 2014 campaign, on the publicly-owned Television New Zealand and privately-owned TV3. The case study provides a complete data set of the 2014 campaign, widely regarded as the most controversial for decades. Interviews with journalists, politicians and party workers, and an observational study of newsroom practices, enhance the results of the quantitative analysis of that campaign. The variables from the 1993-2017 study are considered in the context of a ‘Coverage Quality Index’ allowing for direct comparison of campaigns, both longitudinally and trans-nationally. New Zealand is compared to three countries that have great influence on its media, politics and society: Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Using the framework of mediatisation of politics, based on the tension between a commercial media logic and a more normative political logic, this study shows that New Zealand’s electoral politics are substantially mediatised. News coverage of election campaigns saw a growth in the influence of media logic from 1993 to 2014, with a decrease in that of political logic. This led to a substantially ‘devalued’ coverage, with fragmented statements by politicians and other participants; a confrontational style of reporting concentrating on scandals and trivia at the expense of policy exposition; and an increase in negativity. Measured by normative yardsticks, the quality of campaign coverage on both TVNZ and TV3 reached its nadir in 2014. But in most variables, and overall, the 2017 campaign saw a sharp increase in quality on both networks. What seemed like a downward spiral into triviality and cynicism was arrested, returning the quality of the coverage to levels last seen two decades ago. Drawing on those data and analysis of them, this thesis makes three significant contributions to the study of media coverage of politics, in particular election campaigns: 1) a comprehensive longitudinal data set of television news coverage of nine New Zealand campaigns, 1993-2017; 2) the Coverage Quality Index (CQI); and 3) the concept of devaluation of media, in counterpoint to mediatisation of politics.