Vaalikeskustelu ylittää uutiskynnyksen:

Mitä sanomalehdet kirjoittavat television vaaliohjelmista?

Authors

• Pekka Isotalus

Abstract

The role of the media in political campaigns has rapidly become more and more significant. Television debates, in particular, have gained an important position. They are generally newsitems in newspapers of the following day. Therefore, the television debates not only create the agenda, but are an integral part of it. This article examines how the newspapers wrote about the political programmes in television during the 1995 parliamentary election campaign in Finland. In all, 90 articles dealing with these programmes were found from four different newspapers. The articles focused on the confrontations emphasizing the dramatic elements of the debate and concentrating on the personal character of the candidates. The reports focused on the television performances and images of the candidates - at the cost of the political issues which were discussed or the content of the arguments which were made during the debate. It can be argued that a reporting style such as this strengthens the political power of the media, because it obviously emphasizes the role of television in the political campaigns. Television is often accused of increasing the superficiality of the political culture, but as the results of this study indicate, the newspapers also have an important role in this process.