Assesing The Role Of Television In The General Election 1998 A Monitoring and Au

Assesing The Role Of Television In The General Election 1998 A Monitoring and Audience Feedback Study Conducted by the Media Advocacy Group, New Delhi

THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS DURING ELECTIONS: THE PUBLIC SERVICE CAMPAIGN ON TV

The 1998 general elections have been described by the media as a television election. For the first time in India, the Lok Sabha elections were covered by about half a dozen television channels.To find out how the general public reacted to this profusion of election related programmes on various television channels, particularly the Public Service Campaign of Doordarshan, we conducted two surveys: one in Delhi and one in a rural area - Mau.

Study Objectives
Ø The objectives of the study were to:
Ø Find out whether those who had television were aware of Doordarshan¿s Public Service Campaign and had watched it.
Ø Assess whether the campaign had any impact on the public, especially the women and the young;
Ø Assess whether people who participated in the survey had watched the election coverage that both cable channels and Doordarshan had carried before and during the election and
Ø Gauge the broadcast formats audiences preferred, both for the recent election as well as for the future.

Methodology for Delhi
The questionnaire had four major sections:
> Demographic information,
> Audience response to Doordarshan¿s Public Service Advertising campaign,
> Questions relating to election coverage and
> Audience reactions to political broadcasts.

Investigators went to houses in each of the areas that had television.In most cases, they spoke to the respondents at length about the study, prior to getting down to the details of their television viewing habits during the recent elections. Audience response was assessed in two ways - those who had cable television and those who did not. In particular, we wanted to find out if those who had cable were aware of the Public Service advertisements about the election. If they were aware then what was their source of information? Had they actually seen the ads or merely heard or read about them? Here we tried to differentiate between the direct and indirect source of information.

Frequency of recall of the campaign was also assessed. We tried to find out whether the respondents were able to recall the ads by name. Related to these questions were those about attitude change and the query which related to their voting behavior - i.e. had the campaign motivated them to vote? Criminalisation of politics was an issue which figured in the current elections, since some of the ads addressed this issue, we wanted to find out whether the respondents had been informed and educated about the issue. We also tried to see whether women and young people had been influenced in particular, since some of the ads featured Sharmila Tagore and Kiran Bedi.

Another section of the study concerned election coverage on television. We tried to get an assessment of the channels they had watched among the many that had covered the election.