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.