Mass media and the New Democrats : making sense of the election campaign
Date
1993
Authors
Clark, Terry
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Abstract
This thesis will determine if NDP campaign tactics, as opposed to other factors in the 1991 B.C. provincial election, managed to set a campaign agenda best suited to their policy platform. To do this, two questions were asked. One, what part did our mass media have in the election of the New Democrats? Two, what part did the NDP have in its own victory?
The analysis uses a method for categorization based on the consideration of news broadcasts as a specific "discourse", the "news-discourse". Starting from these assumptions, the notions of "telling" and "treatment" are used to categorize content from the news discourse. This breakdown is expected to categorize the data in ways that discern the intertwining of media and party language, practices and events.
This analysis concludes that the place, or effect, of our mass media in an election campaign is too important to ignore. The news is not a "distorted mirror" as media practitioners argue. The production of news is as dependent upon the reality of media operating routines as the reality of "the facts." This analysis also concludes that the NDP campaign employed the "manipulation by inundation" news management strategy. It is also concluded that this strategy was very effective.