Whilst there are government directives regarding the purdah period for councils (to prevent them tying a future to expensive decisions that will affect them) there is no such rule for newspapers.
One local newspaper has today announced that it will operate a purdah period to ensure that candidates are treated fairly, yet another one stated that it would report political news throughout the election period.
Would it be fair if, say, one candidate got a mountain of negative publicity and behaved really badly and one got a mountain of positive publicity and behaved impeccably, to keep this news from readers?
Surely, a fairness policy then appears to protects the least liked and least popular candidates from harm and the most popular and most liked from being given credit. This can then skew election choice. Is that really fair?
Is it perhaps more a case of not wanting to tread on powerful feet?
East Devon Watch 
I can guess which paper, or group, that has decided to operate a purdah policy. The one I have in mind has a very close relationship with EDDC, and operated the same policy in the district elections four years ago, although historically it has covered elections properly. The way in which this policy operated did not seem to have fairness as its driving force. It meant that its readership got no chance to know anything about the challenging candidates and what they stood for. This included a number of Independents with no party team behind them; whereas the ‘status quo’, the party group councillors whose comments, witticisms and actions had been reported though the previous four years are already well known. This lack of platform for the challengers would have been bad enough if that had been the only way purdah worked against them. However there were also a number of articles of a feel good nature, how marvellous a place this is to live, illustrated with pictures of Conservative Councillors! If you read this group’s papers through the campaign please watch out for subliminal tory advertising articles like this and post them on the page!
LikeLike
Well according to the public data of every spend over £500 since 2011, EDDC’s total spend on advertising between 2011 and 2014 was c. £251k. If we exclude expenditure of £43k with Exeter City Council and £16k with BT directories (which presumably cannot be spent elsewhere), this leaves £197k. There may be other advertising expenditure which is not newspaper advertising, but this is difficult to identify. So let’s assume that the whole of this £197 was spent on newspaper advertising (though it almost certainly wasn’t).
Of this £197k, a total of £169k or c. 86% was spent with Archant – and of course if the £197k is actually lower, then this percentage would be higher.
What is unclear is:
1. Why EDDC spends such a large proportion of its advertising spend with a single organisation when e.g. Pulman’s View From has a similar coverage area? Obviously such a large spend with one organisation opens EDDC up to interpretation of favouritism, and if they are playing favourites then you have to wonder why and what they hope to gain in return? Favourable coverage for the incumbent leadership perhaps?
2. Whether the substantial advertising revenue gained by the newspaper concerned compromises its ability to be objective in its reporting when it stands to lose such a substantial amount of advertising revenue if it says something negative about the incumbent leadership? Certainly, my impression of the limited amount of Archant’s coverage that I have read is that it appears biased towards the current administration, with very little investigative reporting to attempt to hold EDDC to account. But then, since my own thinking is critical of the current leadership I am not sure whether my assessment of Archant’s output can itself be unbiased. (If anyone has back copies of e.g. both Pulman’s and Archant newspapers when controversial decisions were being made, it would be interesting to see a formal analysis.)
BOTTOM LINE
Bearing in mind what I said in my previous comment about the local press having a democratic responsibility to investigate / report in a way that holds local government to account (the so called FOURTH ESTATE), the bottom line is that:
1. the unbalanced expenditure on advertising by EDDC with Archant is VERY worrying as it raises questions about whether there is explicit or implicit influence on Archant not to be impartial and unbiased in its reporting of local politics;
2. Archant’’s impartiality is now seriously open to question and, if it is Archant who has self-imposed a purdah, whether this is a right and proper position for a local newspaper to take.
LikeLike
It was certainly Archant that imposed purdah four years ago. This is a very unhealthy relationship. I know The moderator won’t let me go into detail on this but by all means get in touch with me.
LikeLike
This is a difficult one.
The purpose of Purdah is to avoid distorted news items in the run up to elections.
If a newspaper were to take a political position, by which I mean supporting a particular group of candidates because of their affiliation regardless of what they were saying, or favouring the factual reporting of one party over another – as rather than reporting the news factually and in an unbiased fashion and giving thoughtful opinion – then this would have the effect of distorting the news and is not really legitimate news reporting.
But if a paper were to give even coverage of news to all groups, report factually and give thoughtful opinion on what they were seeing, opinion supported by facts, then that seems to me to be legitimate reporting.
I will also go further and say that newspapers have a responsibility to not just act as mouthpieces of political groups, but also to investigate the facts and give their considered opinion – newspaper investigations of politicians are (in my opinion and that of many more knowledgeable people than me) ESSENTIAL to a democratic system. And what more important time for that is immediately prior to an election. Were a scandal to become known during the purdah period, why should newspapers keep the public in the dark on a matter which could legitimately change their voting?
So, bearing this in mind, IMO a newspaper imposing a purdah period on itself is really avoiding its responsibilities as part of the democratic process.
LikeLike