Reporting the ‘public’-discourses of interpretation, evaluation and prediction

Abstract

Firmstone and Corner comparatively analyse how the public are represented in television news about elections in France, Italy, Greece, Sweden and the UK. The chapter focuses on examining the instances of the indirect voice of the public, the way that the public are ‘spoken for’ in their absence either in the reporting of opinion polls or in the claimed hearing of the ‘voice of the public’ through the interpretation of election results. Patterns in journalists’ practices show that opinion polls were predominantly used in the creation of predictive and evaluative narratives and were used more often to say something about politicians and national politics than to report on public opinion. The second part of the chapter looks at how the election results were reported, and how journalists made politicians’ ‘hearing’ of ‘the messages’ sent by the public in the form of the election results a key feature of their story-telling, which further served to ventriloquize citizens’ voices.