I was hoping to spend this morning watching the Scotland debate on Sky News. However, I’ve just been through all 1,000 channels on my Freesat box and have been unable to find it. I could have watched CBeebies, Pop Idol Gives Back, any one of about thirty regional variations of BBC1 and 2, or something called Stamping with Clarity (which very nearly detained me), but I can’t watch an election debate between people who are actually standing in the country I live in. I did try to watch it live on sky.com, but that involves installing something called Microsoft Silverlight, and I’m afraid my political anorakness doesn’t extend to inflicting Microsoft on my little Mac.
By contrast, I couldn’t have escaped the Westminster leaders’ debate if I’d tried. It didn’t matter that I don’t have Sky News, because it was also broadcast on BBC News 24 and on CNN. Even if I’d been nowhere near a telly, the newspaper and internet coverage would have made sure I knew who said what and who was deemed to have won by which media monopoly. Call me cynical, but I’m fairly sure that about 80% of the Scottish electorate will have no idea this debate even happened, let alone what it contained.
At the start of the hoo-hah about election debates, I thought the SNP was being a bit melodramatic with its threats of legal action against broadcasters excluding them. And I still, broadly, think the debates were a good idea, having prompted a level of grassroots political debate that we haven’t seen for years. But in areas where it’s always been a three if not a four horse race, we are now being very badly served by our media coverage.
The debates dominate every news cycle. The build-up to one gives way to it’s coverage and post-match analysis, closely followed by the next round of build-up. There is just no space for discussion about the subtler nuances of this election, and it’s not easy for the Scottish media to resist the Mighty Debate News Juggernaut. It’s what everyone wants to know about, so if they doggedly stick to reporting the policies and politics that actually matter to Scotland, they risk losing readers and viewers.
The rest of the country is agog that a third party is now a real contender in the election. But in Scotland, there have been three main parties for years, and none of them were the Conservatives. The story of the election that we’re being fed is not the real story up here.
That’s not to say that I’m buying into the conspiracy theories that some of the more “interesting” nationalists have put forward. I don’t believe that the main news organisations are deliberately trying to distort the agenda in Scotland to benefit one party or another. I think the truth is much sadder: they just don’t realise that what they’re reporting is inaccurate here. I can understand it: they’re caught up in the excitement of an election that suddenly seems utterly unpredictable, so having to wrap your head around an entirely different electoral narrative probably appears extraordinarily tedious.
It’s a shame, though. I haven’t decided how I’m going to vote yet. And since I’m not getting much help from the media, I’ll just have to rely on the Scottish blogosphere and my own research to decide how best to use my vote. With that in mind, I’m off to my local hustings tonight. Given that I’m in a solid Labour seat, there’s a part of me that thinks it’s pointless to bother turning up. But then, the media keep telling me that this election is wide open…