y over the last 50 years, we are now in a culture where news is instant and opinion polls more numerous and accurate, we now know the result, the closeness of the contest and the likely trends in voting patterns weeks before the election. Are the media to blame for degrading our elections?
             In America the media has had a more profound effect in politics for longer than in the United Kingdom. The Party Conventions are spectacles specifically designed to impress a television audience. Yet in 1996 the Party Conventions gave the television channels their lowest ever prime time figures. Newspaper headlines and speeches are being cut to soundbites. In 1968 the average electioneering speech aired on US television or radio, had a duration of 43.8 seconds. By 1996 this figure was reduced to 7 seconds. As one commentator put it "no more than a verbal belch". These "verbal belches" rarely mention policies and are soundbites of negative campaigning, the like of which it is impossible to imagine Churchill or Roosevelt being reduced to. It takes Churchil
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