Jon Bright (London, OK): Mark Bell of CentreForum has an interesting piece in CiF today asking the above question. I had a rather ingrained resistance to the idea, but he might have turned me round. The case against, which he deconstructs, runs as follows:
Here in the UK, political parties are banned from advertising on television or radio - with the exception of occasional five-minute party political broadcasts. The logic is seemingly that political advertising encourages negative attacks, reduces politics to soundbites and superficiality, and increases the political influence of the corporations and vested interests whose money would be needed to fund such advertising.
He argues - accurately in my view - that both negative attacks and increasing "money" in politics can (and should) be controlled by regulation if and when they need controlling - not by denial of access to the medium. The soundbites point is also extremely interesting. Bell points out that, when politicians do appear on the news, they are heard to speak for less than 10 seconds on average. Conditioned by this type of access to media, many of them have already divided their message into perfect soundbites - David Cameron's media friendly performances in PMQs the most obvious example of this. Increased access to television might therefore, perversely, contribute slightly to a decrease in the type of soundbite heavy political pronouncement we have become used to.
Bell connects the whole argument to what's going on currently in the US. But here he misses one trick - the dramatic effect of the internet. Even in the US, a land where almost any ad (positive or negative) can end up on TV, politicians in this election have reached out ever more online - where regulations are fewer and cost is far far lower.
Robert Colvile of the CPS has just released a pamphlet on exactly this subject, which I haven't had time to digest in full yet. But the pull quote is eye catching: the BNP website has the same "market share" (% of UK net traffic) as all the other major parties combined. Colvile's point is not that the BNP is wildly popular but that the three main parties have been pathetic in exploiting the potential of the web to get their message across.
Unlike the US, I do not believe the next election in this country will become known as the first "internet" election - it's coming too soon, and dramatic changes of process in this country are an extremely long time coming (a week is, in fact, not a very long time at all in politics - that people think it is says much about how much the word 'politics' in this country has become synonymous with scandal, rumour and celebrity style gossip). But if it isn't, the one after almost certainly will be. And, following Bell, I can see strong arguments in favour of keeping both this medium - and older ones - open rather than closed.
