Law or Regulations on Media During Elections

Many countries have nothing in their laws to govern the behaviour of the media during elections and see no reason why they should. Others see some measure of special media regulation during an election as being part of the process of "levelling the playing field". Still others are somewhere in the middle, with a system of voluntary self-regulation, whereby the media agree to adopt a series of self-limiting regulations because of the special demands of an election period.

Even in long-established democracies, there are widely divergent views on how far the media should be subject to formal regulation in election periods. The US tradition is one of minimal regulation, while the European one tends more towards the establishment of enforceable rules. One reason for the difference is that Europe, unlike the United States, has a history of state involvement in domestic broadcasting. The implication of this is that the precious resources of broadcasting and the frequency spectrum should be used fairly to reflect the views of the different candidates and not improperly favour the ruling party. As in its broader approach to media freedom issues, the US view is generally that the "marketplace of ideas" is most readily achieved by recourse to the economic marketplace. Thus, the pluralism of many privately owned media is assumed in itself to ensure that the full spectrum of political views find their voice.

But whatever the differing political culture as regards media regulation, it is generally acknowledged that the media have a vital role to play in communicating information to the electorate. This makes it rather surprising that so few electoral laws deal to any great extent with the media. The absence of formal statutes or regulations might indicate a mature media environment in which there is a free interchange of political ideas in the press and over the airwaves and where every party has fair access to the media to get its ideas across. Or it might not....