49 Election Debate is Always News The Reports of Political Television Programs in Finnish Newspapers PEKKA I SOTALUS Nowadays, every election seems to be a media hap- pening. A central part of any political campaign takes place in the media. As Blumer and Gurevitch (1995: 3) have stated, media has gradually moved from the role of reporting on and about politics to that of being an active participant in the political process. Both voters and politicians have become increasingly dependent on the media and on the messages they provide. Now the voters receive most of their information concerning the candidates through the media, and the politicians aim at com- municating to their voters through the media. Tele- vision debates, in particular, have gained an import- ant position as news items proper. Political television debates are treated as news items, because they are so widely viewed. Today, they are clearly one of the largest forums of political discussion. For example in Finland, a two-thirds of voters use to watch them (Moring & Himmelstein 1993: 71). It has been suggested that the debates may influence the voting behaviour of certain voters (e.g. Benoit & Wells 1996, Hellweg et al. 1992, Moring & Himmelstein 1993, Pesonen et al. 1993). However, it can be argued that the television debates reinforce rather than change the opinions of voters. In any case, we may safely assume that the debates seem to have some kind of influence at least in the voting behaviour. They may arouse an interest in the election and the campaign, inspire political discus- sion among the voters and increase the interest in voting. It is obvious, however, that also the debate news will have an effect on how the voters see the election, the campaign, the candidates, and the im- portance of the programs themselves. This study examines how Finnish newspapers write about the political programs in television: what is reported as news, which points are focused on and what kind of images the newspapers seem to reinforce. The material for the study was collected during the 1995 parliamentary election campaign in Finland. Television Debates on the Agenda According to the agenda-setting theory, the media will control the agenda by selecting certain issues for a prominent coverage. The prominence, subse- quently, will determine which issues are judged as important (e.g. McLeod et al. 1994: 137). During a campaign, for example, voters have a tendency to consider the items that are frequently reported by the media as important political issues. The agenda is thus set by the newspapers as well as by the tele- vision debates. The political television programs, however, do not only create the agenda, but seem to be an integral part of it, because they are often rep- resented as items in the news broadcasts and also, in the newspapers of the following day. Thus the influ- ence of the programs, the questions of the journal- ists, the answers of the politicians, and the nature of the discussion have all become news. The political television programs have gained a central role in the campaigns, because the media pay a great attention to them. At the same time, the voters gradually learn to regard the televised political discussions as im- portant, because they reason that what is in the news must be important. Department of Communication, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, FIN-40351 Jyväskylä