徐鹏和刘振亚的关系:请各位大侠帮忙翻译一下

Talking past each other: Journalists, readers and local newspaper reporting of general election campaigns in the UK

ABSTRACT
Drawing on an extensive database of local press reporting of the last four general elections (1987,1992, 1997 and 2001), as well as contemporary interviews with journalists and editors, this paper argues that local press coverage of the constituency campaign has changed markedly since 1987, and in ways which may contribute to diminishing voter interest and participation in elections.
Significantly, journalists do not perceive themselves as the ‘cause’ of voter apathy, but their efforts to ‘lighten up’ election coverage and report local election issues, contrast starkly with readers’ preference for more serious reporting of the national 6 agenda. Journalists and readers appear to be talking past each other in the pages of the local press.
KEYWORDS: local newspapers, local journalism,civicdisengagement,election reporting

INTRODUCTION
This paper suggests that the ways in which local journalists and editors have reported the constituency campaign during recent general elections, especially 2001, may have contributed to the declining public interest in elections across that period. The argument is informed by data derived from a detailed and longitudinal analysis of journalists’ coverage of election campaigns in selected constituencies in the West Yorkshire region of England (Franklin 2003, 2004: Chapter 7).1 Significantly, analysis of press coverage suggests that instead of providing a public forum where local communities of readers and voters might debate electoral issues of consequence, local newspapers — in part driven by the campaigning agendas of local parties — have become a public space where readers’ and journalists’ agendas clash or, more accurately, where these two communities ‘talk past each other’ rather than engaging in political dialogue. Consequently, in the 2001 election, journalists expressed their commitment to providing essentially local election stories, while readers’ letters revealed their preference for national concerns. Journalists, moreover, offered a ‘dumbed down’ electoral agenda, focused on candidates and personalities rather than policy, re ecting their judgment that sustained coverage would prove‘boring’ or ‘a turn off’: again, readers expressed different priorities. Finally, in the context of a second Labour landslide in 2001 and unprecedented national newspaper support for the Labour Party, the local newspapers analysed revealed an editorial shift in favour of the Conservative Party: the first such shift recorded since the study began in 1987. In brief, local journalists’ presentation of the 2001 election, refracted through the prism of local interest, a pro-Conservative partisanship and an emphasis on entertainment rather than policy discussion, created dissonance between them and their readers.