Abstract
It is widely assumed that British voters obtain a considerable amount of their political information from television and that television news plays an important part in shaping their political and economic perceptions. This study uses an experimental research design to assess the extent to which the political perceptions of a sample of 1125 UK voters tested during the 1997 general election campaign were affected by and party images presented in television news programmes. As well as being of intrinsic importance to debates about the effects of television news, this focus on positive and negative news has more than passing relevance for the kinds of campaigning that political parties adopt. The evidence reported in the paper shows that voters' views about the political parties can be swayed quite markedly by the content of television news. In particular, the analysis indicates that news images exert far more powerful effects on voters' perceptions than news.
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