Adam Boulton: Why didn't people watch the election on TV?

From a talk given by the Political Editor of Sky News at the London School of Economics Media Group debate

I'm going to start where I usually finish at these events and talk about apathy and what I think is happening within television at the moment, which has a role to play within apathy. I do think it is something that we all need to consider.

Television audiences, as we all know, are fragmenting. And I think that's a good thing ­ there's more variety, there's more choice. What that means, from television's point of view, is that you can have more election than you ever wanted if you watch Sky News or BBC24, let alone get into the online or "active" options. On the other hand, it also means that there has been a corresponding effect whereby the amount of election coverage on the mainstream terrestrial channels has diminished.

I think we are in a society where people, if they don't wish to participate passively by viewing the political process, can get out of that. To a certain extent, that is good news for a channel such as Sky News, because we are an opt-in channel and we would expect, and indeed we did record, modest increases in our average audiences for this time of year. This was during the election campaign, and there was a significant boost on election night.

But, of course, the people who watch our channel are people who choose to watch news. You have to look at what's happening on the terrestrial channels. Why didn't people watch the election? Partly because, when David Dimbleby was doing his Question Time session on the BBC with William Hague and Tony Blair, ITV scheduled actively against them with a football final involving Liverpool and the soap opera awards. So, bizarrely, Cherie Blair giving out an award got something like four times the audience of her husband on Question Time.

I also feel that in a fragmented television market, all of us who think that TV news is important need to make more of a common cause in terms of staging events and coverage of events. There are very few genuine exclusives. We at Sky News would appeal to our colleagues in ITV and Channel 4 and, indeed, the BBC, to work openly together to establish a non-branded debate with a committee so that an event will be staged that we will all have access to, but will not fall subject to inter-station competition. I think there is a unique opportunity to pursue that with the appointment of Sam Younger and the Electoral Commission.

This is probably the last time we are going to see a campaign of this sort. This is the last time we are going to see leaders dashing around the country making stump speeches. What has killed it is live television capacity. We on Sky were doing upwards of 20 live locations in a day, following the leaders around. And that meant that the traditional origin of a whistle-stop tour, that you basically went around with the same message, effectively became redundant, because on TV you could see them saying it over and over again. They were also gathering remarkably small crowds. In fact, all reports from the road suggest that on a large number of occasions there were many more activists present around the leaders than there were punters. It wasn't often the case that the general public actually wasn't there ­ just that they generally didn't appear interested in seeing something that they'd already seen covered extensively on television.

Also, with great respect and due reverence for their viewing figures, I think that the era of elections being fought on the nightly news bulletins, the Ten O'Clock News, is over. The dynamic of the campaign was very clearly being run by the parties through 24-hour television and radio, with its rate of rebuttal and the speed of its news cycle. Anyone who was interested was getting their information quite a long time before 10 o'clock. We know that the BBC and ITN have followed us into the 24-hour market, and that is a recognition that that is probably the case.