Who gets the most on-screen time during the elections?

“We strive to give politicians and parties a fair distribution. It is clear that the largest parties will get more speaking time than the smaller ones, but everyone must be heard” says Louise Koustrup, Journalistic Web Producer at TV2 Funen.

With this in mind, TV2 Funen teamed up with MediaCatch to create a new era of transparency in the mediacoverage of the 2022 general election.

The Solution

With the clear objective of determining if TV2 Funen's coverage of the 2022 general election provided an equal platform for all voices to be heard, we could easily plan out the three total steps:

STEP 1: Utilise world-class facial recognition technology on all politicians who are regularly in the media to identify when they are on screen

STEP 2: Analyse the data and condense everything into one simple metric: seconds of on-screen time

STEP 3: Visualise this single metric on a custom dashboard for anyone to understand

The Results

To add insight to the data, we also looked into what the average age of the speaker on screen was, and how the speaking time was divided between the sexes.

The dashboard sparked quite the debate, an example of which can be seen on journalisten.dk:

A few outtakes of the work:

• The speaking time was skewed towards men
• The biggest party in Denmark, the Social Democrats, had by far the most speaking time

For more information about the case or our custom solutions in general, please reach out to us.

*Although our collaboration with TV2 Funen is ongoing, this specific project ended with the 2022 general election, and the dashboard is therefore not live on tv2fyn.dk anymore.