London Mayoral & Local Election(s) Coverage 2012

But that is the thing - its just for London! It has no bearing whatsoever outside London, apart from maybe political interest, but as most of the population have political apathy taking so much coverage on the national news is just unbelievable, compared to the coverage of Liverpool, Salford and politics in other areas. And as someone else mentioned earlier in the thread there has been no coverage whatsoever with regards to the way Liverpool decided on having an Elected Mayor as there was no referendum much to the disgust of the people of Liverpool!!!

Not the Lib Dems. Newsnight had their defeated candidate on last night

BBC London TV wasn't on-air though - so how would you suggest it was seen on the telly?

I'd expect the election of the most powerful directly-elected figure in UK politics, with an electorate of more than 10% of the population of the UK to be a national news story. Like it or not, London is the capital of the UK, and the most important city in the UK. Some things to do with London are national stories...

You'd expect CNN, Fox or MSNBC to cover the NY mayoral election wouldn't you?

Liverpool is particularly important, as Joe Anderson is the first ever elected mayor there, there was no referendum to decide, and he is a Labour mayor elected with a 57% share of the vote. Quite an extraordinary state of events, and someone who will inarguably put Liverpool on the map during the next 4 years.

Yet this didn't get mentioned at all at a national level - not even in passing. And it takes about 10 seconds to say?!

The referendums which resulted in a 'no' vote received more attention. Yes, this is significant for the Conservatives as a party, but since they haven't voted to have a mayor, nothing has been gained at all from the referendum. It's a completely empty story now, devoid of anything significant to say. Yet Joe Anderson offers lots to the table for Liverpool. This is noteworthy, no? As we know, about 2/3 cities voted yes to have mayors, but yet this story is more important than Liverpool, which has already cut to the chase and elected its mayor, along with a Labour mayor in Salford.

There has been a large amount of spin put on the story to make it look like a Conservative failure, and yes Labour has done very well nationally. However, Liverpool and Salford have been ignored in being right behind London, and will push them further on in terms of their political clout.

Carrying on from erroneous thread:

In the segments I watched, which was most of the day in the afternoon, the frequent summaries they did to bring together the points of the day, it wasn't mentioned there, neither was Salford. It was wrong of me to suggest that they didn't completely, obviously they did cover it to an extent of having an interview.

Maybe it's more about the sources you used for your news rather than the service offered by BBC News and Sky News. I stumbled across that information quite easily without even looking for it yesterday - and didn't watch a second of the Election programming on the BBC or Sky.

I know that North West Tonight and BBC Radio Merseyside in particular will offer sufficient and more than enough depth respectively, but as I'm not in the region at the moment, I'm not asking a lot for it just to be mentioned in their summaries. Like I say, it takes about 10 seconds to present who won in Liverpool and Salford.

But, as several posters have said, it's not a case of them not covering it at all, it is just it was done infrequently enough for me to notice.

Just a point as well, not mentioned on the online summary of council elections: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17946745

Although I agree there was probably a bit too much on the London mayor in the pre-election period - not only is there the argument about how important that individual vote is (and the London mayor has a lot more power than the Liverpool and Salford mayors) but also the fact that this contest had two such huge personalities going for it, and ended up being announced much later than the rest of the results (and at a time when nothing much else was going on) added to it perhaps appearing to be overdone.

That said, it's simply not true that there has been no mention of the local mayor votes. There was quite a lot of coverage of how much they'd been rejected and I had heard who was elected in Liverpool - and I live in London so it can't have been local coverage. I used to live in the north west and it's very easy to fall into the "London gets all the coverage blah blah blah" trap, and I don't think it applies here.

The French elections don't affect anyone outside France but they will quite rightly be the top story tomorrow evening!

Apparently there have been continuous complaints that Siobhan Benita hasn't been getting a fair amount of coverage during the campaign which was dubbed a "media blackout" and during her speech she said it was "good to finally be on a televised platform"; ironically the BBC and Sky News had actually cut away from the speeches before she started. Jon Sopel fell off air shortly afterwards.

With respect, that's rather different. The London mayor has no influence over me living in the north west. The French president (whoever it's going to be) is a key person within the EU and whatever direction France takes over the coming weeks could have a big influence on EU policy and consequently the UK and the policies of the British government. So, I think the British media is well within their right to provide coverage of the French election. If it was a Zimbabwean election they were providing in-depth coverage of, then I'd be raising questions.

When watching the virtual reality bits of the election coverage, what with Jeremy Vine strobing (or whatever it is called when talking about VR) and the fact that the map of England seemingly was unable to be zoomed in on, meaning you could barely see what was going on and much of the screen was taken up by the fake newsroom backgrounds, I was thinking, have we gone to far with the VR coverage, is it time to take a step back?

Would something presented in the style of the weather forecast have been better, meaning the small metropolitan councils in the North/Midlands and the London councils could be shown in close up.