Covering the Budget - and meeting the audience's needs

The Budget is one of the most important - and often one of the trickiest - events in the political calendar. Both an economic and political story, it can be a challenge to see a clear way through the mass of data and announcements. 

This Budget was particularly difficult to report because there was little change in the overall economic forecast and plans for spending cuts, while all the major measures were leaked in advance.

Research carried out by ICM for City University shows that the difficulties are even greater because of the growing scepticism among the public about the role of business journalists in the midst of the Euro crisis.

Half of the public said that journalists do not give them enough information about how the economy will affect them personally; 40% believed that journalists are not independent enough of their sources; and 35% said the news had too much economic jargon which they could not understand. Only 22% said that journalists give a fair and balanced picture of the world of business.

How can these lessons be applied to Budget coverage?

Maintaining independence while presenting a fair and balanced picture was made particularly difficult when the Government tried to manage the news by leaking major Budget announcements to selected members of the press. It was hard to avoid the impression that by reporting these in full the press was serving as a conduit rather than a critic. However, the strategy back-fired, as the one major policy change not leaked in advance - the cuts to personal allowances to pensioners - became the next day's headlines in most of the papers.

It was not just the usual suspects - The Guardian and Mirror - that led on the age-related tax allowance changes. "Gran Theft Osbo" screamed The Sun, while The Mail headline was "Osborne picks pockets of pensioners" and The Telegraph's large-type headline read "Granny tax hits 5m pensioners."

Interestingly, for aficionados of social media, "grannytax" was trending on Twitter within an hour of the Budget announcement, ahead of much of the media. By the morning it was also the first question Evan Davis put to the Chancellor in his Today programme interview.

Whether this was a relatively minor adjustment to the tax system, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies argued in its post-Budget briefing, there is no doubt the papers knew their audience. Older people are far more likely to read national newspapers, and are also far more interested in personal financial news than the population as a whole.

The other big issue in the Budget turned out to be much trickier to report without resorting to jargon. The argument for the abolition of the 50p tax rate centred on claims about how much the rich were able to avoid it entirely - and unproven assumptions about behavioural change that even the experts admitted had a wide margin of error. It was a particularly difficult topic for radio and television to tackle when the answer is 'we don't really know'.

The good news from the survey evidence is that people are more interested than ever in financial news, with one in three saying they look for financial information every day - a huge increase compared to 2005.

So the Budget should have provided an even better opportunity to explain how the economy and tax system affects the individual. There was a massive effort in the Budget specials in the newspapers and websites to give detailed tables of its impact. However, perhaps surprisingly, very few picked out the Government's own tables (tucked away in the last pages of the Budget document) which gave estimates of which income groups were losing the most from all the tax and benefit changes combined.

There was also relatively little coverage of the proposed changes to pensions and welfare - something likely to be of interest to another under-served group in the population: those under financial stress.

The Budget is one of the few times when business journalists are almost guaranteed a mass audience. If their job is difficult they can at least take consolation from the thought that the audience is even more sceptical of politicians and their promises than they are of journalists. Indeed, when asked which party had the best economic policies, the most common answer was "no-one".

Polling data: ICM surveyed 2,000 British households as part of its online omnibus from 2 to 4 November 2011, with a margin of error of +/-3%.

Professor Steve Schifferes is director of the financial journalism MA, and Marjorie Deane professor of financial journalism, at City University, London.