Local TV misses the mark again

Yes it's true: Local TV news just doesn't give American citizens a very good service when it comes to reporting on political events - not even during a presidential election year. A new study of local news coverage has just been released by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Seton Hall University, and led by the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (see the New York Times piece on the report here). It's pretty damning.

The Benton Policy web site summarizes the findings: A mere "8% of TV newscasts included a report about a local race. By contrast, more than half contained a report on the presidential race. In the 11 markets studied, the hours of advertising by House candidates eclipsed actual coverage of those races by a ratio of 5 to 1." This pretty much bears out what most studies of local news have found. And since a recent Gallup poll results found that 51% of respondents get news from local TV.

I noted back on Nov 29 a Lear Center report that during the last election, about $1.6 billion was spent by political parties on TV election ads - the vast majority of which went to these local TV markets. As a result, almost two million political spots were aired on 615 stations in the top 100 TV markets — equivalent to 677 full days of advertising! As I said back in November, I think local TV stations have largely abrogated their public service responsibility to provide comprehensive coverage of national, and especially local, elections. The election-related pieces local stations did air tended to be pretty flimsy, to say the least. Strategy and horserace stories outnumbered issues stories by a ratio of 3:2; ad watch stories, meanwhile, made up less than one percent of all campaign stories (Lear Center). States Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School and one of the lead authors of the study: "I think most stations fear that covering politics is ratings poison. ... Interestingly, they don't seem to fear that running a torrent of political ads hurts them with their audience."