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Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Local TV news short on politics
By David Bauder, Associated Press
Despite its windfall from political advertising last fall, local TV news in 11 major markets spent little time covering local politics, a new study has concluded.
More than 90 percent of newscasts examined last fall had no news about campaigns for the House of Representatives, local or state governments. They devoted eight times the amount of coverage to people injured in accidents, said the Lear Center Local News Archive.
"If you want to get on local news, it's easier to be in a freak accident than to run for local office,'' said Marty Kaplan, professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School, which worked with the University of Wisconsin on the study. Researchers looked at all the evening and late-night newscasts in 11 cities for the 29 days before the Nov. 2, 2004 election.
The study is being released today in Washington by the Lear Center, which has encouraged local television news to be more aggressive in covering politics. Their findings this time mirror similar studies done in 2000 and 2002.
Local stations took in an estimate $1.6 billion in political advertising in 2004, according to the Alliance for Better Campaigns. That more than doubles the $770 million the stations got four years earlier.
More than half of those local news broadcasts contained a story on the Bush-Kerry presidential race, compared to 8 percent that had a local political story.
One reason local political races may be avoided is the broad geographic reach of some stations. A New York City station, for example, may not want to risk spending two minutes on a Brooklyn race for fear of turning off viewers in Manhattan or New Jersey.
"That's a challenge,'' said Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association. "It isn't to say you don't do that, but it's a challenge.''
Cochran also noted that a vast majority of local races are not particularly competitive.
Kaplan agreed it was a challenge to cover these races, but that local stations have promised to do so in order to get their licenses to operate.
The time spent on the presidential race may have also taken time away from local races, he said. While national news broadcasts and cable news are also outlets for presidential news, there's usually no other TV outlet for the local stories.
Since there are many viewers who watch local newscasts and don't read a newspaper or watch national news, it's important for those stations to keep on top of the presidential race, Cochran said.
The study also appeared to give no credit to stations like those in Seattle that sponsored candidate debates because they weren't shown within the newscasts, she said.
In U.S. Senate races, the amount of time spent on commercials outnumbered that for actual campaign news by a 17-to-1 ratio, the study said.
As with many national newscasts, the study criticized the stations for spending more time on campaign strategy than issues. But it said the stations did a generally good job in informing viewers where to vote and if there were any polling problems.
The markets included in the study were New York; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Dallas; Seattle; Miami; Denver; Orlando; Tampa; Dayton, Ohio; and Des Moines, Iowa.
13:24 Posted in Seattle Tales | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Politics