Does Local News Measure Up (2007)

INTRODUCTION Many Americans get information from the national broadcast or cable news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CAN), while others rely on newspapers. But, for most of their news, whether concerning domestic political issues, health, or events in other countries, most Americans depend upon local television news broadcasts. Even with the rise of cable news channels, even with the increasing use of the internet for information, even with relatively large audiences that network news broadcasts still attract, even with the greater depth and analysis in print journalism, local broadcast television stations in the United States' 210 media markets are the places from which most Americans get most of their news. According to recent surveys from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 59% of Americans report watching local news regularly, a substantially higher percentage than any other news source. (2) And according to another Pew survey, more than three-quarters (76%) of Americans report obtaining most of their election information from television compared to under a third (28%) who use newspapers and an even smaller number who use radio (15%), internet (10%), magazines (2%) and other news sources (3%). Of those who use TV as their primary source, more people report getting their news from local broadcasts than from any of the networks or cable channels. (3) Furthermore, people who use local news as their primary source of campaign information more closely reflect the nation's divided electorate than people who look to other news sources. Whereas almost three-quarters (70%) of the respondents who rely on Fox Network News indicated a preference for George Bush in 2004, and two in three (67%) of the respondents who rely on CNN indicated a preference for John Kerry, among those who rely on local news, the distribution of partisanship looks more like the nation's voting population with candidate preference roughly evenly divided, with 42% preferring George Bush and 46% preferring John Kerry. (4) In other words, local news is not only a source for intense partisans, but for a large swath of people that resemble the electorate as a whole. What then is the nature of local news coverage? How much local news coverage of politics is there? Does it provide citizens with useful information? Is there any partisan bias in how local news covers politics? Because of the importance of local news as an information source, (5) answering these questions--gauging the content, quantity, and quality of local television news coverage of elections--is crucial. In addition, understanding how and if local television news covers local political issues and contests is particularly important given that providing a reasonable degree of locally focused coverage is a central tenet of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) station licensing process. (6) This localism requirement is perhaps the most concrete example of the difficulties FCC regulators face as they attempt to ensure that stations meet the so-called public interest obligation found in the original 1934 Communications Act (7) and reaffirmed in the 1996 Telecommunications Act (8). Therefore, understanding and cataloguing what is aired on local news is crucial for public policy makers debating regulations on local news, for station owners, for journalists, as well as for social scientists trying to build measures of exposure and gauge the effects of this important source of political information. There are archives of many newspapers going back over a hundred years, and there is an archive of national network news broadcasts at Vanderbilt University (9). Remarkably, until recently, although there had been scattered case studies of local news broadcasts in particular markets for short periods of time, there had been no systematic national collection or archive of local television news broadcasts. This manuscript reports on the findings from an extensive systematic study of local news content during the 2002 and 2004 elections. …