WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Lawmakers' pique over the networks' incredible shrinking news hole is prompting legislation that will both shorten the time broadcasters have between license renewals and require full commission review of 5% of all licenses.
The legislation was introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after the release of a report by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California found evening TV newscasts contained little coverage of local political campaigns last year.
It also would require broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public-affairs programing, and it calls for the Federal Communications Commission to complete its open proceeding on whether public-interest obligations should apply to broadcasters in the digital era.
According to the survey, 64% of 4,333 broadcasts examined by the center included at least one election story. A typical half-hour contained 3 minutes, 11 seconds of campaign coverage, the report claims.
While 55% of the broadcasts contained a presidential story, just 8% of broadcasts contained a story about a local candidate race for U.S. House, state house seats, city council seats and other local and regional offices. Eight times more coverage went to stories about accidental injuries, the Lear Center said.
"If a local candidate wants to be on TV and can't afford advertising, his only hope is to have a freak accident," McCain said.
The researchers monitored evening-news broadcasts by 44 major network affiliates in markets that account for 23% of all TV viewers: New York; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; Dallas; Seattle; Miami; Denver; Orlando; Tampa, Fla.; Dayton, Ohio; and Des Moines, Iowa.
McCain argued that the dearth of local political coverage on local TV is a result of the increasing consolidation of the media industry.
"Perhaps some media groups have expanded more local news, but most observers see a decrease in local news," he said. "It defies logic that large, centrally owned media groups would expand local news. They would just take the national feed."
Broadcasters disputed the study, claiming that the foundation surveyed only 11 of 210 local TV markets and left out thousands of hours of election coverage in morning news programs, noon news programs, 4 p.m. local news programs, late night programing like "Nightline" and weekend political talk shows.
"The Lear Center review is disappointing on so many levels that it would be a disservice to the academic community to label this legitimate research," the National Association of Broadcasters said.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
NEW YORK - 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 Tuesday 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.
Researchers singled out a handful of stations for doing a particularly good job covering local politics: KXAS and WFAA in Dallas and KCCI in Des Moines.
===================================================================In the month leading up to last year's presidential election, local television stations in big cities devoted eight times as much air time to car crashes and other accidents than to campaigns for the House of Representatives, state senate, city hall and other local offices, according to a new study to be released tomorrow.
The study - which was carried out by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., and led by the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California - analyzed more than 4,000 local newscasts that were broadcast in 11 major markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami, in the four weeks before the election.
It found that 8 percent of those broadcasts included a report about a local race. By contrast, more than half those broadcasts contained a report on the presidential race.
The apparent disparity between local and national political coverage at the local level is being added to the debate over how many television stations a company may own. Last week, the researchers filed their report with the Federal Communications Commission, which is in the midst of an inquiry into easing local ownership rules.
The study will be formally presented tomorrow at a news conference hosted by Senator John McCain of Arizona, a critic of efforts to ease restrictions on media ownership.
"I think most stations fear that covering politics is ratings poison," said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School and one of the lead authors of the study. "Interestingly, they don't seem to fear that running a torrent of political ads hurts them with their audience."
Mr. Kaplan, who hosts a weekly program on "Air America," a liberal talk radio network, and his colleagues found that 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.
Among the study's most jarring findings was in the Seattle market, where in the month before the gubernatorial election, which would turn out to be razor thin, 95 percent of the newscasts analyzed by the researchers had no reports on the race.
"Time spent on teasers, bumpers and intro music in Seattle outnumbered time covering the Washington gubernatorial race by 14 to 1," the researchers wrote.
In an attempt to showcase stations that did focus on local politics, Mr. Kaplan and his colleagues - Ken Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Matthew Hale, an assistant professor at Seton Hall - cited WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas. The station devoted more than 15 percent of its campaign coverage to local races, more than double the national average of 6 percent, the researchers found.
"It's easier, quite frankly, to cover car wrecks, murders and spot news," said Cliff Williams, managing editor of WFAA. "It takes more time, it takes more manpower, to do politics. But we believe our viewers expect that coverage."