Local News Ignores Backyard Campaigns
October 21, 2004
As the political campaign season entered its most intense period, nearly eight out of 10 election stories on local television news were about the presidential race rather than campaigns for Congress or local offices, a USC study has found.
In markets with U.S. Senate elections, little more than 4 percent of campaign stories on local news covered them, according to findings by the Norman Lear Center Local News Archive.
In presidential battleground states, a half-hour of local news averaged almost six minutes of campaign advertising, but only three minutes of campaign news.
Ad watch stories, which truth-check the political commercials, made up less than 1 percent of campaign stories in the study's sample.
The ongoing Lear Center study is monitoring all evening news coverage from 5 to 11:30 p.m. aired on local ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox stations in 11 media markets. The latest results cover the period from Oct. 4-10, 2004.
“Local television stations promise to cover local issues when they get their licenses,” said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of its Norman Lear Center, “but you wouldn't know that from watching their campaign coverage.”
The project, funded by the Joyce Foundation (joycefdn.org), is a collaboration between the Lear Center and the NewsLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, directed by professor Ken Goldstein. Matthew Hale, assistant professor in the Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University, is the third principal investigator.
These interim findings, plus a searchable video database of stories, can be found at localnewsarchive.org. A full report on the 2004 campaign season will be released after the election.
Researchers analyzed 435 hours of regularly scheduled local news. Based on analysis of the total time devoted to various news elements, a composite half-hour looks like this:
- advertising: 8 minutes
- sports and weather: 6.4 minutes
- crime: 2.5 minutes
- other (celebrity, science, education, arts, etc.): 2.5 minutes
- election coverage: 2.4 minutes
- local interest: 2.1 minutes
- teasers, bumpers, intros: 1.6 minutes
- health: 1.5 minutes • business, economy: 1.3 minutes
- unintentional injury: 0.9 minutes
- Iraq, foreign policy: 0.5 minutes
- non-campaign government news: 0.4 minutes
Additional highlights of what researchers found:
- The average length of a campaign news story was 81 seconds.
- Nearly two-thirds of all campaign stories contained no candidate sound bites. When candidates did speak, their sound bites averaged just under 12 seconds.
- Only 5 percent of all campaign stories were about local elections.
- Forty-five percent of all campaign stories were about strategy or horse race, while only 29 percent focused on campaign issues.
- Nearly half of all campaign stories mentioned a national or other debate.
Data for this study came from 11 markets: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Denver, Orlando, Tampa, Dayton and Des Moines. Methodology of capture and analysis can be found at localnewsarchive.org.
The Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center studying the impact of entertainment on society. Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Lear Center bridges the gap between the entertainment industry and academia, and between them and the public.