Does local news measure up?

• Author: Fowler, Erika Franklin

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.

Specifically, we report information from a new project, a collaboration of the USC Annenberg School's Norman Lear Center and the University of Wisconsin NewsLab. The University of Wisconsin-Madison tracked the volume and content of local news during the 2002 mid-term and the 2004 presidential campaign. This data set is the most comprehensive and systematic collection of campaign news coverage on local television stations ever gathered, and it has been cited in numerous policy initiatives seeking to change the lackadaisical federal renewal of station licensing. (10)

1. TRACKING LOCAL NEWS COVERAGE

   Over the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, we tracked local news coverage of election campaigns in two distinct ways designed to yield as much information as possible concerning the way in which local news stations across the country cover elections. In 2002, we drew a random sample of 122 stations in the nation's largest fifty media markets (11) and examined each station's highest rated early-evening and late-evening newscasts from September 18 to the eve of the election, November 4.12 For a detailed methodology of the 2002 election study, see Appendix.

   In 2004, we monitored forty-four stations (the top four local afilliates--ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) in eleven markets (13) for six and a half hours (5pm to 11:30pm) (14) of programming a day during the month preceding the election. (15)

   Whereas the 2002 study looked to provide information on the content of local television news from the nation's largest media markets, the 2004 study sought to answer complaints of the broadcasters that the 2002 study had "missed" election programming that aired outside of the top-rated evening newscasts. Overall, the 2002 study examined and analyzed 8372 news broadcasts, almost 5000 hours of local news programming, and the 2004 study analyzed over 8000 hours of programming and a total of 4082 news broadcasts that aired. (16)

2. THE PUBLIC INTEREST OBLIGATION

   Since the Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934 declared that stations that broadcast on the public's electromagnetic spectrum must fulfill the "public interest, convenience and necessity," broadcasters have been considered by the courts to be trustees of the public interest. (17) Broadcasters have repeatedly challenged the public interest obligation on First Amendment grounds, (18) and as unfairly restricting commerce. In response to these cases, the courts have repeatedly found that because the broadcast spectrum is a scarce and public resource, Congress, and by extension the FCC, has the right to require broadcasters to serve some often unclearly defined public interest function. In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress clearly reaffirmed the general public interest obligation of broadcasters, saying that nothing in the act "shall be construed as relieving a television broadcasting station from its obligation to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity.... [T]he television licensee shall establish that all of its program services on the existing or advanced television spectrum are in the public interest." (20)

   Faced with these decisions and with the clear stance of the 1996 Telecommunications Act concerning the public interest obligation, broadcasters have begun attacking the scarcity rationale itself. Their most recent efforts came in a 2005 appeal to the Supreme Court by The Tribune Company, Fox, NBC University, Viacom, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the Newspaper Association of America of the Third Circuit's Prometheus decision. (21) The Court declined to consider this appeal.

   While the courts and Congress clearly have upheld the importance and validity of the public interest obligation, it is important to recognize that it is the regulatory process of the FCC that has actually shaped how the public interest obligation is defined and implemented. According to a National Telecommunication Infrastructure Administration paper:

   It is through the regulatory actions of the Commission, an independent federal agency, that the details of television public interest obligations have taken shape. While the Commission's public interest rules for broadcasters have from time to time been litigated in the courts or been given more definite direction and definition through statutory measures, the Commission by and large has had ample lee way to determine the parameters of the public interest obligations for commercial and noncommercial broadcasters. The Court has observed that the public interest standard is a "supple instrument for the exercise of discretion by the expert body which Congress has charged to carry out its legislative policy." (22) The primary mechanism available to the FCC as it attempts both to define and implement the public interest obligation is its licensing requirements and ownership rules. These requirements and rules rest on three central FCC goals: competition, diversity and localism. (23) So, in essence, the FCC argues that it is protecting, and that broadcasters are meeting, the public interest obligation if local media markets are competitive, if there is a diverse range of content or voices provided, and if stations within each market provide significant local content. Obviously, like the public interest obligation itself, the three goals that the FCC currently uses to define it are open to ongoing interpretations by the courts, Congress, the FCC itself, and, of course, the public.

   Many media advocates argue that the willingness and ability of the FCC to carry out this regulatory function has eroded in recent years in the face of broadcast industry pressure. (24) In fact, there is clear evidence that FCC licensing requirements have become less rigorous. For example, from 1963 through 1984, the FCC maintained a "processing guideline" under which renewal applicants set forth their performance documented in logs for a "composite week." They...