The decade-long collaboration between the Project for Excellence in Journalism and several academics led by Wellesley College political scientist Marion Just concludes that the more local TV invests in quality reporting, the bigger its audience tends to be. Crime news and celebrity news, contrary to all popular and professional wisdom, they say, aren’t as appealing to TV viewers.

But are American TV audiences really pining for a local-news equivalent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer? The question is before us again, not just in the recent pages of CJR (which has published PEJ reports on local TV), but also in the April issue of Political Communication. There one can find an article by Just and Todd Belt, “The Local News Story: Is Quality a Choice?” as well as a review that challenges the conclusions reached by Tom Rosenstiel, Just, et al in their 2007 book, We Interrupt This Newscast.

That reviewer, John McManus, a journalist-turned-Ph.D. and author of a leading academic study of local TV news, Market-Driven Journalism (1994), contends that marketplace pressures stifle the capacity of local TV to serve the public interest by producing hard-news stories, basing his conclusion on a close analysis of three West Coast stations. Rosenstiel and Just, on the other hand, insist that it is newsroom misperceptions about public taste that defeat quality, that newsrooms erroneously believe that the public wants sensation and gossip rather than substance. Rosenstiel and Just’s extensive national data indicate that newscasts with quality news have bigger and demographically more desirable audiences.

McManus judges the quality of local TV news to be abysmal. Belt and Just have data to support this (only 6 percent of local TV news stories show any enterprise), but they take some cheer that a quarter of stories deal with policy, politics,...

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