Well, so much for the old axiom “All politics is local.” It’s not, apparently, for TV station news directors. For them, hardly any politics is local.
A new study covered by the New York Times today finds that during last year’s Congressional elections “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.” (Giving credence to another old axiom: “If it bleeds, it leads.”)
The study, set to be officially released tomorrow at a news conference with Sen. John McCain, also found that only “8 percent of [local news] included a report about a local race. By contrast, more than half those broadcasts contained a report on the presidential race.”
As the piece notes, the shoddy coverage most affiliates afforded local races shines light on the dangers of centralized control of local media markets by national conglomerates. As Sinclair Broadcasting (for one) has amply demonstrated, consolidated control of local news operations by one company — we’re thinking of their “News Central” broadcasts, which are filmed at company HQ in Baltimore and beamed to local markets nationwide — reduces local media to recipients of one overarching viewpoint coming down from on high.
Just this past January, the Bush administration announced that it would not appeal a June 2004 appeals court decision shooting down the FCC’s two-year attempt to relax media ownership rules, a decision that would have had the practical effect of destroying locally-owned media. Passed by the commission in June 2003, the rules would have expanded the number of television stations one company could own in a single market to include a daily newspaper, three TV stations, eight radio stations and a cable system. But it’s not as though news consumers are out of the woods just yet. While the Feds may have given up the fight, big media conglomerates haven’t. Four companies, the Tribune Co. and the parents of the CBS, NBC and Fox television networks, have appealed the most recent ruling, claiming that without the proposed new FCC’s rules, their ability to compete with cable television and satellite broadcasting at the local level is impeded.
It will likely be a while before they either win or tire of the fight. In the meantime, don’t count on your local news to keep you abreast of the latest twists in small matters — like, say, who runs your town.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.